The Organist

What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves turn out to be wrong? And what if the attempt to shape our life stories to fit some formulaic narrative arc fundamentally distorts them? Could different narrative forms tell more honest stories? Or do all narratives falsify reality in their own way?

Three artists suggest new ways forward for narrative storytelling and making sense of the world. Maggie Nelson seeks to w...

Buck Gooter is quite possibly the hardest-working band you’ve never heard of. Since forming in 2005, the band has logged 18 albums and 531 live shows. Their latest, Finer Thorns, just came out. But they’ve never had a hit, never been reviewed by Pitchfork.

A punk duo from Harrisonbur...

[Explicit language]

In 2017, David Lynch’s metaphysical detective soap opera Twin Peaks returned to cable television screens 26 years after its network cancellation. Most of the original characters resurfaced, but in several cases, either those characters or the actors playing them—or both—were dying. Over its 18 new episodes, this specter of commingled on- and off-screen mortality became as much ...

On this week’s Organist, two stories about the surprising intimacy of anonymity. In the first, thousands of people sign up for a service, created by artist and programmer Max Hawkins, which wakes up thousands strangers with a phone call in the middle of the night then pairs them up at random and records their conversations. The vulnerability of that moment, and the anonymity of having a sleepy and total stranger on the end of the l...

If you’ve lived in L.A. anytime in the last thirty years, you know Angelyne. She’s the blonde bombshell on the billboards that used to be studded like rhinestones all over the city. Angelyne rose to prominence in the ‘80s, and she was a mashup of elements from the pantheon of Hollywood starlets: platinum hair, an hourglass figure, and a breathy, cooing voice. But Instead of a movie or a TV show or an album, Angelyne’s billboards ju...

This week we bring you dogs, many of them. So many dogs that you can’t possibly scratch the soft fur behind all of their ears or gently caress the scruff of all of their necks or pat all of their bellies when they climb onto your lap and roll over prone for your affection. To investigate the connection between humans and canis familiaris, we talk with acclaimed character actor Bob Balaban, who you’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV...

Recalling the experimental films of David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Reynolds’s comic books, newly anthologized as The New World, confound his readers’ expectations at every turn. In these dream-like narratives, Reynolds twists the trope of a space-helmeted comic-book hero into an uncanny figure. Comic-book plotlines, including kidnappings and interplanetary travel, dissipate as the story shifts to focus instead on ominous si...

Temple Grandin, an animal scientist and autism advocate, describes how she uses sound to make cattle slaughterhouses more humane. Journalist Bella Bathurst describes how she lost her hearing while conducting interviews with the last generation of Scottish lighthouse keepers and then how it felt, twelve years later, to regain it. Along the way, we’ll listen deeply to ABBA and the Beach Boys and hear an excerpt from Alexander Provan’...

This week, we explore how artists navigate disease, how disease can be both a stigma and an identity, and how artists both resist and embrace that identity even as it comes to define their work. We’ll listen to the audio diaries of multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. We’ll also hear from author Sandy Allen, whose uncle Bob, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, mailed them a manuscript of the “true story” o...

This week we explore two beliefs that persist in the absence of proof. In a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Glover made comments linking him to a community known as “Stevie truthers,” conspiracy theorists who believe that Stevie Wonder is faking his own blindness. When Glover asks Wonder for permission to use one of his songs on his TV show Atlanta, he wonders how Stevie will be able to watch the episode—but Wonder’s work...

Wendy Davis’s epic thirteen-hour filibuster made the Texas legislature’s livestream into a viral sensation. But Jen Rice, our producer in Austin, argues that beyond these viral scenes, its season-length, character-driven plot arcs make the Texas legislature—or as die-hard fans call it, “the Lege”—every bit the equal of prestige-television staples like Game of Thrones or Mad Men. In her recap of the 85th Texas legislative session, J...

This week, two stories from the borderlands of the U.S. First, the story of poet Javier Zamora. When he was nine, he crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. to reunite with his family, who had left home before him in order to escape the political violence in El Salvador. Years later, Zamora found a way to process this childhood trauma by writing furious, luminous poetry. In this interview, he describes indelible images from his bo...

After the death of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright in 2015, his wife Beth gave producer Bianca Giaever 546 audio tapes that he made as he was dying. Unable to type because of pain in his wrists, Franz used an audio recorder to dictate his poetry, but it picked up much more: Franz talked with his wife, made phone calls, cursed at his cat, and fantasized about the first human to ever speak.

Franz was known in the poetry worl...

This week we bring you voices from heaven, hell, and everywhere in between. In documentary films, the authoritative “Voice of God” style of narration presents a seemingly omniscient, impartial, deep-voiced male narrator. No one has had more practice with the role than Peter Coyote, best known as the narrator of Ken Burns’ documentaries (The West, The Roosevelts, The National Parks). Here, Coyote gives a master class on the major di...

From KCRW and McSweeney’s, the Organist returns with its fifth season on July 12!

We’ll be drilling down into pop culture to reveal its dark, beautiful, pulsating inner-core to bring you funny, sad, and surprising stories about the complex ideas and feelings behind the artists and thinkers that we adore.

We’ll visit gutter punks and Pulitzer Prize–winners, we’ll talk to a poet who crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. at nine ye...

The Organist is still in off-season hibernation, but we emerge for a moment in order to showcase KCRW’s newest podcast: Lost Notes. In this episode, writer Donnell Alexander examines the racial politics of a strange chapter of early 80s pop-music history. To white America, Boston’s music scene was synonymous with the hard rock of Aerosmith and J. Geils Band. But alongside rock and roll was a vital tradition of talent shows in B...

Between 1967 and 1975, the Firesign Theatre put out nine albums that carved out a new space somewhere between comedy, sound art, literature, and rock and roll. The music critic Robert Christgau called them “a comedy group that uses the recording studio at least as brilliantly as any rock group.”

In this episode, we focus not on how those albums were made, but how they were heard. From teenage house parties to soldiers’ barracks in ...

After King Kreon condemns her brother, a traitor, to rot on the battlefield, Antigone defies him, risking her own life, to give her brother a proper burial. This week, we present poet Anne Carson’s experimental translation of Sophocles’ play, an adaptation that incorporates within it 2,500 years of the play’s reception history, its performances (from Brecht to Vichy France), its interpretations (from Hegel to Judith Butler), and st...