Music

No fooling: today's show deals with some dangerous imposters. It's not all lies and deception, however. We also have some "lost" sounds from the man in black himself. Finally, Chad Harbach talks about his controversial essay about making it as a writer. Grab your headphones and turn up the volume; we've got the stories behind the stories.

Listen to the full show and click Read more for individual segments.

Today on Word of Mouth we're exploring the macro influences of the micro world. Then 99 Percent Invisible brings us a story about a menacing courthouse. (Perhaps a phantom menacing courthouse?) Finally, a conversation with Josh Ritter, whose album The Beast in its Tracks was recently released.

Listen to the whole show and click Read more for individual segments.

Top o' the mornin' to ya, lads and lasses! Ahem. We'll drop the attempt at authentic brogue, but our St. Patrick's Day continues with a playlist that has enough Irish inspiration to make up for it. We reached out on Facebook to find out what tunes you play to celebrate St Patrick's Day. 

Click Read more for our top St. Patrick's Day songs!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, the day when everyone gets to be Irish! Doff your green cap, sip (or chug responsibly) your green drink, and tune into Word of Mouth. Slàinte! 

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Word of Mouth wishes you a happy Daylight Saving Time! (Can you believe it's this Sunday already?) But why exactly does the practice of changing our clocks even exist? We explore the ins and outs of Daylight Saving (without the extra "s") with a guest who wrote the book on it. Then Zach Nugent talks with Marissa Nadler whose most recent album was released in early February. We take an architectural turn with a look at the invention of revolving doors followed by a hot architectural commodity: wood. Finally, producers Logan Shannon and Sam Evans-Brown bring us a story about a wild winter activity. No, not skiing or boarding, but animal tracking.

Listen to the full show and click Read more for individual segments.!

The Boston Globe describes Marissa Nadler's  voice as “an intoxicating soprano drenched in gauzy reverb that hits bell-clear heights, lingers, and tapers off like rings of smoke."

On Sunday, March 9th, Marissa Nadler will be performing at the Portsmouth Book and Bar. Producer Zach Nugent spoke with Marissa and asked why her new album is called July, when her music is often described as dark, sparse, and even frosty.

Today's Word of Mouth is brought to you by: Rejection. All artists have been there, feeling confident about a submission only to find out that someone  "regrets to inform" them that their work has been denied for publication.  Well, Word of Mouth is here to commiserate with rejection letters from literary greats. Then, what do film studios do when forced to substitute an actor? Use fake shemps, of course. Taking a musical turn, we revisit the Word of Mouth love song and the fantastic listener submissions. (Really, they're awesome!) Finally, the band Lake Street Dive released their fourth LP 'Bad Self Portraits' last week, we'll dig up an interview we did with the band from 2012.

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Today's Word of Mouth broadcast delves into the hows of character creation. Then we speak to the creator of everyone's favorite chat feature. You know, the one that says "So-and-So is typing." (Thankfully he doesn't leave you hanging on those three little dots...) We leave acting and writing for a musical treat with the band Pearl and the Beard. Finally, it's all about the cute with the author of a new book about interspecies relationships.

Listen to the full show, and click Read More for more on each segment.

 Update:

Wow! The submissions keep coming in, and they're AWESOME! Scroll to the bottom of this story to listen to the epic covers of Taylor's terrible, terrible love song.

If you'd like to submit your own version of our love song, upload it to SoundCloud or YouTube and share it with us on our Facebook page!  Or, you can email an MP3 to tquimby@nhpr.org, and we'll make sure to include it in our post. 

Love songs, which by their very nature tend towards the melodramatic and saccharine, are ripe for parody.  We at Word of Mouth thought it would be fun to compose a love song using only chart-topping lyrical clichés – so we asked for your suggestions, and then set to work.

It turned out to be a humbling experience.  Love songs, which may sound to the layman as though they consist entirely of extra-long notes, flamboyant R&B runs, and an excessive use of the word ‘forever’, are MUCH harder to make than one might think.

Valentine's Day may be over, but Word of Mouth is still in the mood. We poured all the love we have to offer into our Saturday show. Listen to the full show and read more about each segment below.

As editor of The New York Time’s “Modern Love” column since 2004, our guest Daniel Jones has read over 50,000 love letters.  Well, not love letters exactly, but letters about love.  Okay, and most of them aren’t actual physical letters, but emails.  Which says a lot about the state of romance in 2014, given how much of it sparks, burns, and is often extinguished from behind a computer screen.  Technology’s impact on modern love features heavily in Jones’ new book “Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject with the Help of 50,000 Strangers”.

The Winter Olympics are in full swing, and among those going for gold at Sochi are eight New Hampshire residents. Today on Word of Mouth, we’ll go back to the days before lifts and lodges to find out why a tiny state with icy mountains has produced so many champs. Also, last night marked the 50th Anniversary of The Beatles’  first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, an event that drew the largest audience for any program in the history of television up to that time, and has remained burned into America’s collective memory. We’ll take a deeper look into the start of Beatle-mania.

Happy February! This Word of Mouth Saturday show has all you need to satisfy your midwinter radio cravings with new ideas about audio, the wacky world of internet horror lore, and more. Enjoy! And beware.

More than a musician, folk legend Pete Seeger influenced generations of Americans through both song and activism, often using one to fuel the message of the other. The power he invested in music helped promote his peaceful messages. Recently, producer Zach Nugent spoke to Nick Panken of the band Spirit Family Reunion. Nick had some timely praise for the folk singer who recently died:

Audio: it can be both poetic and powerful. Its influence is undeniable, but what happens when we need to be concerned with limiting its intake while simultaneously expanding our auditory horizons? Today on Word of Mouth: the ear-plug debate, High Intensity Focused Ultrasound, the band Spirit Family Reunion, and continuing the Rethink 2014 series with a conversation about, you guessed it, radio.  Listen to the whole show below or keep scrolling to listen to individual segments.

In February, 1995, violinist Roman Totenberg performed with the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra. He joined NHPR ahead of the concerts on our Perspectives program and spoke with host Laura Kiernan.

Can't help singing along to your favorite sad songs in the shower, the car, or from the middle of a crowded street?  Looking for something to help you dwell on your latest breakup, or summon your personal demons?  Want to put something on the stereo that will dull your roomate's perversely happy attitude?  Word of Mouth has the playlist for you. 

This is “Rethink 2014”, presenting ways of challenging our habits and assumptions and the status quo. Today: paying for creative content. It’s the axiom of the era: you can find anything on the internet--for free!  The challenge has been figuring out how artists, writers, musicians and content makers get paid for their work. Take the music streaming service Spotify. Sure, users can discover new artists and find a lot of great music, but Spotify is under fire for failing to compensate the artists who make that music. In an opinion piece for the The Guardian last October, David Byrne wrote, “If artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they'll be out of work within a year.” Maybe the big-name musicians have it wrong. We bring you the story of an unknown songwriter who is raking in the Spotify royalty checks, one song at a time. PJ Vogt of On The Media’s new TLDR podcast and blog, has the story.

Our interview with Chris Ballew, also known as Caspar Babypants (also the frontman for the band The Presidents of The United States of America!) made us want to try and write a children's song.  SO WE DID! But we need your help naming it.

The Presidents of The United States of America - the same band responsible for the enigmatic 1995 hit single “Lump”  - is releasing their 6th studio album in February, their first since 2008.  Since then, PUSA’s frontman Chris Ballew has been keeping himself busy making music geared towards an entirely different generation of listeners: the three and four year old set!  Under the alias “Caspar Babypants”, Chris has released 7 albums of children’s music, including a collection of Beatles tunes.  In this interview Chris explains why he started making music for families, how “being a parent is a little like being in a penitentiary in 1887”, and gave us a preview of songs off PUSA’s new record!  

In 2009 the New Hampshire based “junk rock” band Recycled Percussion successfully made it to the final round of NBC’s show “America’s Got Talent”. For their final performance the four piece band pounded away on assorted junk as water rained down on them and strobe lights flashed in rhythm. After coming in third place in the competition out of 100,ooo acts, Recycled Percussion landed a headlining show in Las Vegas where they’re still going strong. This Thursday the band will finish up a string of homecoming shows at The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Our guest is founding member of Recycled Percussion and Legacy X Justin Spencer.

Maybe it’s the repetition, or maybe the obligatory cheeriness, but there’s something about hearing holiday songs that you don’t like that rankles much more deeply than other assaults on the senses.  We asked listeners to share their favorite seasonal tunes on our Facebook page, along with the ones they hate.

The song, “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey was released in 1994, and has become a Christmas standard, consistently topping the billboard holiday charts. Despite the sleigh load of holiday albums released every winter, there hasn’t been an original holiday single with the staying power of Mariah Carey’s hit for nineteen years.

So, has our culture stopped welcoming new holiday songs? Has our Christmas carol quota been met?  Chris Klimek, is here to weigh in, his article for Slate:  “All I Want For Christmas Is A New Christmas Song,” pretty much says it all.