With all of your different podcast projects, and with your songwriting, you seem to approach it all as a historian. You're capturing these processes that are leading to this creative end result and cataloging that for people to reference and learn from for years to come – while also drawing out stories. Then, with your own music, you're cataloging your life, and the people who've meant something to you, through your music.
I totally get what you mean. It's funny, I hadn't thought about Song Exploder in those terms. I think about it almost more like I'm doing a remix with the stems of the song, but with the additional “stem” of the interview. I have all these WAV files, tracks from the song, and then I have this one long WAV file of the artist's voice telling the story of how they made it that I get to cut together. When I started the podcast – having never interviewed anyone or done any kind of journalism, historical cataloging, or anything remotely close to this – the only thing that I could relate it to was remixing – and, I guess, film scoring, the idea of combining music and narrative. The part that feels the most exciting for me is when I get to time something that someone says with the element of the music that they're talking about. I love having the voice and the music interact in a way that feels musical, and then I add in other elements – like having the drums come back in, but on the two with just the snare. There are little moments of production that I get to do in editing the music that feel satisfying to my music brain. In the best version of this, people aren't even noticing that it's happening; it just feels seamless.
There is a rhythm to it, with the way that you edit dialogue. It feels like you're guided by some flow.
Yeah, whether it's two people talking, or a person talking in dialogue with the musical elements, there's definitely some kind of clock that goes on in my head for how long [something can go on] before it starts to feel monotonous, or repetitive, or like it needs some other texture – which I guess happens with a song, too. “You're going through the second time around on the verse? Well, what's the new idea that you're introducing – either lyrically or musically or texturally – so that it feels like this is going someplace?”
How did you get into making your own music?
I started playing piano when I was a kid. My mom worked at Sears in the mall, and next to the Sears was a piano shop. There were a couple of days when my dad, older sister, and I would be waiting for my mom to finish the night shift, and I would play around on the pianos that they had (demo units at the front of the store). Then we noticed they had a sign that said piano lessons were offered in the back of the store. My parents asked me if I would want to try that, so I did. We didn't have a piano or a keyboard or anything, so my sister drew a little piano for me on a piece of paper, and I would practice by putting my fingers on it. It was a real Hirway family team effort!
That's really sweet. Could you imagine the notes in your head while playing?
Probably not. [laughter]
So that was your first instrument. What about your entry into creating audio projects?
I kept playing in bands – in the school band, and then in bands with friends. Then, when I got to college, a friend of mine had a 4-track recorder. The first time I started recording my own stuff, I was making these lullaby instrumentals to fall asleep to. I would record a couple of tracks of acoustic guitar, or direct electric guitar. Then I would also have this AM radio that I would [use to] play little staticky bits. I would drift through the channels and then ride the fader on that. In between the music, you'd hear these little staticky excerpts of people talking or something like that. Also, I had a computer that had a free demo version of a program that was called [Propellerhead Software] ReBirth [RB-338], that was like a [Roland TB-]303, [Roland TR-]808 emulator thing. You could make beats on it, but you couldn't save anything. I would make a pattern on there that I liked, music and drums, and then I would record that loop to the 4-track. Sometimes it would be acoustic guitar, AM radio, and then these little drum loop, beep-y things that were coming out of the headphone jack on my computer.
Through analog, you were able to outsmart ReBirth’s little strategy.
I didn't have a way to record digitally, so this was the best of both worlds, in terms of what I had access to.
Does that radio tie into your music project, The One AM Radio?
The idea of using AM radio in this lullaby context actually goes back to when my mom worked at Sears. I was young enough that, when I'd go with my dad, sometimes she'd be working late enough that I’d already be in my pajamas and in the backseat of the car. We'd go pick her up and wait in the parking lot of the mall for her to come out. The mall would be closed, and my dad would listen to AM sports radio, like a Celtics game. Then at nine o'clock it would switch to some radio old time program, like The Shadow, that was super staticky. I would drift in and out of sleep in those moments and, because of that, I always associate that sound with something soothing and with falling asleep. So, when I went for this lullaby instrumental idea, I was like, “Here's a sound, here's a texture, that feels like falling asleep.” When I started writing songs of my own and playing them with acoustic guitar, at first I started doing it under my own name. But then I got a lot of strange comments at the time about my name – like not understanding how to pronounce it, or someone asked me if I made “world music.” I was like, “You know, maybe I'll use a moniker instead.” And The One AM Radio was what I came up with, for all these reasons.
Your songwriting does tie back into storytelling and memory, but there is also space for imagination. The song that sticks out to me as exemplifying this is “Charlie, Short for Charlotte.” You conjure this image of this little girl that doesn't exist, but she lives in your mind alongside your mom, who has now passed away.
Yeah, it’s the idea of this daughter, who I won't have, who existed at one point as a potential idea but she's never going to come to be. It was interesting for me to realize the juxtaposition between that and where my mom lives in my memory now. They're both just people I can imagine.
On the beautiful recording of the song about your mother, “Between There and Here,” you had Yo-Yo Ma play a cello line to represent her humming. I was struck by your incredible ability to draw in collaborators. I have that Night Falls split album you released with The Wind-Up Bird, and I was curious about how you approach making music and building community.
I don't know what it is exactly about the sort of crossover that I find so exciting, but I always have, my whole life. I remember seeing, in Newbury Comics, a split seven-inch between Texas Is the Reason and The Promise Ring; two bands that I loved. I was like, “They know each other!” That was the first time that I was introduced to the idea of a split seven-inch, and this idea of two bands that I love meeting on equal footing was so exciting. I used to have a similar excitement as a little kid when there would be crossover issues of comic books. You know the Punisher/Wolverine crossover limited edition thing? I was like, “Wow, that's so cool.” Of course, it's perfect that that seven-inch was actually at Newbury Comics, because Newbury Comics was a place I first started going to for comic books, and then kept going to for music. I remember, in high school, I got introduced to Tori Amos by a girl that I was dating, and we were listening to the CD Under the Pink, and I was reading the liner notes and saw that Trent Reznor was singing backing vocals on one of her songs. I was like, “But that's Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails! That music is so different.” Then she put out another album [Boys for Pele], and [in “Caught a Lite Sneeze”] she says, “I built my own pretty hate machine.” And I was like, “Oh, they're friends. These two artists are friends. What does that Venn diagram mean?” I just thought that was so cool, and I've never stopped thinking that was cool.
