Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.
I've been blessed. I have no complaints. I've been surrounded by people in radio, on stage and in motion pictures and television who love me. The things that have gone wrong have been simply physical things.
I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped, really.
I do it because I love acting, I love working, and whether it's radio, television, films, theater, I don't care as long as I can get out there and do it.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
It was just me in my basement honing my skills, hearing songs on the radio and trying to manipulate them and then writing over those, and I started with local artists in Boston, writing records for them.
I don't think there's one thing I've ever said on the radio that would have been found indecent or obscene.
I only got interested in radio once I talked my way into an internship at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1978, never having heard the network on the air.
I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there.
There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
I visit studios. Just to get the feel, the smell, and see what other people are doing. Not only listening to the radio, but going to studios, greeting musicians and artists, just getting a vibe.
Too many radio stations, all they do is syndicated programming, it's just piped in from some satellite someplace, and they don't have much of a connection to the community.
I made a dollar a day sweeping a laundry out. Then we made a record that was number two in Los Angeles. We got so excited hearing it on the radio that Carl threw up.
I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.
Yes, I get a report from BMI about the frequency of performances, and it is very surprising. They played one of my most advanced pieces, and one of my most unusual ones on the radio.
The final effort came when our reconnaissance team reported contact with the POWs and their guards by radio near midnight at a pre-arranged crossing site.
It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.
My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me.
I talked to a guy who has old cars, and there are parts that don't exist any more. So he makes radio dial knobs for obscure cars.
I finally learned to accept that I can't make radio play blues any more than I could get Reagan out of the White House.
This thing that Colin Powell's son is expected to do is kind of scary when you think that television and radio and newspapers are what make people think what they think.
