We've 'dropped' our latest episode today, Thursday April 29th.
I put little single-quote thingies around the present participle of the verb 'to drop' to hint, as Elaine from Seinfeld might do, that for some strange reason I am not comfortable with the use of the word in this context. Totally irrational, and what have you, but, whoomp! There It Is. Maybe someday I'll get over this. In the meantime...
We've published our latest episode today, Thursday April 29th.
That feels better.
Our guest, our centerpiece, is singer, songwriter and social entrepreneur Susan McKeown.
I am really excited about it. I think I did a decent job editing her story. Because I want the world to be reminded of Susan, to reinforce for everyone the gifts she offers to her expanding universe, and to introduce her to an even wider audience.
And I am excited too about the production, the engineering, the quality of this episode because I am inclined to care about the tech aspects of the things I enjoy doing. (There'll be more about this in a future blogsled–my cute little word for a blog post.) I am getting better at this side of my podcasting. And the quality of this episode, along with the editing and the cadence, is enhanced immeasurably by Susan's high-end song recordings.
She's a really great episode subject, Susan McKeown, with a life story that I found riveting as I listened to it. I knew some of it already, and we only ever see that piece of the iceberg above the water of anyone's life, but I learned so much more during our CPNY time together. (CPNY is my shorthand for CenterPieceNY.)
Ironically, I first met Susan McKeown in a radio station in the early 90s. Ironic, because this was at a time when to broadcast to the world, you needed access to a studio and expensive resources, but, while technology has advanced in unimaginable ways since then, as it does, people still love radio, and podcasts are little more than radio-on-demand. And now, anyone can do it, e.g. me.
So, again, the first time I ever met Susan, and there's no way she'll remember this, because she was 'the name' guest and I wasn't, was when I had to shove over on a tight bench in a small radio station in mid-town Manhattan, to let her and her guitarist, and I believe his name was John Doyle, squeeze in behind the mic. I was there to talk about activities in the (at the time) largely undocumented Irish in New York. Susan was on to play great music. I think it was the same studio that the great broadcaster Adrian Flannelly was using at the time.
Incidentally, the show we were on together was co-produced/co-presented by a guy called Sean Benson, who, all things being equal, is our CPNY guest for May. Some irony there too, yeah? The name of the show was 'The Next Wave'...
I got to know Susan better when she played the New York Irish Center. At the time, the gear we had there wasn't as good as it is now, and at one point we lost power to the stage. Typically, Susan displayed how cool she was, to my relief, by continuing unplugged with her band on acoustic instruments for several numbers, until the juice to the stage came back.
I also collaborated with her on a Cuala Foundation project in 2018, where she introduced Lorraine Maher's wonderful I Am Irish exhibit to the walls of the New York Irish Center. I even had my two bi-racial kids in the exhibit, and I think those photo-portraits are still part of it as it travels.
I hope you enjoy the episode with Susan.
If you'd like to comment on this blogsled, leave me a message through this website.
-PEF
