Rumble Strip The Heard

For the past few months I've been working on a podcast series with Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of the band Sylvan Esso. They just released a new album, Free Love. This podcast was an experiment. The interviews were all recorded over the phone during Covid....on back porches at night, by rivers, in fields, and sometimes in closets. Nick and Amelia weren't interested in a standard set of questions about how they make their songs or what their songs are about. Instead...they told stories that cause songs.

The series is called Shaking Out the Numb and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Francois Clemmons was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945 on the plantation where his great great grandmother Laura May’s family had been slaves. Then he moved with his mother and siblings and aunts and cousins to Youngstown, Ohio during the Great Migration. Youngstown is where he started singing, and he never stopped singing. He sings in the middle of sentences, and he sings on the way to the bathroom...



But you all know him already. Or those of you who are of a certain age. For twenty-five years Francois played Officer Clemmons on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I drove over there to talk with him about his life in the south and about Mr. Rogers, one of the great loves of his life.

I am not fond of video conferencing. I learned this last week.

Karl started as a vegetable and dairy farmer on a hill farm in Vershire Vermont. He had a business card that said, 'Have fun. Make money. Save the world.' How do you make more land better land to make more food for more people? I think it was that question that finally made him leave farming and get into compost production, long before composting was a virtue...

A guest show from Bianca Giaever about loneliness, God, and the quest to live a meaningful life.

In her sixty years, Winnie has learned that not all Christians are actually Christian.