The Department of Tangents Podcast

I know I haven't dropped a new episode in a long time, but it's the holidays, and I love the holidays, so I wanted to present an audio version of my reaction to seeing The Nutcracker for the first time. This is my assessment of the story, using only the visual cues from the ballet as it was presented. 

Merry Christmas and happy holidays! 

Jon Rineman started his career with as tumultuous and triumphant a 15-year run as a comic could envision for themselves. He started in 2003, then freelanced jokes for Jay Leno, wrote jokes for Seth Meyers including one infamous zinger at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that earned the ire of a future president, and wrote for Jimmy Fallon at Late Night and the Tonight Show until 2018. He survived the vicious battles around late night, got to write for the WWE, got married, had his first kid, and then saw things deteriorate quickly, both personally and professionally. A lot of this is detailed in his new podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About. I would refer you to that for some of the more intricate workings of his writing role and departure from Fallon we reference here. We address that, but we also talk about his new comedy card game, Anti-Social Skills, his post-Tonight Show gig teaching at Emerson College in Boston, and what he learned about the future of late night from his students. 

This one was a tough edit because we had so much to cover, so I’m hoping this gives you a taste of an extraordinary period in the life of a stand-up comedian and writer. You can find the podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About, on Apple, Spotify, and all the usual podcast locations. Jon’s website is www.rinemania.com, and that’s where you can find at least a partial accounting of his late night monologue jokes. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @rinemania. Anti-Social Skills is at asskills.com, which should be easy to remember, and on Twitter at @antiskills and Instagram at @antisocialskillsgame.

The Stay Scary Podcast is a silly podcast about serious horror, as described by host Lisa McGolgan. Every episode, Lisa and co-host Yinh Kiefer take a theme in horror films or horror lore, everything from insects to puberty, serial killers to doll parts, and have a ripsnorting good time going wherever that topic takes them. The show is as much fun to listen to as it is to be on, and taping this episode was the most fun I had in an interview this season. It devolves almost immediately, and it was a pile o’ fun. That’s right. Not a pile “of” fun, but a pile o’ fun, which is orders of magnitude higher. We discussed that age old favorite question amongst us ghoul-lovers, “why horror,” the origins of our own fandom, horror as a cultural touchpoint, and what actual scares us (hint- very little, but for Lisa and Yinh, the movie Terrifier certainly fits the bill). But you can see from this interview that you don’t have to be a fan of horror to enjoy the Stay Scary Podcast. Here’s Lisa and Yinh!

You can find Stay Scary on Apple and Podbean and iHeart Radio and various other podcast aggregators. The show is also on social media, on Instagram at @stayscarypodcast and on Twitter at @stayscarypod. You can find Yinh’s podcast, Ten With Yinh at all of those same podcast locations.

At first glance, Rob Kovacs seems to have wildly divergent interests in music. His latest album, Let Go, is lush and rhythmic piano pop. It’s organic and melancholy, and tells a very human story about snakebit would-be lovers who can’t come together and yet can’t quite find their way out of each other’s orbit. It’s built for sepia-tinged sunlight and dry scattered leaves. Look again, and you see his alter-ego, 88Bit, who orchestrates the mechanical soundtracks of throwback video games for piano. The music from Let Go seems as far as you can get from the three-channel ditties on your average NES system. But keep listening, and you’ll hear how they blend together, how they merge in Kovac’s particular style. We discussed both sides of Kovac in this conversation on a particularly nice day in his hometown of Cleveland – you can even hear the birds chirping in the background through his open window. 

You can find his work at the places he just mentioned, but in case you missed them, his website is www.obkovcsmusic.com, and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @robkovacsmusic. You can find 88Bit at www.88bitmusic.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @88bitmusic. Follow him there for tour and new release info.

Last spring, I read a Tweet from author Paul Tremblay apologizing for his upcoming horror novel, Survivor Song. When he had turned in his final edits for the book months before, he could not have known how prescient it would seem, especially to his friends in the New England horror writing community. Survivor Song is set in Boston in the opening stages of an epidemic. A virus is spreading, hospitals are overwhelmed, the government is providing an inadequate response. I won’t go into too much detail here since I read the Tweet into the record later, but he even mentioned a lack of PPE. That is where we begin the conversation, which also covers the reissues of his early comic noir novels about a narcoleptic private investigator, The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland.  

His new novel Survivor Song is out in paperback in July, and The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland are out now wherever you get good books. His website is www.paultremblay.net, and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @paulgtramblay

Being an artist often means you spend your life looking for a place that feels right, finding it, and then leaving it as quickly as you can. Creative fulfilment as Brigadoon. In 2021, Jenee Halstead released Disposable Love, an album that sounds in many ways like the one she was always meant to make. With producer Dave Brophy and collaborators like Susan Cattaneo, Halstead has crafted an elegant pop album with a sonic palette that spans from her earlier acoustic sound to horn-driven R&B to something more ethereal. She took some chances to do something different, part of which was allowing herself to sing happier pop songs, which she says can feel even more vulnerable than some of the more folky confessional songs she has written in the past. But then, she’s always kept moving. She recently found new context in her writing after an Ayahuasca ceremony, and she’s looking forward to incorporating chants into her next project. That is all covered in this conversation about the arc of her career and the sound of Disposable Love. 

You can find her music on Apple and Google and Spotify and all the usual places. To keep track of the new stuff you can go to www.jeneehalstead.com and find her on Twitter and Instagram under @jeneehalstead. The new album is Disposable Love, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I first spoke to Johnson in 2019 for The Boston Globe, and back then he was already an established headlining comic with a distinct voice. He is a smart joke writer at ease with his own vulnerability, and those are qualities that are only enhanced as he gets bolder as an artist. Most of this episode is centered around Elusive: A Mixtape, his album-length exploration of comedy and music. Johnson isn’t a singer or a musician, but he had an idea that he wanted to put stand-up and music together, so he called some musician friends and made an album that is at turns silly and thoughtful, with live comedy punctuated by music recorded in a studio. It also couldn’t have been easy writing for the Daily Show in a year when it felt like the world was ending, and Johnson shares how working with Trevor Noah has helped him both as a writer and a person. I should note that Johnson’s new one-hour Comedy Central special, Trevor Noah Presents Josh Johnson: #, was released after out conversation. But there was plenty to talk about concerning Elusive, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more from Johnson sooner rather than later.

The new album is Elusive: A Mixtape, which you can find on Apple Music and Spotify and wherever you get your music. The new special, #, is on Comedy Central now. You can also see The Daily Show on Comedy Central. His website is www.joshjohnsoncomedy.com, and you can also find him on IG at @joshjohnsoncomedy and Twitter at @joshjohnson.

Season Two of the Department of Tangents Podcast coming Tuesday June 29! Six episodes, guests are comedians Josh Johnson and Jon Rineman, Stay Scary Podcast hosts Lisa and Yinh, author Paul Tremblay, and musicians Jenee Halstead and Rob Kovac! 

New format! Tune in!

This week I speak with Bethany Van Delft, a comedian and storyteller and so much more. Bethany hosts Artisanal Comedy every Wednesday on her Instagram, and she’s got a lot brewing she can’t quite mention yet. She adapted her show to the online comedy world very quickly, partly because she’s not willing to just give up comedy when real world stages are not available. We also talked about taking care of a family under quarantine and taking some time to pause as creative people to prevent burnout. The last part of the conversation revolves mostly around the Black Lives Matter protests, how social media has focused people’s attention in quarantine because they don’t have the usual distractions to move on to, and why this moment in history feels different from other flashpoints. It is always  a joy to speak with Bethany, and we frequently go over time, but I managed to stop us twenty-seven minutes into what was supposed to be a twenty-minute conversation. So thanks to Bethany for the extra seven minutes!

Welcome back to the Department of Tangents Podcast, a special new episode with Paul Hansen of The Grownup Noise. You may have noticed I haven’t done an official episode of the Department of Tangents in several months. More recently, I’ve been doing the Artist Check-In Podcast which focuses on how creative people are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. That series has a very particular focus, and this episode didn’t quite fit that. Paul and I have been friends for nearly 30 years. I was the drummer in one of his first bands when he was in high school, and it has been amazing to see where he has gone since we were playing Aerosmith, Joe Walsh, and Eric Clapton covers at high school dances.

Paul is the songwriter at the center of The Grownup Noise, a beloved and hard to characterize indie rock outfit in Boston. Over the years, the band line-up has changed, but Paul has always been out front with his guitar and voice. This week, on June fifth, Paul is putting out a new Grownup Noise with a very new sound. The music was mostly constructed on an analogue synth, rather than Paul’s guitar. If you’re a fan, you’ll notice the difference in sound immediately. But you may also notice that, while Paul is challenging himself as a songwriter, this is still very much a Grownup Noise album.

In this conversation, we cover writing and recording the new album, working with a new instrument, the decision to keep using the Grownup Noise name, and some of our own history. Much of this is focused on the music, but this is very much a conversation between old friends who know each other well. Which means the very first thing you hear is Paul asking me about my own process for writing fiction. I debated cutting the stuff where Paul asked me about my own work, but I think that also shows Paul’s generosity and curiosity as an artist and a human being.

You will hear three songs from the album sprinkled through the conversation. You can look for the full thing Friday, June 5th on BandCamp, and look for more info on www.thegrownupnoise.com and search for The Grownup Noise on all your social media.