Speechification

Glorious. 30 minutes of treasure from the Kitchen Sisters' archive of recordings - all about the revelatory power of singing. Here's the MP3, here's a list of the recordings used in the programme (which I've put up as a page here at Speechification because it will be replaced by next week's in a few days), here are some other things by the Kitchen Sisters we've featured here and, finally, the Lost and Found Sound pages from the NPR web site. Search for the Kitchen Sisters at NPR.org and you'll find hours of great radio to listen to.

Three things you could do if you were feeling charitable (and not just broke or depressed) here on the wrong side of Christmas:

You could give some money to Chicago Public Radio, the station that makes This American Life. We've featured the show four or five times here but never included it in the podcast because public radio in the States is funded almost entirely from donations so nicking it would feel wrong. They're already laying people off in response to the recession (so is NPR) so they could evidently do with the help. Make a donation here.

You could support Radio 4's annual Christmas appeal which, for the last 82 years, has been for the work of St-Martin-in-the-Fields with homeless and needy people in London and all over the country. Make a donation here.

You could pass a few dollars in Jimmy Wales' direction, if you think Wikipedia's important. I can't count the number of links I've made to Wikipedia from Speechification. Imperfect it may be but it's becoming the backbone of the emerging 'semantic web' and a lot of people, including the BBC, have begun to use it as a 'controlled vocabulary' for other organised content. We evidently can't live without it. Make a donation here.

This I Believe is a long-running NPR series, sometimes a little cloying but often lovely. And we all know that Brian Eno is often genius but can sometimes have a face of po. This is a conjunction of the lovely and the genius. Mr Eno talking about the benefits of a good old community sing. MP3 here.

This won't go in the podcast because I just feel bad about uploading This American Life while they're making such an earnest effort to make a living from this stuff over there. So you'll just have to get over to the web site where you can listen to the show for nothing in your browser (or pay for a download). The second item in this episode (which starts at about 8:10) is a really gorgeous little story, told by crime writer (Clockers and Lush Life), TV script writer (The Wire) and screenwriter (The Color of Money) Richard Price.

It's a snapshot from the time he's spent shadowing NYC cops while researching his writing and it was actually recorded at a 'storytelling club' in New York that I'd now really like to visit called The Moth (and they have their own excellent podcast). His language is so disarming, so light of touch (and so American) you'll find yourself laughing with pleasure at the dialogue and the picture painted (or your money back).

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.