A rad new audio podcast features Bobbie Gentry in debut episode
Comedian and writer Sarah Thyre and writer/DJ Rachel Lichtman have created a new audio documentary series that profiles SOMETHING COOL that--due to horrific cultural forces beyond our meager control--people don't know about, or maybe forgot, since all the good stuff is buried under our steady media diet of billionaire bigots, starlets shaking the very foundations of society via aggressive twerking & internet debates about whether the fact that more women go into more debt to buy college degrees to earn less money after graduating signals "the end of men."
DID YOU MISS SOMETHING COOL? That is the worst!
The pilot, focusing on the country singer Bobbie Gentry, moves briskly through her career, with four songwriters -- Roseanne Cash, Susanna Hoffs, Evie Sands and Jill Sobule -- all leaning in to offer insights into Gentry’s craft and the chauvinistic industry in which she worked. Along the way, Lichtman and Thyre mix in a rich range of audio, including music from an old reel-to-reel tape Gentry made at home as a child, archival performances of her appearances on television and snippets of her biggest, most enduring songs.
“Our main goal is that you listen to one of these episodes, then you run out and buy and listen to everything one of these people did,” Lichtman said.
Do you know what you do when super awesome producer/writer women contact you to ask you to be in a thing with Mary Steenburgen AND Susanna Hoffs and Rosanne Cash and Jill Sobule and Evie Sands and Kelly Hogan? You drop everything and go right out the door and ask your friend who is also your stylist to do your hair and then you sit down for the interview at your laptop for a Skype interview and you belatedly realize it's an AUDIO DOCUMENTARY. (And then you watch some old Bangles videos.)
SOMETHING COOL is part of a premium Howl subscription but you can listen to the debut Bobbie Gentry episode by using the promo code COOL for a free one-month trial. You can LISTEN HERE.
And obviously if you haven't read the book yet, you can rectify that here or at your local indie shop that carries 33 1/3 books. Also, you need to read Thyre's book Dark at the Roots: A Memoir, which is seriously one of the best memoirs I've ever read, and I say that as a person currently reading Tanya Tucker's 1997 classic Nickel Dreams.
Also? MARY STEENBURGEN.
