Speechification

The thing about Randy Newman—let’s be honest—is that you have to be fairly old to appreciate just how often he starts a line with “So anyway…” Something about those two melancholy words makes me want to cry every time. Why? I suppose they’re about resignation, or at least acceptance. Acceptance of the sediment of missed opportunities and paths not taken that you accumulate as you get older. Newman’s acknowledging the passage of time: the busy, messy, hysterical business of getting to middle age.

So anyway… NPR ran a special live performance of his latest album (which is billed as a ’song cycle’) on 5 August and I grabbed the MP3 but I’m so afraid that the whole American public service media establishment might explode if I share it here that I’m going to suggest you get over there and listen to it yourself while you can. It’s a mellow, thoughtful treat… but probably not for you youngsters.

Robert Krulwich is the older, funnier one from WNYC’s Radio Lab, a show we’ve featured here quite often. He’s also NPR’s science specialist and makes terrific science inserts for shows like Weekend Edition and Morning Edition. We don’t make science programmes like this in Britain. It’s clever and funny and formally bold: Krulwich builds a short piece about neuroscience and the integrity of the self around Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: a nicely arranged collision of science and art. The MP3 is here, there’s a programme archive here and a podcast here.

So we have a problem. Out there in Radio Land there exist a few radio programmes that are always always good, week-after-week, show-after-show. I don’t know why but—if you ask me—a disproportionately large number of these programmes comes from America, where they have no state broadcaster and precious little state funding for radio.

Why is this a problem? Of course it’s not really a problem. It’s just that, here at speechification, we like to bring you a variety of great speech radio. How can we do that if the producers of This American Life keep coming up with clever and beautiful shows like this one? This episode is about memory. Read about it here.

We’re not linking to MP3s for This American Life since the show is self-funding so you should really get over there and pop a few quid in the collecting tin—the podcast is free. In fact, I think they’re developing a pretty interesting economic model: the streaming MP3 and the podcast are free but if you want to download and keep the show you pay 95 cents. I wonder if it works.

This is like a delve into the history of the future: it’s a (badly recorded) hour of phone-in about science and science fiction with William Gibson, David Brin and Anne Simon. And it’s from 1999, when everything looked rather different. And it seems to be the first recorded citation of Gibson’s “the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” quote. MP3 here.

I’ve been meaning to post this mesmerising episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab since I listened to it late at night while working through a mountain of New Year washing-up a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it was the drink (drink had been taken) but I think this is the best single radio programme I’ve heard in years. It’s about Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Gorgeous, joyful radio (MP3).

Here’s a lovely example of the kind of material that the Kitchen Sisters gathered for their Lost and Found Sounds show on NPR (the show itself is off the air). This one’s got stories from early radio in Nashville, a really marvelous train whistle and the legendary Sam Phillips from Sun Records. I ripped this MP3 from a 2000 Real stream. There are lots of other shows - all excellent and unbelievably varied - here and you could, if you felt like it, give the Kitchen Sisters some money to help them make more.

I’m putting this up quick because I reckon the five (five already!) Speechification contributors will be racing to do so. Since the rest of them probably have better things to do with their Saturday nights, I’m first! It’s another Archive Hour (I love the Archive Hour).

This one celebrates found and accidental and informal and amateur recordings collected by American independent media celebrities the ‘Kitchen Sisters’, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, for broadcast on their NPR radio show Lost and Found Sound.

If Russell’s last selection was Speechification crack, then this one must be Speechification cocoa. It’s full of breathtaking recordings from sources you won’t believe: 9/11 voicemail messages, a Buster Keaton sing-along, Tennessee Williams mucking around with his friends, a man who actually heard the Gettysburg Address… Moving and joyful stuff. (MP3).

And another thing: why don’t they just turn Saturday Live into a British Lost and Found Sound?