Field Recordings
As you read this I will be on my to Gifu City to meet up with my fellow podcast host Jason. So far three episodes of season one of Books About Bands have been released—Nirvana, REM, and Patti Smith—with one on Motley Crue’s The Dirt coming in a couple of weeks. Today we are recording episode five, on Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones. The plan was to record all six episodes of season one before releasing them but life, as always, got in the way.
I’m on the train because, in a departure from previous practice, we’re going to see if we can master the difficult art of speaking face-to-face. I’ve been pushing for this for a while because I’m not a fan of Zoom chats, since the distance and the lack of the usual visual/verbal cues can make the conversation unnatural. Also, it can lead people to either monologue or to clam up, neither of which are ideal for a podcast. Jason has, until now, been reluctant because of the tech issues that arise with us being in the same room. He reckons he can overcome the obstacles though, so we’re going to give it a go.
The other reason that we’re trying it today is because the subject is Prince. Jason loves Prince; I am indifferent. I don’t have a problem with him, he just kind of passed me by and his music isn’t really my bag. I certainly don’t know very much about him beyond a few singles, a symbol, and that guitar solo. As such, the podcast chat will necessarily be one sided, essentially me quizzing Jason about his fandom and him trying to convince me that I should give Prince one more chance. Having this chat face-to-face should make it less like an interview and more like a conversation. We’ll see how it goes. It may be a technical disaster and we end up just getting drunk and talking a little about Price before moving on to REM (what we tend to do anyway), or it’ll be great and we’ll end up getting drunk and talking about Prince enough to qualify as a podcast episode before getting on to REM.
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