Episode 252: 60 Songs that Explain the 90s … and The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla

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By Brendan O’Meara

Rob Harvilla (@harvilla), a Ringer staff writer and the mastermind behind the Spotify Original 60 Songs that Explain the 90s, comes by the show to talk about the flannel-clad 90s. As an aside, most of my wardrobe is flannel. I still wear some of my old flannel from this time. Anyway …

His podcast is great, especially if you love the 90s or came of age in the 90s, as I did.

So you know we dig into some of the great 90s vocalists, what these songs say about the 90s and Rob, and also how this podcast is actually stealth memoir over music criticism.

Hope you enjoy it. If you do, consider linking up to the show and tagging it @CNFPod. And if you want access to forthcoming audio magazines and want to support that endeavor (and pay writers!), head over to patreon.com/cnfpod.

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Killing Yourself (Artistically) in Order to Live

By Brendan O’Meara

There’s a certain artistic suicide and artistic murder that takes place when you reach a certain level. 

My case study is Metallica, my favorite band, my home team, as I like to say. 

Their first four records were very heavy, thrash, genre-defining. They could have ridden that wave for their entire careers and done OK for themselves.

Instead, for their fifth album, they pivot by writing shorter songs, cleaner-sounding songs, still heavy, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them heavy metal anymore. 

They committed a kind of artistic suicide in order to live. It was more of a murder suicide, because they knew they’d be killing off much of the audience it took them ten years to build, too. 

On Rob Harvilla’s podcast about the songs of the 90s that define us, he had a conversation with the chef David Chang about The Black Album. Here’s a long quote from Chang:

I love growth in artistry. I love the fact that they were able to kill themselves in order to reach a new audience. They knew if they wanted to reach a different level, to push themselves out of their comfort zone. The hardest thing for them to do wasn’t to be more hard core and play it faster. It was how do I make someone that hates heavy metal, love heavy metal. That to me was a wildly difficult challenge and I admire that tremendously. I love when anybody tries to shoot for the moon and it could have really been just terrible. It wasn’t. I love that when you can grow and do something different and I don’t know if they get enough credit for doing that. The Black Album to me is what I always explain to someone who’s becoming a chef for the first time and they’re like getting out of the just trying to be cool phase. 

The hard thing isn’t to make five people happy. The hard thing is how do you make as many people as possible simultaneously. 

60 Songs That Explain the 90s

And that’s the balance. How much to you scratch your own itch vs. creating art with the empathy of an end user, a listener, a reader in mind?

Again, David Chang says:

The hardest thing is to kill yourself, metaphorically speaking as an artist and you don’t have to, but that’s part of the word I resonate with, how do you tell new stories, when you don’t it hurts like hell. I think we should celebrate more things like the Black Album. I hope we have more of them. 

Ibid

What Metallica did was they played to edges at first, way out on the fringe. They went super narrow, and it was only then that they could reel in a bit and become more generalists. It can never be the other way around where you try to appease the masses then get granular. The key to growing any audience is by going way out there, building trust, building true fans because you see them out on the edge, too. 

Then you can backpedal into broader reach.

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Episode 123—Elena Passarello on Listening to the Book, Polaroids, and Self-Doubt

Elena Passarello, author of “Animals Strike Curious Poses,” stopped by (literally) CNFPod HQ for Episode 123.

By Brendan O’Meara

Tweetables by Elena Passarello (@elenavox on Twitter):

“I loved going to the library and getting lost.”

“I wanted to dig deeper into the essay collection as the essay.”

Welcome wayward CNFers, it’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to bad ass writers, filmmakers, movers and shakers about the art and craft of telling true stories. Here you’ll learn the story, tips, and tactics that will inspire you to greater heights in your own own work. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara, hey, hey.

Continue reading “Episode 123—Elena Passarello on Listening to the Book, Polaroids, and Self-Doubt”

Twilighter is here: Why you need this free app

brendan o'meara
I was thinkin’ …

Written by @BrendanOMeara

Sup.

I’m a fan of just about everything Noah Kagan and AppSumo do. You know how some people are just cool to be around (literally and digitally)? He’s kind of that guy; just good energy, makes you remember the time before the weight of the world crushed your spirit.

He and his team came up with this great product free product called Twilighter. It’s super easy to install and it allows readers the chance to highlight with their cursor anything in a blog post and tweet it out. So, for instance, if you wanted to select this sentence: Brendan is pretty rad. You could tweet it out. The idea is that it drives more traffic to the site, but also allows people to tweet out little nuggets straight from the post. Go on. Try it.

The same applies to y’all with websites/blogs. I have an incredibly small following (I love you all for being part of the gang!), but because authors of all kinds, especially nonfictionists like moi, need traffic and platform, this tool is a big help. Getting traffic is a must and a constant struggle. Like this:

 

Am I right?

That’s been my experience trying to get people to jam with me at my little blog devoted to nonfiction, reading, reporting, and my subsidiary affiliation, Donutarium ( launching summer 2014!).

So, go to www.sumome.com. Watch the short video. And get Twilighter embedded on your site so people can Twilight to their heart’s content … without the vampires, of course.

Let’s tweet. Let’s Facebook. Together.

Added bonus, my favorite band, just for fun, the Spanish is the cherry on top: