It’s that time of year where there is no shortage of “best of” lists. The Seattle Times recently published one with the best Seattle music albums of 2018 . But unlike most lists featuring the opinion of one person, this one polled music experts from all over the city. KNKX producer Kevin Kniestedt sat down with Michael Rietmulder, who covers music for The Times and curated this list, to talk about the results.

This show originally aired on January 20, 2018. This week on Sound Effect, we share stories of fish out of water -- people who find themselves in places they're not sure they belong in. We start by talking to writer Rosette Royale, who after beginning an unlikely friendship , decided to plunge right into a place that always terrified him. We hear from former WSU history professor Sue Armitage about how one of Seattle’s founding fathers recruited women to come to Seattle from the East Coast. Then

This story originally aired on January 20, 2018. Olympic National Park, with its temperate rainforests and stunning views, exerts a natural pull on many Pacific Northwesterners. But it repelled Seattle writer Rosette Royale. To Royale, the park seemed like a damp, mucky, inhospitable place. "I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to haul a 50-pound pack into the wilderness and camp there for days," he said. "It didn't make sense." Then he met Bryant Carlin. Carlin was a vendor for Real

This story originally aired on January 20, 2018. “Here Come The Brides” was a short-lived television show from the late 1960s. In the show, 1860s Seattle is faced with losing its lumberjacks to other cities because Seattle doesn’t have enough women, until they import a bunch of marriageable ladies from the East Coast, and hilarity ensues. Kind of an outlandish premise, right? Except that it really happened. Asa Mercer was president of the University of Washington (at the time they had exactly

This story originally aired on January 20, 2018. Thanksgiving dinner at the house where Christina Hayes grew up, in the Tri Cities in Eastern Washington, has all the normal things. Her parents, who met in bible college, are there, along with extended family. There’s turkey and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie: By all appearances they are a completely typical American family holiday. “We’re playing, we’re laughing, we’re joking, we’re prepping food. We are like the Hallmark family,” Hayes said.

This story originally aired on January 6, 2018. It wasn’t so long ago that, in order to buy groceries, most people would walk into a market, hand their list over to a man behind a counter, who would then go back into the store room and get everything for them. There were generally no prices listed -- it cost what it cost. You rarely got much say over what brand you got. That was the way it was, and it was hard to imagine it working any differently. But in the early 20th century, a man named

This story originally aired on January 6, 2018. People will go to great lengths in pursuit of wealth. Mountains will be literally moved in order to make them release the mineral bounty they contain. This is the drive that led to the creation of Monte Cristo, a mining town founded in the North Cascades back in the late 1800s. Today, Monte Cristo is a ghost town. Yet, it still has a hold on people like David Cameron. “It’s just a beautiful spot, and it kind of captures you. Sort of despite

This story originally aired on January 6, 2018. The first openly-operated gay bar in Seattle was a nightclub called Shelly’s Leg. It was founded in Pioneer Square in 1973 by a woman named Shelly Bauman. It quickly became an important center of LGBT life in Seattle. But it's the bar's origin story -- and the freak parade accident at the heart of it -- that caught our attention. Sound Effect Producer Kevin Kniestedt sat down with Bruce Buls a former Seattle disc jockey and good friend of Baumann’s

This story originally aired on January 6, 2018. Everybody loves a good mystery ... some of us more than others. So when Tom DesLongchamp discovered an unusual looking cassette tape in a bargain bin, and discovered a collection of unidentifiable disco songs on one side of it, his curiosity was aroused. That curiosity soon transformed into a fixation, or maybe even an obsession. He created a website dedicated to finding the disco mystery man. He took to Reddit, and starting pursing every lead he

This show originally aired on January 6, 2018 This week on Sound Effect, take a trip down a rabbit hole. It all started when contributor Warren Langford brought to our attention a man who was trying to track down a mystery disco musician on a cassette he found. That led us to Seattle’s first openly-operated gay disco bar in Seattle, Shelly’s Leg , and the story behind the owner, Shelly Bauman. In researching Shelly’s Leg, we came across a rumor about a relative of our current President, which is