Sean’s Unsolicited Advice for Doing Excellent Radio

I find it funny when people who I don’t think are seasoned and world-class at their craft provide advice or input on how to be excellent at something. But here’s the thing, I think I am quite excellent at being on the radio. I’m not seasoned (I believe in there being a ten year full time “seasoning” mark in most professional pursuits. I’ll explain in the bottom paragraph as a pseudo footnote.) But I also feel that if you have some skills, you should impart it. Do you ever think about the angels who make videos explaining shit on YouTube? Maybe that one video made them $425 dollars. But honestly, they did it because everyone should know how to spackle a hole in the ceiling or replace a garbage disposal. That’s beautiful, that’s generous. And there are very few things I feel I know well enough to provide advice for. But, as far as doing some good work on the radio, particularly in the music format, I have some advice that I think is helpful and not obvious.

No Audience Will Complain About You Talking Too Little

One time a fellow bass player talked about showing up a half hour late to a bar gig but "makig up for it” by adding some pretty “long bass solos”. My friend should’ve been fired that night. That’s a strike one, strike two situation. You shouldn’t show up late for a gig, but if you do, you shouldn’t overcompensate by dropping big bass solos. Moving that to a radio space: you shouldn’t show up late for gigs, you should avoid making mistakes, but there is no mistake you can cover up for by offering up more of your mouth opening and closing. We don’t get paid per word and the best in our business are generally the most efficient. Even if some of the best are long winded, they are still efficient. Their art is fitting an article into three paragraphs. But that is the rare breed in radio. for most broadcasters the art should be fitting a paragraph into a sentence, a sentence into a word, a word into a pause.

Be an Iceberg

Have you taken one of those diversity training events where they' show you the iceberg graphic? Here it is.

An Iceberg

So, the basic thing is that beneath the observable person you are interacting with there are layers of diversity, uniqueness and variety that you simply can’t ascertain from the bit of the iceberg that is poking out. This is a clunky analogy, but I believe a good broadcaster should know more than they let on. Let different tips of the iceberg come out each day, on different topics, at different times. If you want to say two smart things about an artist who you know very little about. . .you should learn nine things about that artist. I believe it is noticeable if someone is rattling off the entire contents of their knowledge about The Smashing Pumpkins, or Clifford Brown in twenty-two seconds. It rings a certain way and if one is just an inch deep about any topic, one is very prone to mistakes. Plus, you’re going to play this artist again, if you always spit out the same two facts, it’s tired, it’s not rewarding. Now, the ultimate goal should be to take those nine facts and establish something beyond any single fact about that artist. Perhaps a thesis, an opinion, a new thought about said artist. This does not have to be deep, but I think hosts who provide no context for the music they’re playing, I don’t know, I can’t understand that as acceptable. I believe that an intrinsic value add to radio listening is having a trusted narrator ushering listeners between hopefully somewhat disparate elements. . .a connective tissue that lets me know that even if I don’t love this song, I might love the next one. That connective tissue involves a lot more than just music criticism, it includes humanity, relatability et cetera but honestly. . .if you have no ability to metabolize the music and offer a through line with your presentation, I don’t know what you’re doing. I simply don’t think charming is enough, no matter how charming.

Have Utter Respect for the Time and Intelligence of Your Listener

If you don’t care about the people listening, I think you are just drawing a paycheck, and generally not a very big one. The honor in doing radio is in being the listener-in-chief. You should love what is happening on the station you work at and you should be humbled to get to toss in a couple comments in between to make it even better. You should believe that listening to this station is a gift even without your silky voice, and you should believe that the folks tuned in care about what is happening on the station. NOTE: This might not be true. But you should believe it. I understand that many people don’t care about who is talking on their favorite radio station unless they decide they don’t like that person. I understand that many people who are tuned into a radio station aren’t choosing to be tuned in, they are listening passively, maybe they have to listen to this cause it is on at their job. But, I believe in the philosophy of the customer is always right. And I don’t necessarily think of listeners like customers, but I think of them as always being right. Also, you’ll never meet the monstrous majority of the people who listen to the radio, if you’ve made an unfounded decision that they are unintelligent, what does that say about you? Seriously.

If You Win, You Lose

I had a conversation a long time back with Ant, the producer for the hip-hop group Atmosphere about his production style. In short he said that if a listener checks out Atmosphere and remembers the beat/production as opposed to Slug, the lyricist, they had both lost. The north star of most music is the vocals. That’s facts. The north star of music radio is music. In ratios it’s not even close right? The music you pick or present has a much bigger on your presentation than your witty banter. Now, you may be in a situation where you pick very little or none of the music you play. . .but. . .it’s still part of your presentation. If your presentation is not in service of the music it will not measure up to snuff. You can’t fight with music and win. Music is magical and humans are not. Music is otherworldly and spoken voice is not. We are lucky that there is some small way that human voices can enhance the joy of listening to music, something that can be added to the joy by your presence, but if you don’t respect the hierarchy I don’t think you’ll ever do your job properly.

Don’t Try to Out Alexa Alexa

If you asked a human being what the weather was like and they said “47 degrees with moderate winds coming in from the NW winds, blowing at 3.7 miles per cubic bionomineter” you would lose your shit right then and there and kill the robot infidel. We have robots in our house and people still turn on the radio. Most people turn on the radio not for another robot, but for another person. So tell them the weather like you would tell another person. NOW LOOK: it’s very possible if my wife asks me what the weather is I’d say “It’s cold as shit, I just froze my toes off putting something in the compost bin on the porch”. DON’T SAY ALL THAT ON THE RADIO. But, I think a little humanness, a little “probably a good day for layers” or “this is a bundle up situation” “I expect to see a lot of cargo shorts on the patios” to be completely legit, to be welcome. AGAIN, we have robots in our house, don’t be a robot on the radio.

Don’t Be The Same and Don’t Be Dumb Different

Don’t manufacture ways to be zany, but also don’t manufacture ways to be predictable and lame. You generally greet people a handful of ways, adjusting for things like the time of day, your mood, the location and some totally wild card combination of variables. Permit some of those variables to factor into your presentation, let Monday be a little different than Friday, let 5:15pm be a little more magical than 9:22am. Again, robots are readily available for our jobs, give them a reason to keep hiring us by staying human. BUT DON’T overdo it. People come to radio for some consistency, some reliability and if you fritter all of that way in just being a hot mess of unpredictability. . .who wants to bring that in to their house. So be consistent in a human way, with all the variabilities that that entails.

Slap Bass is Great

You should do everything within your power to get great at everything you can get great at. There are some “cheesy” radio skills that I think some of the high-minded hoity-toits that I’ve brushed shoulders with eschew, whether that be ramping a song (talking over the intro), talking over beds of music, editing promos or whatever. But it reminds me of a thing my very first bass teacher said. . . QUICK ASIDE: my very first bass teacher is the very successful very famous Sean Hurley who plays with John Mayer and others but when I knew him he was just a great bassist out of Massachusetts. He said “I used to think slap bass was lame so I didn’t work on it, until I realized that I wanted someone who called me for any opportunity to be glad they called me”. That stuck with me. If you can get your array of skills up to the point where they don’t have much reason to call somebody else, you’ll be all set to keep on getting those calls.

Don’t Confuse Success with Talent, Don’t Confuse Talent with Success

I am trying to sharpen my skills as a radio host with a different outlook than I approached my music making and most significantly bass playing in the earlier years of my life. I was by no means a child prodigy in anything, but I got the music stuff cooking professionally on the young side. I was playing legitimate gigs with bands that I was booking to audiences of 300-1200 by the time I was 21. There are all sorts of caveats to this. . .many of the gigs were opening for bigger bands, some of these gigs were definitely glorified high school parties that I had talked venues into having. . .but the record stands. My shit didn’t stink and you couldn’t tell me otherwise. The nucleus of my success during those years was Heiruspecs. Heiruspecs was (and is) filled with musicians and emcees who are more talented than me. This has been a wonderful thing for the band musically, but it has been intimidating to me. I am part of a bullet-proof band without being a bullet-proof instrumentalist myself. Instead of tending to my shortcomings, working on them, finding new paths, I wanted to stay doing what I knew I was great at. Even when I was practicing a lot, I wasn’t practicing the right shit, I wasn’t looking at where I was lacking and fixing it. I was just running down the lines I was already comfortable with in different keys. If my band wasn’t doing well. . .I would’ve known I needed to get better at bass. But instead, I took the success of a thing I was a part of and assumed I was as successful individually as I was as a part of that group. It was wishful thinking, it was foolish. I’m not being wishful or foolish in the radio chapter of my career. Some of the early stuff I got going on in radio was big, big time to me at least. Big radio station, positive comments, good feelings all around. But that didn’t mean I didn’t need to fill in things, if there was something I was bad at, I remained bad at it even if I had a desk at a cool radio station. If I couldn’t handle this or that element of the work, my profile didn’t matter, it didn’t matter that my neighbor thought it was cool she heard me on the radio.

You’re Always Auditioning

This is a Ray Browner. He’s the world’s best upright bass player of all time. I got to see him live once and I got to see him in clinic twice. He pointed out that “you’re always auditioning”. We’re sitting in Bandana Square in St. Paul at 4:15pm on a Tuesday and Ray’s in front of max 25 high school students and he said “look I don’t know if the guy walking in to deliver the mail right now is a cousin of Quincy Jones. . .you are always auditioning and you can always be judged”. I know some baller ass people listen to radio stations, sometimes I’ll meet amazing, unbelievably lettered people and they say they hear me on the radio. I never know who is listening, and I never know when they’re listening, if I’m working a shift on low sleep and handling the 1am hour. . .that still could be the one time when someone who could really change my life is listening. It’s just a fact with radio, you don’t know who is listening, so you can’t phone it in cause you think it’s bullshit. Today is the first day someone is hearing Miles Davis, and one of those packages sitting on my desk might contain the next artist to change the art form as much as Miles. You are always auditioning.

It Still Beats Work

I think being great at radio is quite a demanding job, I mean that in the amount of hours it takes to become talented, and I think it' also takes a lot of time to stay good, to stay pertinent, to be centered on that. But, you frequently receive health insurance, a steady pay check and a job you can explain to your in-laws more easily than playing bass or running a trivia company simply to try to communicate around music and the news of the day. If that doesn’t feel magical to you, you should step aside and let the people who it feels magical to keep on working. Music is a gift, it’s a magical gift. The job of radio isn’t magical, but it’s next to magic, so if you do it truly right, with true passion uninterrupted by distraction, you are in the magic. Sound like it.

TEN YEAR SEASONING: At the top of this blog I mentioned by idea that ten years is proper seasoning time for many creative pursuits. I believe that primarily because of a personal experience. In 2011 I played a show at the Southern Theater called the Southern Songbook with a bunch of great players. DeVon from Heiruspecs was handling the leadership alongside Adam Levy & Lily Troila. The band was the Heiruspecs band. And I remember just knocking the shit out of the park on that show. Well-rehearsed but not over rehearsed, excellent impassioned performances and the question marks we had during rehearsals were all about the actual needs of the songs, not a lot of getting mired in chord changes, tempo issues. The things we were trying to resolve were artistic and required expertise. And I don’t think you can really get that seasoned vibe until the technical side stops eluding you. Once you can make quick work of the fundamentals you can give more time to the things that distinguish between good and great. I remember Martin Devaney started to work with some more premier musicians a little bit into his career and I asked him if they required him to provide chord charts. He said “no, those guys can get the chords the first time I play it, they are asking questions about the themes, the nuances, what colors the song connotes”.* I remember thinking that those musicians had arrived at a higher level of craft than I had. I feel the sky is the limit for my potential as a broadcaster to be perfectly honest, but I know that a lot of my issues are still technical, they are still the equivalent of chord change type problems, not nuance type problems.

*Footnote to a footnote: I spelled connote correctly with no need for spell-check.