Now I can name a dozen shows and podcasts that do, both new and old. But in 2004 nobody was doing it in this way. That marriage of conversations/script, of documentary/fiction, might not seem especially cutting edge right now – and of course heightened reality is something radio producers have been playing with forever. A world shaped by the love of the medium of radio, and that constantly pushed its own format in ambitious directions. But as I listened, I didn’t really know which ones they were – it was all so gently mixed together, so masterfully punctuated by music, so deftly stitched up, that all the odd parts created a loose but recognizable world. I knew, because of the credits at the end of the show, that at least some of the people Jonathan talked to were themselves. The ambiguity of the conversations – real, but obviously just a notch or two heightened from normal, were initially befuddling. Jonathan would be in the studio – people would call on the telephone, he would tell a story, or read a journal. My favorite people would get quiet, and in time, crack a smile.Įventually, things started making more sense. We would sit in the car, and when the show came on, the familiar expression I wore would creep over their faces too. It was the same with my radio-listening friends and family. Though I grew up on a steady diet of CBC radio 1 (in the kitchen, all day long), I’d decidedly never heard anything like it. The first season of Wiretap produced an odd sensation for me, a sort of mixture of bemusement, and amusement. Recording life, out there with a mic and goofy head phones, is like trying to love life back a little by noticing it, by slowing it down, by performing the absurd act of presenting your favorite parts of it to the world, to simply share it with people the way you would a meal you have chewed up like an Eskimo mother for her papoose.” “At one point Kerouac said, quoting a Frank Sinatra song, “unrequited love’s a bore.” Unfamiliar with Sinatra at the time, I heard the words as “unrecorded life’s a bore.” I think my confusion was prescient.

Jonathan goldstein wiretap podcast