Randee Dawn - Author (The Only Song Worth Singing / Tune In Tomorrow) - Fascination Street

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is a Harmony Krieger from Life with Harmony and
Netflix's Jewish Matchmaking and you're listening to Fascination Street podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Yea, yes, the amp.

Speaker 4 (00:21):
Visual down the most interested street in the world with
my voice d Fascination Street.

Speaker 5 (00:27):
You already know when you wait for the fastest street.

Speaker 6 (00:31):
Welcome back, Street Walkers. This episode is with Randy Down.
Randy is a reporter and a journalist and now an author.
She has a ton of experience covering musical icons and
even co edited a book that we do not talk
about at all in this episode. That said, we do
talk about where she grew up and how she grew

(00:51):
up and what made her get into music, and particularly
the journalism side of music. We talk about some of
the music videos that she made, both in her head
and on her own unofficially with some old ass of
ECRs and things, and then we talk about her writing.
She has written for Soap Opera Digests. She was I believe,

(01:15):
one of the editors there, and she also is a
former editor at The Hollywood Reporter. We talk about some
of both of those things, and then we talk about
some music stuff. She shares a fun story about how
she came to know Adam Schleschinger, who was formerly the
frontman of Fountains of Wayne and the band Ivy, which

(01:38):
is how she came to know him. And then we
talk about her books. She had a book that was
re released with some new and interesting chapters and content
last year called Tune in Tomorrow. She tells us all
about what that book is and what it's about, and
that book did so well that later this fall there
will be a second book in that series, so keep

(02:00):
your eyes peeled for that. But before that, even she
has a book that came out on April eight called
The Only Song Worth Singing, and coming up in August
on the nineteenth, she has yet another book coming out
called Leave No Trace. Make sure you follow Randy Don
everywhere where Things are things. Check out her web page

(02:23):
at Randy Don dot com for more info on those
books and other upcoming projects. And this is my conversation
with fiction novelist Randy Dawn.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Forgredit be fascinating, Forgrett to be fascinating, Forgret to be fascinating.

Speaker 6 (02:48):
Welcome to Fascination Street Podcasts. Randy Don, how you doing today?

Speaker 3 (02:52):
I am well, thank you very much. It is sunny
here and still cold, but sunny at least.

Speaker 6 (02:57):
Where is here?

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Here is in New York bencon Hurst. If you know
your neighborhoods yay.

Speaker 6 (03:04):
Buddy of mine grew up in benson Hurst. His name
is A. J. Binza.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
Oh yeah, that name actually sounds a little familiar on that.

Speaker 6 (03:11):
Yeah, he used to be like a gossip columnist for
the Day. I don't know for what's the one the
New York magazine that Billy Joels sings about.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Oh, the Daily News. Yeah, that also the New York Times.
But yes, I think I know where you were going
with that.

Speaker 6 (03:28):
Yeah, I think it's Yeah, he's from benson Hurst.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
Vincent Dinofrio's from the area.

Speaker 6 (03:32):
Also, I'm unfamiliar with that iconic and amazing actor.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Oh okay, he's like everywhere or so. But that's fine.
Not everybody knows everything.

Speaker 6 (03:41):
I love that guy. I heard he's clinically insane.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
He was a very interesting interview. Like it was not
an insane interview. I've had those before.

Speaker 6 (03:49):
But when I, oh, you interviewed him.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've done a ton of interviews.

Speaker 6 (03:53):
Hold on one second.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah, Ready.

Speaker 6 (03:56):
What I like to do is I like to start
from the beginning. It helps us understand how they guess
scott from where they were to where they are. So first,
where were you born and raised? We'll get to Vinnie
D in a minute.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Okay, So I was born and raised in Maryland, closer
to DC than.

Speaker 6 (04:11):
Baltimore, where specifically it's a.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
County called Montgomery County. These days, since everybody abbreviates everything,
people go like moco, Yeah, I know. Well, you know,
I live in New York.

Speaker 6 (04:23):
My wife and I are going to Maryland in a
couple of months.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
So I was just scurious, Yeah, what part are you
going to?

Speaker 6 (04:28):
I have absolutely no idea. She said, hey, let's go here, here, here,
and there. And I said, just just tell me how
much clothes to bring. I don't. I have no idea
where we're going. We're going places, though, so that's cool.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
It's a pretty state. They got a lot going for it.
It's one of the smaller states, but you know, we
got a lot going forest the courses, there's the beach,
there's crabs, there's Baltimore. You know, there's all sorts of stuff.
So come on down to Maryland.

Speaker 6 (04:50):
Okay, so you grew up in Maryland, sure, and then
what did you want to be when you grew up?
What was the plantimes?

Speaker 3 (04:57):
How far back you go? So my initial plan as
of seventh grade veterinarian. There you go, veterinarian had guessed
very accurately, but one hundred percent.

Speaker 6 (05:09):
All little girls want to be a veterinarian, all of them.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Well, you know, where I was in Maryland was still
rural adjacent enough. You know, I was very much in
the suburbs, but it was still rural adjacent enough that
we had the future farmers of America. You could take
an animal husbandry class, which I did in seventh grade,
and a little group of us got to raise Each
group of three had like a rabbit. You were supposed
to feed and clean up and just get to know

(05:33):
how the outworks. At the very end of the year,
they were like, okay, and now you have to vaccinate
your rabbit. And I was like, I cannot do a
needle on an animal. I can't. I can't do it.
I mean personally couldn't do it. And I was like, well, mom,
I think the veterinary dream is over. What will I
ever do with my life? I'm in eighth grade and
don't have a direction. And she was like, what do

(05:53):
you like to do, and I said, well, I like
to write, and very sensibly, because she somehow knew in
her heart that fiction writing was not very remunerative, she said, well,
you could be a journalist. And I was like, what
is that? And so she pointed out a couple of
local journalists and said, that's what they do, and you know,

(06:15):
it's a reporter, but it's more than a reporter, and
here's what you could do. And I just kind of
took it from there. I'm like, you'll pay me for writing.
I'm on board, and that became I sort of knew
what I wanted to do as an eighth or nighth grade,
which is amazing and maybe a little sad, but also
kind of amazing because I.

Speaker 6 (06:32):
Don't think that's sad. I think that that is one
of the more Norman Rockwell days gone by things, you know,
like we all kind of knew what we were going
to be from a very early age. And nowadays, just
because I guess technology and the way of the world
is moving so fast. Yeah, I think half the jobs
that people have didn't exist when they were kids.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Yeah, or the ones that did exist are either fading
out or being phased out or just completely changing. I
mean I would not I admire anybody who wants to
get into the business of journalism, But by the time
I graduated from college, I was sort of advising people
not to major in it. Right, I don't feel like
I graduated with a knowledge about what to write. I

(07:14):
just had the specific structure of how you write certain articles.

Speaker 6 (07:18):
Gotcha. When my kids were little and they were trying
to figure out what they wanted to be. Have two kids,
so I told one of them they should get into
typewriter repair, and then the other one's saddle repair. So
they're doing great.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
I would figure the saddle probably might a little bit
better than the typerector. But yeah, it's not much old
fashioned stuff.

Speaker 6 (07:41):
Okay, so we're going to get to everything. We're going
to go all over the place. The timeline on this
is going to give you whiplash and or the bins.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Okay, I'm better brace my neck.

Speaker 6 (07:50):
As a kid, you used to make up stories to
go along with the songs that you listened to sort
of like music videos, but before they were a thing. Yeah,
which then in inspired you to write actual stories. What
is the first song that you remember making up a
story too? In your head kind of a music video
style thing.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
I don't know that I could actually pin it to
one single song. I started out listening to the radio,
and the radio kind of spun a certain group of songs,
and it was a lot of adult contemporary stuff because
I wasn't cool enough to start listening to.

Speaker 6 (08:26):
Sure thing nerd.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Early yacht rock. Let's put it that way, oh cool
early yacht rocker. But that's what ALS always played in
the house, you know, my mom. We had a weird
speaker system and intercom system throughout the entire house, and
at night, my mom would put the radio on on
a station she wanted, so that's what I fell asleep to.
And then she turned it off when she.

Speaker 6 (08:46):
Went to bed, so the whole house would fall asleep
to this, or she just did it because you had
an early bedtime.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, she did it for me. You could turn off
the intercom in your room if you want. And my
brother didn't give a crap, but we would do like,
you know, the top ten to ten and Top five
to ten all that. So I would listen to the
songs over and over and they just started connecting in
my head, like I can tell you individual songs that
I have music videos for still in my head that,
but I'm I'm not sure which the first one was.
So like, there's a terrible song by Darryl holland John

(09:14):
Oates called adult Education, and the video is actually worked.
You've got to pull this video up one day, and
I had like this video of it being performed with
people I didn't like. In my high school. Chicago seventeen
was a big deal at the time, and there were
all these songs on there that kind of linked together.
And then I was obsessed with Duran Duran at one point,

(09:38):
so they were characters in my various videos, and they
all were just, you know, a middle schoolers slash high
schoolers idea of what a romance should look like. They're
all very romantic, you know, oh I lost and my
founder now we're kissing, you know that kind of thing.
And sometimes you would get a series of songs that

(09:58):
kind of linked together, and I could make a through
line of a story. And I had written some stories
without this particular aid before I sat down and wrote
stories about my stuffed animals, so you know, you play
with stuffed animals and then like, oh, that's a story.
So then I would write that down, but actual stories
that kind of linked together. Just it depended on what

(10:19):
the radio decided to play. It was a long time
before I was making my own mixed tapes or sitting
down and listening to whole albums. And for those in
the audience who are under a certain age, we had
to do that. There wasn't There wasn't the iPod which
had ten sixteen thousand songs on it, or the Spotify
and it would just give you a number of things
and over and over and over again. It was just

(10:41):
it was a very different It was a very different
time the Spotify.

Speaker 6 (10:46):
I love it. You mentioned Duran Duran, and I know
that you're a fan of Neil Gaiman, and I think
that this is true. One of, if not maybe the
very first book that Neil Gaman put out was a
book about Duran Duran. And if you can find a
first run copy of that book, I think it's worth

(11:06):
almost ten thousand dollars right now.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Yeah, it's it's it's up there. I have never seen it.
I have certainly heard of it. But yeah, I mean,
you know, he was a journalist and he was doing
for higher work, and I'm assuming that this was a
for higher.

Speaker 6 (11:20):
Thing I would imagine.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
You know, it was. It was an early enough version
that they probably hadn't even put out Seven in the
Ragged Tiger. I mean this is product first album or
second album. To clarify, just in case anybody's sitting is
sitting in here listening to this podcast with a cocked head. Now,
Neil Gaiman is now a problematic man, and although I
have admired a lot of he is. Oh yeah, that's
a whole that's a whole extra podcast. You need to

(11:44):
do a little googling on Neil Gamon.

Speaker 6 (11:45):
Oh well, that's okay. I mean, you know, I was
talking about his stories.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
That's fine. We can separate the writing from the man himself.
I just wanted to point that out. But yeah, he's
not the man we thought he was. But you know,
he has some very interesting books and stories, and I
have taken his writing advice over the years. That's the
kind of thing that really inspired me.

Speaker 6 (12:08):
Gotcha, let's talk about separating things. Before you entered it,
you thought high school was going to be something like
a cross between the movie Greece and the movie Fame.
How disappointed were you I realized was not either.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
I respect your reporting on this one. So yeah, I mean,
you know, there's the what we what we expect really
and what we don't expect.

Speaker 6 (12:36):
Really.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
I didn't exactly walk into Gavisburg High School and think
that people are going to break out.

Speaker 6 (12:42):
In the song, right, go Trojans.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
My god, that's really good stuff. Yes Trojans, Yes that
was our mascot. So yeah, I didn't literally think people
are going to start to break out into song. I
just love that concept that the musical can express emotions
that were just so difficult for teenagers to wrap their
heads around. And I loved both of those movies so

(13:06):
very much, Fame and Greece, and I guess I had
just sort of thought that it might follow a trope
in some ways, that there might be some tropiness that
I would, you know, immediately latch onto. It was, I think,
maybe a way of trying to make sense of the world.
You're a teenager. Nothing makes sense, but at the same time,
you sort of have to act like you know everything,

(13:27):
and if you have something that you really love that
sort of gives you what you think could be a
game plan that can be very helpful. And it was
just it was, again, this is the world in my head.
And the world in reality or just you know, there
are two different things, which maybe is why I ended
up writing fantasy, especially portal fantasy, where fantastic characters mix
with the modern world. I like that idea that there's

(13:49):
a place in the world or a place in the
universe where maybe these things to do actually intertwine.

Speaker 6 (13:55):
Gotcha, now I heard an alternate theory about the movie Greece.
Oh yeah, have you heard about this?

Speaker 3 (14:03):
I have? Yeah, But go ahead, where like.

Speaker 6 (14:06):
I guess, the whole movie takes place sort of, it's
a dream because Danny died over the summer or some
shit like that.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
Sandy the other Sandy, you know, I saved her life.
She nearly drowned as one of the very early lyrics
that Danny sings and Sandy was dead the whole time
is the theory. And it was funny because I wrote
an article about the fan theories about Greece at one point,
and I tried to get the author of the guy
who had written the script, whose name is passing out

(14:33):
of my head at the moment. I sent him an
email and just like, hey, can you just clear this
up for us one way or the other. Was that
your intention or did you even think about it? Or
was that this is completely out of left field? And
all he would write me back is I'm writing a
book and everything will be clear. And that was as
far as it got. And I don't think I've ever
seen a book from him anywhere.

Speaker 6 (14:53):
So is that person still alive?

Speaker 4 (14:55):
Do you know he is?

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Yeah, as far as I know, he's still alive. I
have not checked recently, but a quick IMDb would probably
pull his name up. And that was probably four or
five years ago that I had that email conversation with him. Gotcha,
And like I say, as far as I know, there's
been no book and there's been no big revelation. But
this is this is like the conversation of whether Leo
DiCaprio could have fit on the floating door that Kate

(15:20):
Winsley was like, no, it's too small in Titanic.

Speaker 6 (15:24):
So that wasn't the worst part of that movie. The
worst part of that movie was that that dumb bitch
through that necklace overboard.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Oh yes, that was ridiculous, Like, come on, man, you
need that for you need that for the assisted living home?

Speaker 6 (15:35):
Exactly good alert back to you pretending to make music
videos in your head when you got into college. I
think it was college. You actually did make a music video.
Tell me what you did with the Alan Parsons song Silence,
and I yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
So I was in college and hang out with some
friends and I was a junior and they were seniors,
and one of them, within a film class, he had
to do a final project that was somewhere between eight
and ten minutes long, and it had to have two
sources of audio, and he had no idea what he
wanted to do. He couldn't come up with concepts. And
I said, what, Actually, there's this eight minute song that

(16:14):
I like and I've got this fairly pretentious kind of
metaphorical music video idea in my head. And he said,
what is it? I told him, and he was like,
I want to do that. So my idea for this
video and he augmented it a little bit, which I
give him a lot of credit for. Is one of
my first creative collaborations with somebody, and it was neat

(16:37):
to see how somebody could take an idea it was
very much in my head, realize it, but then also
find a way to make it better. So he added
a bit of a couple of things and the first
audio track was the song Silence and Eye by Alan
Parson's project, and then at some point he added in
a little bit of rustling of leaves for a second
audio track, and that was the project. And it was

(16:57):
shot on eight milimi, I think, and I have a
copy of it, but I can't make it available on
YouTube without getting getting taken down for copyright infringement. So
I have a copy of it. And it was basically
me holding up a video camera to the screen where
we projected it on a wall. So that's the quality.

Speaker 6 (17:17):
We're talking nice, But yeah, that.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
Was pretty amazing. It wasn't the first time I had
actually made a music video. It was the one that
I'd made with the most people or it was most
extensively done. I was very into the idea of trying
to create my own and I came home from college
my freshman year around Christmas. We had a VHS player,
but we could rent a VHS camera as what it was.

(17:40):
It was a player, but it was a camera. It
weighed probably fifteen pounds and you'd carry it around on
your shoulder and you'd film everything. So I had an
idea for a song. I went and filmed around my
neighborhood in the Maryland area where I grew up, came back,
spliced everything together using the video camera and our home

(18:00):
video tape machine. I just like connected the RCA cables
and then I fed in a forty five recording of
There's an artist named Tommy Keane. He had a song
called Places That Are Gone.

Speaker 6 (18:12):
He's like a DC artist.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
Yeah, he was from the DC area exactly. He since passed,
but he was very much I worked in a record
store and we were very much all Tommy Keane fans there,
and I just laid that down, put the video on
top of it, and then used the forty five record
for an audio input. And at the very beginning of
that video, you can actually hear the needle going down

(18:34):
on a record and then the song starts, and that
was so much fun. I thought, that's actually what I
really wanted to do, is I wanted to maybe get
into the business of making not even films. I wanted
to just make videos. And then when I went to
my study abroad in England in my junior year of college,
I actually worked at a music video firm that made
videos for like Ultra Vivid Scene and The Sundays and

(18:57):
Depeche Mode and even I was there demon Tina Turner,
So that was actually pretty exciting.

Speaker 6 (19:04):
Wow, you said some of my important years there with
the pest Mode and the Sundays. Good god.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 6 (19:10):
And then of course, I mean, who didn't grow up
with Tina Turner? Good God.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
You know she's an amazing, amazing woman. We are we
are lesser for not having her anymore.

Speaker 6 (19:20):
That is the truth. Also, I think maybe you made
a video or two. You did like some Amy Grant stuff, right,
I did you know? Cool?

Speaker 3 (19:29):
Let me tell you one of my best friends was
a huge Amy Grant fan. And I mean I grew
up Jewish. I'm pretty agnostic at the moment, but I
grew up very culturally Jewish. So Amy Grant was really
not on my radar. But my friend gave me her
stuff and I'm like, well, she has a very beautiful voice.
There was a song that she came out where she
duetted with Peter Seta after Chicago, called Next Time I Fall.

(19:50):
And I was just like, I want to look like her.
She's just a beautiful, beautiful woman.

Speaker 6 (19:53):
And that was her Yeah, wow.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Like that was my Like I didn't want her that way.
I wanted to be here, you know. And I started
listening to her songs, and yeah, it's like very slight
pop confections, and yeah, occasionally the key she's talking about,
in fact is God or Jesus. But they were perfectly,
you know, adequate songs. And I enjoyed a certain amount
of her work. And she did a song called lead

(20:22):
Me On which somehow melded in a pop Christian way
both references to the Holocaust and the Jimmy Swaggert scandal.
And I said to myself, Randy, you should make a
video for this. And I have no idea why I did,
but I got my friends to appear, and I found
old footage and I, again using the video cassette to

(20:42):
video cassette plastic format, spliced it together. So I have
a version of that, which again not available on YouTube
for various reasons, one of the which is they would
just simply take it down for copyright violation.

Speaker 6 (20:53):
It's so terrible what they do. Because I have interviewed
a ton of musicians p. Two hundred and twenty five
musicians or something like that, amazing, thank you, and every
single one of them I ask if I can play
one or more of their songs, and even if they
wrote the damn thing, YouTube does not care. They take
they they don't quote take it down. They just put

(21:16):
it on a list. It just says like copyright infringement.
You know, I can't make any money off of those,
which is fine. I don't give a shit. But the fact,
like when they first started doing it, like you said,
they would just take it down, it was just unavailable
after about one hundred times. Now it's available, it just
is flagged as a copyright infringement. Like Joe Bouchard, founding

(21:36):
bass player of Blueish or Cult. I had him on
and his solo work he owns them, and even he
got notified that that video was that my episode was
taken down and he emailed me. I was like, I
tried calling. I tried, I don't there's no there's no person.
It's all robot like. I can't, like even the artist

(21:59):
doesn't know how to get around that, and it drives
me insane.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Oh yeah, if you want to, I can get into
the discussion of trying to secure writes for lyrics that
appear in my upcoming the book that's coming out in April,
and the only Songboord singing and if we're going to
get to that later, we can save it.

Speaker 6 (22:14):
We're going to get to that later. But I definitely
am going to ask you about that because that sounds fascinating.
Oh real quick, since we're talking about music, you wouldn't
happen to be or know the Randy down that helped
executive produce the trash Can Sinatra's album Wild Pendulum.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Well, that's the classic executive producer where I didn't lay
hands on anything. I just gave them some money to
help them make it.

Speaker 6 (22:39):
I did that too with an artist recently. It was
very fun.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, the trash Cans, they actually ran an indie go
go to raise money to make that album, and indiego
Go shut down without ever giving them that music. And
so they were totally classy by putting my name on anyway,
even though they.

Speaker 6 (22:55):
Shut down without giving them the money money.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, yeah, the indigogo like went or did something. But
I spoke to one of them later and they're like, yeah,
you know, we never saw any of that money from
that campaign. So they made the album and they put
my name in there anyway, even though they clearly didn't
have to. But yeah, the trash Cans are are probably
my just longest lived, all time favorite band.

Speaker 6 (23:16):
I had no idea that about Indiegogo. That is insane. Yeah,
what a wonderful statement of our times, current day. Thank god.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Well, okay, so if it's not Indiegogo, I don't want
to slander anybody who but this company, whatever it was,
they went under or they oh okay, So if I
misspoke about Indigogo, I apologized. But it was like it
wasn't Kickstarter, is the point. It was one of the
other ones that was specific to music.

Speaker 6 (23:40):
Gotcha, well, that is rough. What's your favorite song on
that album.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
On Wild Pendulum?

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
You know, it's been a few minutes since I actually
saw the album. I'm a little bit more expert on
the earliest stuff that they've done. It's it's kind of like, well,
you love the band when they first come out, and
then they sort of shift gears a little bit here
and a little bit there. Well, nostalgically, I still love them,
and I do occasionally love a song here and there,
but I am not like the word by word expert
that I used to be.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
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hang out with us everywhere podcasts are found.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
Let's get back into it.

Speaker 6 (24:55):
Tell me about the Ivy Vine.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
So the Ivy Vine was the group slash web page,
slash mailing list for the band Ivy. Ivy was this
sort of dream slash jangly pop band that started in
the nineteen nineties mid nineteen nineties. I was one of
the first people who interviewed them. I did an interview
for our alternative press magazine and we really hit it off.

(25:17):
The main songwriter, Andy Chase, was originally from Maryland and
so we had kind of had that connection. They were
also writing songs I just really loved. I've always been
a big fan of It's like a happy sound in
the music, but the lyrics are like small stilettos that
are stabbing you and giving you all sorts of, you know,
dark feels, and they were doing a really good job

(25:37):
of that. The lead singer was Andy's wife, Dominique Durand,
and she had this She was French and she had
this wonderful sort of soft, crooney kind of voice. And
the third member of the band was Adam Schlessinger, who
went on to Yeah, exactly, I'm still dis wrecked by
that because he was one he left. He went so
early in the COVID pandemic, but he went on to

(25:58):
do amazing things with Fountains Wayne, and he wrote for
Broadway shows and he was with my crazy ex girlfriend.
He wrote the music for that, so he got an
Oscar nomination for writing that thing. You do like. They
all were amazing, but Adam kind of broke out and
just became amazing all on his own. Anyway, because I
had done the earliest interview, I kind of had a
lot of information that many people didn't we did have

(26:19):
the Internet, but we didn't have the internet we have today.
Wikipedia didn't exist. People who didn't know a band really
could be left hanging to find out anything about them.
So I don't know if you're old enough to remember
Usenet or news groups.

Speaker 6 (26:33):
I am old enough, but you didn't use them. I
was too poor to know what those things were. I
didn't have a I didn't have the Internet for a
really long time.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
That's fair, I mean, so for those who are listening
to this, what may not remember these were like these
are public message boards that basically were tied to different subjects.
So you'd have alt dot music dot and then fill
in the blank, so alt dot music dot, ivy, all
dot music whatever. So it was a little little reddit,
a little bit newsgroupy, and in this all music section

(27:04):
you'll started asking questions about, Hey, what's this band? IVY.
I don't know anything, and I seem to be the
only person who could reply with any context. So I thought,
rather than answering the same questions over and over again,
I'm going to just make a mailing list. So I said,
give me your email address, I'm going to make a
mailing list. We'll send out information as we get it,
and then the band found out about it and they're like, hey,
we'll be happy to help. Let's do this. So it

(27:25):
was kind of an interesting early version of getting this
band slowly into the Internet. I'm the one who brought
Dominique and Andy into my office one day when I
was working at a magazine and said, all right, look,
these are the web pages I'm going to recommend you
model yourself off of when you create a web page.
And it sounds so basic these days. It sounds like
the kind of thing and of course they have a

(27:46):
web page, or of course they have a mailing list,
but these things were not native or intuitive at the time.
There was no you know, this whole three sixty marketing
that everybody talks about now with bands. So yeah, so
we called it ivvine. We got a domain and had
a web page, had you know, sold merch, I had
a mailing list. I eventually passed the mailing list off

(28:07):
to somebody else, suddenly got rid of the domain, and
it just kind of faded out as ivy sort of
began to fade as well. So that was really interesting.
It was weird being friends with people who were also
very fond of their music and also running a kind
of fan group. It was a couple of different quadrants
to try and step in and not step on anybody's
toes at the same time.

Speaker 6 (28:27):
That makes sense. Yeah, why did you only work for
MPR for six months?

Speaker 3 (28:33):
Because I was nine, I was twenty one, and I
didn't know how good i'd haded. I really thought that
I wanted to do music journalism full time, and my
goal was to get I was going to get into
Rolling Stone. I was going to write for all that.
Did you think music magazines? No, I've never written for
Rolling Stone. It's still a bucket list thing. On one
of these days, I'm hoping that I can get something
in there. I was doing a lot of freelance writing

(28:56):
for Alternative Press and other magazines and trying to get
this freelance career going. And right out of college, I
had been doing some internship with WBUR, which was the
national public radio station on the Boston University campus where
I went. And while I was doing my internship, a
reporter came up and said, Hey, we're going to be
starting this new show. It's going to be all about

(29:17):
environmental journalism, and we're going to need a production assistant.
How would you like to want to talk about that?
So we talked about that and I got hired. Like
it was the easiest job interview ever. They came to
me with this brand new thing. I said, here's what
I can do. You see what I can do, and boom.
I had a job with an NPR radios show and
did not respect it at all because I just was

(29:40):
not an environmental reporter, Like this was not a super
big interest to me. I was like, yeah, I was
going to do music journalism and I thought, oh well,
I'll just sort of half ass my job and I'll
put most of my attention into the freelancing. And about
six months into that, they came to me and very
kindly said, we can just get an intern to do
what you're doing. I don't think we need to pay

(30:01):
so bye. And they were probably absolutely correct. They could
totally save money by getting an intern. But I look
back on it as this is a lesson. You know,
learn from this that you had a really you had
a job, You had a really good job right out
of school, and you didn't put the effort until you
should put your whole less into it instead of just

(30:21):
your half ass. So that's just one of the turns
that life takes. Who knows, maybe I would still be
with NPR these days. I mean, I'm a huge fan
of NPR, very love a lot of the shows that
they put out. We didn't know podcasts were going to
revitalize the whole concept of what radio could be and
could do. So kids, if you get a good job
right out of college, nurture it a little bit. Six

(30:43):
months is not nice to have from.

Speaker 6 (30:44):
The resume, but it is kind of cool to see
MPR in your resume, which came first Hollywood Reporter or
Soap Opera Digest.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
You know, they honestly happened almost around the same time,
because after the NPR job in Boston fell through, I
started doing a lot of temp work and freelancing on
the side, and at some point I said, you know,
I'm going to get more freelance jobs if I live
in New York rather than in Boston, And that is
that was absolutely true at the time. If you didn't
live in LA or New York and you wanted to
do freelance music writing, you just weren't going to be

(31:14):
taken as seriously. It's like, why can't you be there?
So I moved to New York, I started freelancing, and
after a while I was like, you know, the freelancing
slash temp is not something I want to be doing
by the time I'm forty and fifty. I got to
do something that's going to be have more staying power.
And I had become a big fan of Law and
Order at the time, because Law and Order was dunked

(31:34):
umb Law and Order would rerun on TNT at like
eleven o'clock at night, and my freelance schedule basically said
stay up till two in the morning and get up
at eleven and that's your schedule. So I had become
a big Law and Order fan. And I thought, perhaps
in the same vein that I thought musicals were going
to be like high school, I said, oh, maybe I
should go to law school. So I ended up doing

(31:57):
a continuing education program through New University to get a
paralegal degree, because I thought that's not going to cost
as much. It's only a year commitment. If I hate it,
i'll be out in the year. If I don't hate it,
then maybe I'll go to law school. While I was
in the paralegal program, I met a woman whose brother
in law was the bureau chief for the Hollywood Reporter,
and I said, I have all these clips, do you

(32:18):
think they might want freelance. I'd never written for the
business trade side of things, and she passed my stuff
along and I started freelancing. Well. I finished with the
Continuing Education program, never got a job at all. Didn't
even try as a pair ofegal because right around that
time I finished that program, I had applied for a

(32:38):
job from the New York Times. It was literally a
job that was about half an inch thick in the
job listenings of the New York Times, which basically said,
you know, they needed a writer and editor. Soap opera
knowledge a plus, And I was like, I know about
soapob They're a thing. I was a big fan in
high school. I also listened. I watched General Hospital a

(32:59):
lot in high Yeah. So I got called back from this.
I had applied for it the classic old fashioned sent
in the resume to an address, got a call back,
and did a little interview for a soap opera digest
and got hired as a feature writer there. So I
was freelancing for the Hollywood Reporter on the side while

(33:21):
I was doing soap opera digest and having learned from
my n nprst and did put my whole ass into
the soap opera dy chest job, but still spent my
weekends and evenings doing the freelance for Hollywood Reporter because
extra money means you can eventually, you know, pay for
a mortgage, or at least he used to be able to.

(33:42):
And that was eventually how I got myself a co
op by the time I was thirty. So if I
hadn't done both of those things, I would never been
able to save every money.

Speaker 6 (33:49):
Oh nice.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah, they happened around the same time.

Speaker 6 (33:51):
So when you worked for soap aberadiy Chest, a lot
of what you covered centered around One Life to live?
Is that back in the Nathan Fillion days it.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Was postfill in. He certainly was somebody people remembered, but
I actually started out with another world and then they
moved me Like the reporters all had beats, so like
your beat was the show. And I started out with
another world and then got moved to One life to
live after I sort of screwed up another world in
one way. Yeah oopsies, And I was One life to

(34:22):
live and that was the era. There was all this
history that was going on with One Life to Live.
I loved the history of that show because back in
the late sixties when it was really getting started, they
did a lot of social awareness stuff and health related things,
and it wasn't a PSA, but they would talk about
subjects that people weren't necessarily they didn't have the ability

(34:45):
to talk about, weren't being talked about. There was a
lot of progressive stuff, Like one of their earliest stories
was about a main character who was black, which was
passing as white, and they sprung that on the audience,
you know, one afternoon. They kind of had this this
social progressive of aspect to them. It wasn't just big
old trashy weddings and not my daughter or that kind

(35:06):
of stuff. That stuff all happens, and there are many many, crazy, wonderful,
crazy storylines that One Life Live eventually did. But I
really loved looking at their history because they had a
lot going for them, especially very early.

Speaker 6 (35:18):
On love that. Did you ever work on Passions?

Speaker 3 (35:22):
I wrote about it, for sure, but I was not
one of the ones that I covered. But yeah, Passions
was just like this fabulous, fabulous train.

Speaker 6 (35:29):
Wreck was bonkers. One of the actresses I interviewed did
a couple of years on that show, and even she
was like, that shows she's crazy.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Oh yeah. James Riley was the writer, and he had
this imagine he started in Days of Our Lives, I believe,
and he had some crazy storylines from there and just
brought them all over and they gave him control of
Passions and he said, super, let's see how far we
can go with this. When my first book came out,
I ended up writing a list of the craziest science

(35:58):
fiction fantasy story and soap operas. And honestly, you could
do an entire article just on the speculative fiction nature
of everything and Passions.

Speaker 6 (36:07):
That's funny.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
It was just bizarre, all right.

Speaker 6 (36:10):
Real quick, we talked about law and order. Let's talk
about law and order criminal intent. Only tell me about
when and why you interviewed Vincent Dnofrio.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Right, Okay, So it actually wasn't in connection to his
law and order stuff at the time.

Speaker 6 (36:24):
Sure, that was just my cheap bridge to get there,
that's okay.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
I spoke to Vincentinofrio in relation to Godfather of Harlem,
which I believe is still on Epics. It's like in
this fourth season, this season, possibly eighth season, I don't know.
At this point, he was in Godfather of Harlem with
Forrest Whitaker, and I was doing a big article for
Emmy magazine, so I had to interview everybody, and I
got Vincent on the phone, and I had read in

(36:52):
Wikipedia that he was originally from Bensonhurst, which is where
I live now, so I was like, where in benson Hurst?
So he was immediately warmed up. Not that he wasn't
warm to begin with, but he warmed up once we
sort of had this local connection thing going on. He's
an interesting guy. You know. There are some people you
do so many interviews, you can probably relate to this
on some level. But there are some people you interview
and you just feel like they're giving you the same

(37:14):
lines they've given to everybody else, maybe slightly differently angled.
It's almost like they're reading off a page. And then
if you give them a question that they haven't answered
ten times before, they sort of bubble along and don't
know how to answer it. And then there are people
who seem to have all of their gears turning at
once when you actually are talking to them and aren't
just waiting for the next obvious question that they can

(37:36):
previously answer. And that's one of the things I really
loved about talking with him is just he had some
fresh and interesting stuff to talk about. Was he a
little off the wall, sure, but like in a good way,
not in a crazy, I have no idea what's going
on with this guy way? And I just love that
he throws his whole ass speaking of whole asses into
his roles, right, he is just one hundred percent there

(37:57):
for it, and when he was on criminal intent, and
it's just so odd to me that he had become
the star of a TV series because he's great, but
you wouldn't think that he would be part of a procedural,
a formalized procedural crime drama on DV.

Speaker 6 (38:12):
I think that's back when they paid really, really well.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
Well, you know, lawn Order is like the king of television. Basically,
Dick will owns television or owns NBC practically.

Speaker 6 (38:22):
That is the truth.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
So they probably did have a lot of money to
snag him.

Speaker 6 (38:25):
Oh well, I'm sure it would have taken some.

Speaker 4 (38:31):
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Speaker 7 (38:57):
Let's get back into it, Okay, I want to talk
about some books. Sure, I haven't written any books, so
let's just talk about yours.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
I'm sure you've read a few.

Speaker 6 (39:11):
I've read the time. I haven't written any. First, I
want to talk about Tune in Tomorrow. What is the
concept behind this book and why did you read it?

Speaker 3 (39:19):
The concept is that it's about a reality TV show
run by mythical creatures for mythical creatures, but starring humans.
So you know, if fantastic creatures were making their own
TV shows or their own films, what stories would they
want to see told? And they wouldn't be writing about
magic and dragons and castles. They would want to write
about the stuff that was exotic to them, which is

(39:41):
really kind of the mundane things of our world. What
is embezzlement? Why must you drive a car? How does
that work? And when I thought about that aspect of it,
I was like, Okay, this could be a really funny
story if we had a sort of a soap opera
esque type show in which it was starring humans. But
it was all written by these mythical creatures who did

(40:01):
not know how humans worked, but they just kind of
wrote these very elaborate soap opera a type scripts for them,
and then they were all behind the cameras the only people.
When I was at Boston University and I worked a
TV show there for local cable access, the students did
everything behind the scene. If you were on camera, you
were a pro and you were a non student, And

(40:22):
that sort of fed into this idea of a divide
between those who were learning about it and those who
were the pros. But I was at Soap Opera Digest
a bunch of years before I started writing this book,
but I'd always wanted to have a story that was
set as part of a soap opera universe because there
was just so much Actors are fascinating and actors are weird,

(40:43):
and I just thought, what if we had an actor
who investigated mixtories but his full time job was on
a soap opera. I carried that with me for a
long time, it didn't write anything about it. And then
I had an agent and I had two novels that
this agent had shopped around and they hadn't landed anywhere,
and she said, maybe you try something a little different.
And I thought, all right, well, different would be funny.

(41:05):
Because I've been writing more serious books, I still wanted
to stay in the fantasy vein. There's a company called
Choice of Games that has a website and it's text based,
almost like choose your own adventure type games that are
on the internet, and they have a bunch of games.
That's a great company. The woman who was in charge
of recruiting people, i'd often see her at conventions and
she's like, you should write for us. I said, well, here,
I had this idea. It's kind of an all about

(41:27):
Eve scenario but at a soap opera, and we do that.
And I started writing that for them, and then it
got too complicated and they wanted me to do all
this coding and everything to make it so that if
you did X, Y happened and all that, and it
just kind of broke my brain and I said, look,
this is not fun for me. Now can I take
this and go My separate way, and I said, absolutely,

(41:47):
we didn't sign you for anything. You're good. So I
took that story and it became I had already had
this outline for it, and I put it into a
fantasy universe, and that became Tuned In Tomorrow. Originally there
wasn't this fantastical element to it, but then I liked
making it funnier and also more relevant to the audience
I already had in fiction by making it fantastical but
also embedded in pop culture. They often tell authors write

(42:10):
what you know, and I think, when you are eighteen
nineteen twenty twenty two, what you know is the life
of an eighteen nineteen twenty twenty two year old, and
so you get a lot of memoirsh literary confections that
some people like and I personally do not. By the
time I was writing Tune and Tomorrow, I had fifteen
years as a journalist and I knew what the behind

(42:34):
the scenes was like. I knew what it was like
to interact with actors and how they interacted with each other.
And I felt like this was the thing that I
knew how to write. So that's the origin story behind
Tune in Tomorrow.

Speaker 6 (42:45):
Now this was your first book that you actually had published.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
It's the first novel. Had a nonfiction book called The
Law and Order SVU, an official companion that I co wrote,
and that came out like ten years before.

Speaker 6 (42:58):
Okay, So you said that you wanted to sort of
cater to the audience. You already had a fiction audience.
If that was your first fiction book, where did you
find how did you already have a fiction audience?

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Well, you know, the fact the idea that I personally
meet people came to me for fiction. That that's probably overstating.
I had written a bunch of short stories that were
fantastical based, little horror based also, and those had been
published in anthologies or online in magazines. I thought initially, well,
if I'm never going to get published traditionally, maybe I

(43:32):
should try the Amazon self published thing. And I took
a bunch of those short stories and made like a
short book that I could sell at conventions when I
went to conventions. So I had these short stories, and
I also was going to a lot of science fiction
fantasy conventions all over the country and was selling these
books at a table with the networking group that I

(43:53):
was a member of called broad Universe I was learning
how to sell the books, how you know, what would work,
And for I didn't want to write a book that
wasn't something I was passionate about just so it would
go to a certain audience. But it didn't make a
lot of sense for me to write some sort of
straight up comedy book that maybe didn't have a speculative
fiction element. By looking at the speculative fiction element, what

(44:15):
I was really happy about is as I got more
into the book, it allowed me to explore bigger questions
within the speculative fiction universe. I mean, yes, it's a
funny book, but there's a conversation at one point about
what the nature of immortality is like and how that
actually is not the amazing, wonderful thing many people might
think it would be. There are characters in the book
who are essentially immortal, and they talk about how they

(44:37):
can no longer live in the real world. I mean,
the older you get, the more aware you are, how
hard it is to continue running in place, to feel relevant,
to feel like the world is relevant to you. And
it's very easy to sort of stop and say, oh,
this is my stopping point. Everything else is bad, everything
I know is good. I am now the old person.
So imagine if you had one hundred years working at
the same TV show, going home to the outside world

(45:00):
no longer makes sense. It actually opened up my inspiration
and my interest in exploring some of these topics, and
I'm very glad that it turned into this fantastical, speculative
fiction but humorous book.

Speaker 6 (45:13):
Now it must have been well received, because rumor has
it that there is a second book in this series
that's supposedly going to come out this fall. Is that true?

Speaker 3 (45:23):
That is true. Solara's published the book Solara's Novo, which
is now one of our imprints, and wanted to do
two more in the series. Actually, I have already written
one of them, called We Interrupt This Program, keeping the
TV theme it's in the universe of it's not really
using the same characters, But that one's coming out in
the fall. I'm waiting to do some edits on that
and that will be out in the fall. And then

(45:44):
I'm also writing the third one, which tentatively is called
Don't Touch That Dial. That one will in theory be
out in twenty twenty six. So like, if this is
your jam, if you like, tune in tomorrow, I can
promise you that there's two more that are of the
same flavor that are becoming your way.

Speaker 6 (46:02):
Now, how excited were you when you got the call
that they did want more in that universe.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
I was kind of astounded, honestly. I mean, I thought
that Tune in Tomorrow did well, but I had been
thinking had done so well that they were going to say, yes,
we definitely want more. But it did better than average
for their usual sales at this particular publisher. So I
guess they said, you know, we're starting this imprint. It's
going to be ebook forward they call it. I mean,
it's an ebook, but it's also something if you want

(46:27):
to get a print version. It's called print on demand.
So it's a slightly different structure or selling technique or
marketing technique than it is when you just go straight
to traditional publishing. But they wanted more. So I'm very
happy to write more. I love this universe. I want
to write more. Writing funny is exercising muscles that I
don't always get to do otherwise. So I was really surprised.

(46:49):
Also because right around the time I was signing that contract,
the folks over at ark Manor picked up those two
books that didn't sell prior to Tune in Tomorrow, and
those two books are coming up this year. So I
have three books coming.

Speaker 6 (47:02):
And one of those books that didn't get picked up
and then did later. I believe it is called The
Only Song Worth Singing?

Speaker 3 (47:08):
That's correct.

Speaker 6 (47:09):
Yes, tell me about this book. What is this book
and when should we expect it?

Speaker 3 (47:15):
So The Only Song Worth Singing is due out on
April eighth. Oh yeah, it's coming out any minute now.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
The second one, yeah, thank you, Hey, street lockers, here's
a word from our sponsors. Let's get back into it.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
So the Only Song We're singing actually was written long
before Tune and Tomorrow. I started writing it when I
was in college.

Speaker 6 (47:41):
Was the Only Song Worth Singing? The first book that
you shopped around?

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Yes? Yeah, that was the first one.

Speaker 6 (47:46):
That was the one that the one that got you your.

Speaker 3 (47:48):
Agent got me my agent. She shopped it around. Thought
it should have landed somewhere. It just simply didn't. But
I always felt very strongly about it. I had been
writing it and rewriting it for many years. I felt
like it had gotten into a stronger and deeper place
by the time it got picked up. So I'm very
happy about that. It is about three friends who've grown
up together outside of Dublin in Ireland. They are on

(48:09):
tour in America in the nineteen nineties for the first time,
and they are being pursued and be deviled by these
Irish mythical fairy creatures who have come over the Atlantic
to find out what they're made of, and basically it
turns their whole lives upside down. So there's a lot
of backstagey being on tour, being on tour in the

(48:31):
nineteen nineties through various cities on the East coast of
the US. There's a lot of that background because that's
very familiar to what I was writing about anyway, along
with this fantasy element of one of the fay creatures.
She's the fairy Mistress. In Irish, it would be the
Lenehan sheet.

Speaker 6 (48:47):
That's what I was going to say.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Yeah, and the fairy mistress is this sort of succubist
character or succubis slash vampire. She inspires the poets. She
inspires you to write and create great things, but then
she sort of suck your life away at the same time.
So this is why the poets die young, right, you know,
you hear about how so and so died and she
was only twenty seven. That's because they were inspired by

(49:09):
this particular malignant news. She stole their souls at the
same time. So one of these, one of the characters
in the book gets attached to her and not good
things in Sue.

Speaker 6 (49:19):
Let's put it that way, And that's coming out April eight, correct, Yeah,
the only song worth singing April eighth. Guys, you have
another book I do, Leave No Trace. Is that one
of the two that didn't and then did get picked up?

Speaker 3 (49:33):
Correct? Yeah? Leave No Trace was the second one. My
agent sent out the one right before she said maybe
you should try something different. Leave No Trace went out
and nearly got picked up by a publisher. And there's
something called the acquisition meeting, so you get an editor
who's excited about it. They take it to the big
company meeting and said, make the pitch as to why
they should buy this book. That's the acquisition meeting. And

(49:54):
it didn't quite pass the acquisition meeting. So okay, it
was an advance. I mean I was moving forward. I
was getting to an acquisition meeting, but it still didn't
get picked up. And Lead No Trace is loosely connected
to the Only song worth singing. Both of them reference
this sort of mythical fairy world called the Green that
the characters called the Green Place, but they are completely

(50:15):
separate characters. In Lead No Trace, we have a young
woman who has grown up for various reasons, her father
brought her there when she was very young. Has grown
up in the forest and it's like half wild essentially,
and she has made a friend out of this magical
creature called the gilly Do, which is the green man
of the forest and is known in Celtic and Scott's
Celtic specifically folkloret. Then the musicians enter. We have a

(50:38):
songwriter and her best friend, the singer, who's kind of
this justin biebersh character. They decide that they need to
get away from the hustle and bustle of celebrity musician life,
and they decide they want to go camping. As you know,
when people go camping, things generally don't go well either.
So these two groups kind of clash. And the backdrop
of all that's going on is that, even though we

(50:58):
aren't participating in it, we hear about the fact that
there is a war going on between humans and magical
creatures that's going on, and again, the two don't have
to be read together. They are standalones. And if I
end up writing a third book, that will clarify more
of the connection. Because I have a third book idea
for that universe.

Speaker 6 (51:16):
What's going to determine whether you get a third book.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Whether they sell well? I think, I mean they still
write it anyway. I could try and self publish it
or get it to another publisher if this publisher doesn't
want it. But if Leave No Trace and the only
song we're singing sell well, then I imagine the publisher
will come back and say, look, if you've got a
third let's do it. So if you like them well enough,
by them.

Speaker 6 (51:37):
So when does Leave No Trace come out?

Speaker 3 (51:39):
Leave No Trace is August nineteenth, same publisher, same publisher,
arkman or Kasik c ae Zik.

Speaker 6 (51:46):
How cool are you right now?

Speaker 3 (51:49):
You know it's almost an embarrassment of Riches.

Speaker 6 (51:51):
Almost you have three books coming out this year.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Okay, it's an embarrassment of Brits. Which is my cup
runneth over.

Speaker 6 (51:59):
I'll say you need a cup?

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Yeah, I guess I'm gonna need it. I'm going to gobblin.

Speaker 6 (52:03):
That's right, It's weird.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Because I spent so many years writing but not thinking
I could get published, and then when I finally showed
it around and I'm like, Okay, let's see if you can
get this published, nothing was happening. Sometimes you just have
to sort of make the thing happen for yourself. These
two books were originally sent out by my agent, but
the reason they got picked up by Ark Pander Kazik
is I worked both the editor and the publisher because
I went to cons and I was on a panel

(52:26):
with the publisher and a friend of mine is dating
the editor, and I just stood around with them and said,
I have these books. What do you think? And they're like,
we'll look at them. So, you know, some of you
just have to do the hard coding for yourself, if
you know what I mean.

Speaker 6 (52:38):
Yeah, what are they say? God helps those who help
themselves or some something like that, something like that, If
you're not your biggest fan, who's going to be right? Like,
if you're not going to be out there and beating
the streets for yourself, why would anybody else do it
for you?

Speaker 7 (52:53):
Well?

Speaker 3 (52:53):
You know, I would interview musicians every so often and
I would say to them, so is the music that
you're putting out your favorite songs, And they always had
a complicated answer. Sometimes it was a straight up well no,
not really, but you sort of got the feeling that
maybe they wanted to say that it was, but they
didn't feel they could. But I think that, you know,
you have a complicated relationship to whatever it is you
were creating, and hopefully what you're creating is something you

(53:16):
want to listen to or you want to read. But
of course, by the time you've walked it through all
its paces, and you've been in the studio or you've
been behind the computer, and you've done all the revisions
and you've done all the editing, you have a different
relationship to that story or that song or that music
than everybody who listens to it or reads it will. Right,
So I write the books that I personally want to read.
Whether or not that means they're my all time favorites,

(53:37):
it's hard to say, because they can't surprise me in
the way that a book that I have never read
would surprise me. But I think that if you're doing
it right, you're making the stuff that you would like
to see in the world. Does that make sense?

Speaker 6 (53:48):
It does are you familiar? Like twenty three or so
years ago, there was a song called Heaven and as
by Lost Lonely Boys, like how far is Heaven?

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Right? Right?

Speaker 6 (54:00):
Ammys? That did the whole thing. Well. I was talking
to one of those dudes and they were saying that
they took this album around to like probably ten different
record companies, and like everybody said, no, we're good, but
three or four of them said, yeah, we love this album,
but whatever, this Heaven song is, get rid of this shit,
and then we'll take the album and they're like, no, no,

(54:20):
we're good. We want to release the whole thing. And
that was by far their biggest hit by an order
of magnitude. So I think it's funny when you know
people who supposedly have their finger on the pulse, you know,
like making business decisions. We know what's the right thing,
and then they pull stuff like that this right here,
this song that's going to be your biggest and most

(54:41):
famous song ever. Yeah, we don't want that one. We'll
take all the other stuff. And then the artist is like, no,
I'm gonna stick with what I want.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
And more power to them, by the way, to stick
in with their gun.

Speaker 6 (54:50):
Yeah, that's pretty rare. I do love it though. Okay,
so we have Tune In Tomorrow, which is out. It
came out I think last year. It's available everywhere, so
last year before.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
Well, so it came out in twenty twenty two. Then
Solaris Nova reissued it with an additional chapter, an epilogue chapter,
and a new cover. Okay, so you're not wrong to
say it came out last year. It also came out
two years before Got You.

Speaker 6 (55:13):
It's available everywhere called Tune in Tomorrow. If you like it,
there's going to be a second book in that series
coming out later this fall, so keep your eyes and
ears peeled. But in the meantime, on April eighth, we
have the book The Only Song Worth Singing, And then
just a couple of months later, yet another book, August nineteenth,

(55:36):
is called Leave No Trace. Oh my goodness, this lady's
got three books coming out this year, and if all
goes well, maybe one or two next year. That is
super exciting stuff. Are you still writing for magazines and
other stuff like that? Are you still doing that thing?

Speaker 3 (55:50):
Yeah, I'm phasing out a little bit of it. I
like doing it, but I'm now at the age where
My husband is retiring later this year and we're going
to do more traveling.

Speaker 6 (55:59):
I love that year at the age that he's retiring.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
I know, you see what I did there, right.

Speaker 6 (56:04):
That's a great turner phrase. I love that.

Speaker 3 (56:10):
So you know, the focus that I had been doing
on freelancing and regular income earning is not as critical
as it had once been, so I'm phasing out a
little bit of that. But I do still write for
the Today Shows website today dot com. I still write
for a variety here and there. I still write for
the Los Angeles Times the Envelope, which is their awards section,

(56:31):
and then there's another site called gold Derby that I
also write for. So here and there, but not quite
as much because I'm really trying to reserve as much
time as possible to put it into my fiction.

Speaker 6 (56:41):
Well that is fantastic. We talked about the books, we
talked about the things. You know, since you're sort of
slacking a little bit on the on the writing for
magazines and whatnot, maybe in all of your time and travels,
you can just call up all of your friends that
you've interviewed before and start a podcast and just interview them.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
There is that what you did.

Speaker 6 (57:01):
Well. I don't call up all my friends, but yes,
it is a fun thing to do on the side
and stuff. It's a blast to get to speak with
people and then share those conversations. You know. Podcasting's taken
over the world, is all I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
I love the idea. It's a skill that I don't
have all the editing skills for.

Speaker 6 (57:17):
Trust me when I tell you that ninety percent of
the podcasts that come out are unedited.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Yeah, and the problem is they sound that way.

Speaker 6 (57:25):
That is true. But even some of the biggest podcasts
out there, they don't edit. I guess you don't need to.
I do, but I guess there's a I think there.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Was one topic we mentioned a little earlier which I
can talk about or not.

Speaker 6 (57:37):
The lyrics.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Yeah, getting the lyrics into the book?

Speaker 6 (57:40):
Yeah? Which book is that?

Speaker 3 (57:41):
So for the only song worth singing? Uh, there's two
sets of lyrics that I wanted to have in the book.
There's actually three originally, but the process of getting all
three of them, I succeeded with two and I just
I chickened out on the third. I actually managed to
contact all three artists, one of which was there's a
band in Boston called and they had a song called

(58:01):
joy Ride that I really wanted to quote, and I
managed to contact the singer who had written the song.

Speaker 6 (58:06):
So when you're quoting this, are you putting all of
the lyrics in or just.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
No, no, no, a select couple of lines basically to
sort of lead off each chapter or at least of
each section.

Speaker 6 (58:15):
You had to get permission. You couldn't just credit them.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
You know, there is something called fair use, and you
can probably get away with a couple of lines in
most cases. I was not really comfortable with that. I
didn't want it to be something to come back and
would bite me.

Speaker 6 (58:31):
Didn't want to seem skeazy.

Speaker 3 (58:33):
Yeah you know. I mean, look, I also very much
support the idea that the artist deserves to get paid.
I'm an author, I deserve to get paid sort of artists,
So that's fine, but they don't make it easy. And
even after I contacted the guy had written the song
from Tribe, he said, yeah, it's fine with me, but
I don't know who owns the publishing. I'm like, So
then I went to the next one. There's a band
called the water Boys. They've done a couple of different songs.

(58:55):
One of the ones that people know the best is
The Whole of the Moon. It's kind of this Celtic
rock sound that came out in the nineties. I really
wanted to use some lines from the Big Music, which
really tied into my themes in the Only Song Worth Singing,
and through somebody else, I managed to get the name
of their agent, big time music agent, Danny Goldberg.

Speaker 6 (59:14):
Oh, Danny, Yeah, and he was terrific.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
He's like, yeah, Mike would be fine with this. I'll
check with them. He gets back, Mike is fine with us.
I'm like, great, But who owns the publishing And like
the fact that Mike said it was fine does not matter.
You have to get the publisher and you have to
go walk through there, filling out the farms process. And
it's not cheap for just the four lines. I mean,
it was a couple hundred dollars. And I had decided

(59:38):
that's something I really wanted to do, and I thought,
you know, do it. And so then there was one
other band called Prefab Sprout and I wanted to use
some lyrics from one of their songs called Nightingales, and
again different publishing house, different process to walk through. I
managed to get through to the agent of the guy
who wrote the song. Patty Macalone got permission, doesn't matter.
You have to go to the publishing house. That's sad.

(01:00:00):
I mean, I wish you know musicians and musicians they're
not always the most organized of people. I get that,
but it's always a shame when you talk to the
agent or you talk to somebody, You're like, whow is
the publishing? Just tell me who to talk to. I'm
ready to give money. It was difficult, It was it
was very time consuming.

Speaker 6 (01:00:15):
Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
But I did get them all, so you know, I'm
happy with that.

Speaker 6 (01:00:20):
That's awesome, very cool.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
Well, I didn't get the Tribe one because I couldn't
figure out who did the publishing, so I just used
some public domain lines from W. B. Yates, who also
fits in the book. So we have Yates, we have
the water Boys, and we have Prefabs Browned.

Speaker 6 (01:00:35):
Gotcha. That's imminently frustrating. I can't even imagine how much
of a head banging on a table that must have
felt like, particularly when you think you're doing the right thing,
you're going down the right path, and you get all
the yeses and then they're like me. But I don't
have no idea who who actually can give you permission?

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
But yeah, talk to my mommy. Who's my mommy?

Speaker 6 (01:00:55):
Exactly? You gotta talk to my mom and she's at
home right now, and I don't know where she is exactly,
doesn't have a phone, right Randy, don tell everybody where
they can find you on the internets.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
So on the internets, my web page is Brandy Dawn
dot com and Randy is filled as two ease, So
it's our a n d ee Dawn Dawn dot com.
That will lead you pretty much anywhere else on my books,
my articles, my mailing list, my social media. But if
you look on Instagram, if you look on blue Sky,
if you look on Facebook and you look for Randy

(01:01:27):
Dawn or just Randy with two ease, that's almost certainly
going to be me. I've been very consistent about trying
to claim all the domains that are either Randy or
Randy down.

Speaker 6 (01:01:37):
Well, that's cool. Do you have some that are just
Randy with two ease?

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
I do? I mean, you know, I years ago when
Facebook announced that they were going to create URLs that
us words, and it wasn't just a series of numbers
or something. I learned when that was going to happen.
On the day it happened, I made sure I was
online and I claimed Facebook dot com slash.

Speaker 6 (01:01:58):
Randy Wow, that's pretty sick.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
I loved sick, relatively speaking his nerds sick anyway. But
I did miss out on getting the domain Randy dot com.
It's Randy Down. And that's fine because sometimes when you're
too generalists. I imagine the guy who has John dot
com or something.

Speaker 6 (01:02:16):
I'm pretty sure we know him, right, he's got to
be famous.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
Well, even if he's not, like all this misdirested stuff
probably comes his way.

Speaker 6 (01:02:25):
I can't even imagine. I'm going to send him an
email as soon as we're done here, just to say hi,
Say hi, right once again, everybody, Tune in Tomorrow is
out now. The second book in the series is going
to come out later this fall. In the meantime, the
Only Song Where Singing comes out April eighth, and Leave
No Trace comes out August nineteenth. Look for that everywhere.

(01:02:48):
Follow Randy Down on everything, and go to Randy down
dot com for all of the information that, for some
reason we might not have covered. I don't even know
if that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
I don't think we missed anything.

Speaker 6 (01:03:01):
Randy. Thank you so much for taking the time out
of your busy day and you're hectic writing three books
a year, schedule to hang out and let us get
to know you a little bit better on Fascination Street.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
Oh it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Steve.
I am completely fascinated.

Speaker 6 (01:03:15):
Oh look at you. Thank you, Randy. You have a
great rest of your day.

Speaker 8 (01:03:21):
Okay, you too, take care, Bye bye bye bye.

Speaker 6 (01:03:31):
Opening music is the song fsp theme, written, performed and
provided by Ambush Vin. Closing music is from the song
say My Name off the twenty twenty one album Underdog Anthems.
Used with permission from Jack's Hollow. If you like the show,

(01:03:54):
tell a friend, subscribe and rate and review the show
on iTunes and wherever else you download podcasts. Don't forget
to subscribe to my YouTube channel. All the episodes are
available there as well. Check me out on vio at
Fascination Street Pod and TikTok at Fascination Street Pod. And again,

(01:04:15):
thanks for listening.

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Randee Dawn - Author (The Only Song Worth Singing / Tune In Tomorrow)

Episode Transcript

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Randee Dawn - Author (The Only Song Worth Singing / Tune In Tomorrow)