Ira Glass lets you peek behind the curtain at the making of his weekly radio showBy Chris Nixon
February 10, 2005
San Diego Union-Tribune
A woman who falls in love with a pet macaw despite its destructive and harmful tendencies, an American man who travels to Iraq as a private contractor to work for a living and a young woman who serves on the USS Stennis stocking candy vending machines for 12 hours a day – all these stories tell us so much about ourselves in an engaging fashion.
But you'll never hear these stories on the 6 o'clock news.
National Public Radio host Ira Glass and his show, "This American Life," grasp the concept of telling stories to tell the news, embracing the retro throwback style of radio's golden age. Modern news sources supply information in brief, small chunks. Glass and his contributors take their time telling a story. Modern news sources use a professional, almost nasal, tone. Glass likes his shows to sound like good conversations.
"When we first began, our motto really was nobody famous, nothing in the news, nothing you'd ever heard of anywhere else," says Glass from NPR's Chicago affiliate, WBEZ, where he produces "This American Life." "Really, it was about applying the tools of journalism to everyday things and everyday situations and everyday people who would never be considered by journalism."
For the past nine years, spanning 280 shows, Glass uses his hour of public radio time to recount stories with a disarming human quality, allowing the subject to run through the gamut of emotions during the narrative.
"This American Life," which is braodcast on San Diego's KPBS/FM, 89.5, at 2 p.m. on Sundays, narrates stories about regular people doing extraordinary things. At times, the show describes ordinary people doing ordinary things, but telling the story in an extraordinary way.
This depth of emotion leaves the listener with a more complete and complex understanding of the story's subject, and what it's like to walk in their shoes. On the radio show's Web site (thislife.org), Glass and his staff simply describe the show like this: "It's basically just like 'Car Talk.' Except just one guy hosting. And no cars."
When disembodied voices were first heard through the airwaves in the early 20th century, the public remained clueless of the mysterious new invention called radio and the logistics behind producing it. In many ways, 100 years has not improved our understanding of radio and how it is made.
Glass seeks to clarify. He's taking San Diego and other stops on a behind-the-scenes look at the making of his weekly radio show during his current lecture tour, which stops at UCSD's Price Center Ballroom this Saturday.
"I talk about what we do on the show that's different from other radio shows," says Glass. "We consciously – myself and the people I work with – set to do things different from the things that other people are doing on the radio. And so I talk about why and how we make the show. The kinds of stories we do – where they are like little narratives, little movies – other people on the radio really aren't doing that. And then a lot of it, I'm sitting in a console with quotes and music, and I can recreate the sound of the radio show in its entirety."
Glass' style harkens back to the old-school storytelling on radio. And so does his promotional methods: "It's basically the form of publicity used in the 1920s in my medium. Hopefully, people who like the show drag along their friends."
When asked if people are shocked at his lecture after putting a person to the voice, Glass says: "The poet-laureate Billy Collins said once, 'There is no experience that is as reliably disappointing as meeting the author.' I definitely think there is a little bit of that when you meet somebody from the radio. Think about the first time you saw Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. On the radio, everyone is a little bit bigger than life. And when you see people, they are a little bit smaller than life."
Either way, it's American life.
Chris Nixon is a San Diego freelance writer.
