Episode 528
with Sam Sanders, Erika L. Sanchez, and John Craigie
Host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello chat about those pop culture moments we can't seem to let go of; writer Erika L. Sanchez unpacks her memoir-in-essays, Crying in the Bathroom, and how Lisa Simpson taught her about feminism; podcaster Sam Sanders (Into It, Vibe Check) argues that pop culture gives us the script for how to be in the world; and singer-songwriter John Craigie admits to being terrible at small talk, before performing "Drown Me" from his latest album Mermaid Salt.
Sam Sanders
Podcaster
Sam Sanders is a podcast host, radio personality, and pop culture connoisseur. He was the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Sanders joined NPR in 2009 as a Kroc Fellow, and in his 12 years there assumed a number of roles. Prior to hosting It’s Been a Minute, Sanders was a key member of NPR’s election unit, where he covered the intersection of culture, pop culture, and politics in the 2016 election, and embedded with the Bernie Sanders campaign for several months. He was one of the original co-hosts of NPR’s Politics Podcast, and held roles at NPR member stations. Sanders was honored with this year’s iHeart Award for Best Overall Host (male) and the Los Angeles Press Club National A&E Journalism award for best anchor/host radio. Today, Sam hosts the weekly pop culture podcast Into It from Vulture and New York Magazine. He is also the co-host of Vibe Check with Saeed Jones and Zack Stafford.
Erika L. Sanchez
Writer
Erika L. Sánchez is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Sánchez was a 2017–2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair at DePaul University in Chicago. Her new memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, a collection of essays, is available now. Website • Twitter
John Craigie
Singer-Songwriter
John Craigie has been called “the lovechild of John Prine and Mitch Hedberg” (The Stranger), and it’s true that he is as much a storyteller and a humorist as he is a singer-songwriter. Known for his easy Americana style and his clever, life-affirming wit, Craigie carries on the legacy of such clear-eyed troubadours as Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. A Portlander when he isn’t on the road, Craigie has toured with Jack Johnson and received fan mail from Chuck Norris. His most recent studio album, Mermaid Salt, is available now. Website • Listen
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Luke Burbank: Hello, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Hello, Luke.
Luke Burbank: Very formal start to the show this week. Are you ready, my colleague to play a round of station location identification examination?
Elena Passarello: How can I but not answer in the affirmative?
Luke Burbank: This is where I'm going to quiz Elena about a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio. And you get to try to guess where I am talking about. Alright. Here is clue number one. This city has celebrated Eeyore's birthday every year since 1963, throwing a festival in honor of the beloved character from the Winnie the Pooh books.
Elena Passarello: I feel like I lived in this place.
Luke Burbank: You have a memory of attending this festival.
Elena Passarello: Or hearing on the radio about it. So that narrows it down to about six places.
Luke Burbank: Let me give you a couple of other hints which I think will narrow it down. Several movies have been filmed here, including Office Space, Miss Congeniality, Spy Kids and one of the Kill Bill movies.
Elena Passarello: Well, I did not know that Miss Congeniality was filmed in Austin, Texas.
Luke Burbank: Exactly right. Austin, Texas, where we are on the radio on KUT.
Elena Passarello: Oh, yeah. KUT of the great American radio stations, Jonny Aielli forever.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely. Shout out to everyone listening all over the country, including down there in Austin, Texas. All right. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: Take it away
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire this week podcaster Sam Sanders
Sam Sanders: I love to sit in that space of bad TV a lot, and when it's really bad, I want to read everything about it.
Elena Passarello: Writer Erika L Sanchez.
Erika L. Sanchez: I feel like so much of my writing comes from that place of being misunderstood and having a lot of cultural conflicts within my family because I was born weird.
Elena Passarello: With music from John Craigie. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire. Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone tuning in to Live Wire this week. We've got a great show in store for you. We asked Live Wire listeners a question because we're going to be talking to Sam Sanders, who hosts a really great podcast about pop culture. We asked listeners, what's a pop culture moment that lives in your head rent free? And we're going to hear the answer to that question coming up in just a few minutes. First, though, we've got to kick things off like we always do with the best news we heard all week.
Luke Burbank: This right here is our little reminder that there is, in fact, some good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what's the best news that you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Insect news.
Luke Burbank: Okay.
Elena Passarello: That's like my fifth favorite kind of news. You know, like we're always on the lookout for ways to bring pollinators back into the planet's existence and back into our lives because they're cool. And several European cities have come up with a pretty cool way to do this. I think it started in Utrecht, but has sort of trickled into the UK cities like Oxford, Glasgow and Scotland. Even Derby up in Ireland have all started planting pollinator gardens on the roofs of bus shelters. So, you know, like you wait for a bus, it's like a pretty simple structure. It usually has like that kind of flat roof top. They plant native plant species that butterflies and bees like. And because it's the U.K., the native species have great names like kidney vetch and self-heal and wild marjoram.
Luke Burbank: Oh, my gosh. That's the name of the plants?
Elena Passarello: Yeah, I mean, obviously, maybe in Utrecht, the plants are different. And if we happen to pick up this practice here in North America, which I hope we do, we would have different native plants that we would use. But those are the names of the the most attractive plants to bees, I suppose, over there in Blighty. But it's really, I mean it's a great practice, it's actually kind of good for the environment in more ways than you would assume and that the gardens, the rooftop gardens collect rainwater and they also provide more insulated shade, so they keep the urban heat rise of paved areas even cooler. So I really hope we get stuff started here to make that happen. I think it's a great idea.
Luke Burbank: Anything you can do to create a little bit more organic life within the context of a place that's mostly what is it called impermeable surfaces, anything you can do to green it up is good.
Elena Passarello: In Corvallis, they have little planters on either side of the public trash cans. So maybe we don't have a bunch of bus shelters. I think we maybe have ten total, but maybe I should get on the horn and call my local representative and see if maybe I'll just show up there with a bunch of dirt and see what happens.
Luke Burbank: I like that. A little community activism on your part, you're talking about insects on the show this week and I'm talking about betta fishes because the best news that I saw comes by way of Tampa, Florida, where back in the spring, back in May, a freshman from the University of Tampa, a young person named Kira Rumfola was flying back home to Long Island from Tampa because she's been going to college down in Tampa and she shows up at the airport and she's all excited to go home for the summer and see her family and all of that. But she's also got her betta fish Theo in tow. Well, she was trying to get on the plane. She's in the airport and she gets to the Southwest Airlines counter. And one of the folks who works for Southwest Airlines notices that she has this fish, Theo, described as deep blue and purple. Very vivid, very colorful. This agent's name was Ismael Lazo. And Ismael said, I have some bad news. You cannot bring a fish on a Southwest Airlines flight. Like, apparently you're allowed to bring a small dog and a cat, but you cannot bring fish. That's it.
Elena Passarello: Peacock ruined things for everyone.
Luke Burbank: Service fish is yet to be a category, I believe, at least for Southwest Airlines. And so poor Kira was sort of apoplectic because all of her friends had already gone home from college. And she's at the airport, she's ready to go, but she's, like, really bonded with this fish, Theo. Theo likes to sit in his bowl on the kitchen countertop. And when she does the dishes, she says he swims around the bowl really fast. It's like entertainment for him to watch her do the dishes. And she's like, really has a strong emotional connection to this little betta of fish. So Ismael, being just a problem solver by nature, apparently says, okay, look, here's what I could do for you. I could just take care of the fish for the next four months. Me and my fiancee, we've got room. We'll just, like, watch your fish. And then when you come back from Long Island to Tampa, you can pick the fish up.
Elena Passarello: Oh, my gosh.
Luke Burbank: And so that's exactly what happened. They exchanged numbers. He takes Theo back to his place with his fiancee. As soon as Kira lands in Long Island, she's texting. How is Theo doing? And they're like, He's doing great. Although we're on our way to the store to get him a slightly bigger bowl. Just wanted to make sure he had plenty of room. And they also really started to become connected to this little betta fish. He also would like to watch them do the dishes and make their dinners and stuff, and so they just had a great summer watching Theo. And then recently Kira returned to Tampa for her second year of university and went over to their house and picked Theo up.
Elena Passarello: I was afraid that this was going to end up in some kind of betta fish custody fight.
Luke Burbank: No. When they interviewed Ismaell about this, he said exactly what I was thinking, which was he was like, it was fun to have the fish at our house. But I was very relieved when she came and got it because I was worried something was going to happen to the fish on our watch. You know, these things don't live forever now. And like, you know, if somebody fish, you know, expires due to natural causes on your watch, you feel kind of bad. So Theo is now back with Kira with her and her roommates, and is back to just living the life. And everybody seems to be doing just fine. So that right there, a little fish babysitting is the best news that I saw all week.
Luke Burbank: All right. Let's welcome our first guest on over to the show, Erika L. Sanchez burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which was published back in 2017. It was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Award finalist that's now being made into a film, by the way, directed by America Ferrera. More recently, Erika is out with a critically acclaimed memoir in essays titled Crying in the Bathroom about her life growing up near Chicago as the child of Mexican immigrants and her journey to create a stable, fulfilling adult life for herself while also dealing with mental health issues. Erika L Sanchez, welcome to Live Wire.
Erika L. Sanchez: Thank you so much.
Luke Burbank: This is such a fascinating book because every time I thought it was one kind of book, it sort of shifts into another mode or brings in some some kind of an element that I'm not expecting. I want to start, though, kind of in your younger childhood, you grew up in Cicero, Illinois, kind of outside of Chicago, and your parents worked in factories there. I'm wondering, do you feel like you sort of made sense to them, the kind of kid that you were in the world?
Erika L. Sanchez: No, absolutely not. I feel like so much of my writing comes from that place of being misunderstood and, you know, having a lot of cultural conflicts within my family because I was born weird.
Luke Burbank: What do you think the expectations were for you? You wrote a very successful novel, I'm not your perfect Mexican daughter. What do you think being the perfect Mexican daughter would have looked like in your family?
Erika L. Sanchez: Well, for me, it meant being a girl who'd like to stay at home, who didn't like to go out and explore. A girl who lived with her parents until marriage. Someone who cooked and cleaned in the traditional ways. Who was very family oriented. Submissive, I would say. Docile, perhaps.
Luke Burbank: So not Lisa Simpson, but more depressed, which is how you describe yourself.
Erika L. Sanchez: Right, exactly.
Luke Burbank: It's funny. I feel like I talked to more people who found the TV show The Simpsons to be some kind of lifeline, like I'm 46 if they're my age and they grew up watching it in like the nineties. How big of a deal was The Simpsons in your life?
Erika L. Sanchez: It was a huge deal. It was sometimes the only times that I would laugh and feel joy because I just carried a lot. I was very, very depressed. And so when I watched The Simpsons, I just forgot about everything and reveled in the absurdity of it all. And I loved that Lisa Simpson was so outspoken and so feminist, and she was my actual introduction to feminism.
Luke Burbank: Speaking of of cultural influences, I was wondering what your experience was consuming media as a brown child in America.
Erika L. Sanchez: I feel like the world doesn't really see us. We don't exist. We're not really portrayed in any sort of media. We're not in a lot of books. It felt very lonely to, you know, be brown and to belong to this culture. My parents culture and my culture, too, but also try to belong to American culture, was just this really confusing state. And I, I think that was part of the reason that I started to write is because I needed to find a place for myself because I felt like I had no place. And so that's what, you know, began my writing career, I suppose. Just that feeling of alienation and feeling like I don't matter.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Erica L Sanchez here on Live Wire about her latest book, Crying in the Bathroom. We have to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere because we will be back in just a moment.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We're talking to Erika L. Sanchez about her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom. This book goes into really great detail about a time in your life when you were dealing with what you thought was a yeast infection for like multiple years and then also some real personal issues involving your anatomy. Was that challenging to write about or to put in a book that thousands and thousands of people are going to see?
Erika L. Sanchez: I mean, there have been times that I have felt a little strange about it, but then I think first, vaginas are not dirty. They're not gross. I want to really own that. And I want to write also for other women who have experienced similar traumas in their bodies in that way. And so, you know, I write to heal myself, but also hopefully to heal others along the way. Yeah, it was, I guess, risky, but I've always been writing about my vagina since I was like 14 years old, so it's nothing new. Yeah, I've been very feminist for a very long time.
Luke Burbank: One of the things, too, that's really great about this book is that almost reads in part like a travelog because like, you love traveling so much and you just do this really amazing job of describing really vividly just the feeling of being on a street somewhere in Spain or Portugal or wherever it is you might be traveling. You also write about something that I thought I was the only person who particularly loved, which is taking a walk at twilight and smelling what everybody's cooking.
Erika L. Sanchez: Yeah, it's an amazing experience. I highly recommend. And then you go home hungry and you just eat a nice dinner. It's a beautiful thing.
Luke Burbank: I will take a walk to try to figure out what I want to have for dinner because I will smell what everybody else is doing and it'll start to give you some like thought.
Erika L. Sanchez: Oh, that's an interesting idea. I've never done that.
Luke Burbank: Where do you think you got your wanderlust from? And also, do you feel was it a bit of a coping mechanism based on the depression that you were dealing with?
Erika L. Sanchez: Yeah, I think it was definitely partly the fact that I felt really anxious a lot of the time. I felt depressed. I wanted to be elsewhere, you know, just to escape myself, but I never could. And so that was the funny part. And also, I really loved to see the world. I loved to see new things and meet new people and be influenced. And I just had this very expansive sort of spirit that, you know, didn't really make a lot of sense because I was poor. And so how were you going to travel when you're poor? It's just very difficult. And so I had to figure out ways to do that.
Luke Burbank: Eventually it's revealed or you're diagnosed with bipolar two, something that you had thought and everyone else had thought had been depression. Have you found effective ways to try to manage that? I mean, you write in this book about being hospitalized and having a really, really difficult time getting through your day. Are you in a better place now or is this just something that you'll need to manage?
Erika L. Sanchez: Well, I think that the procedure the ECT was really life saving for me because it allowed me to feel like myself again and I feel like I...I was really frightened during that time to not be who I was again. And so that jumpstarted...I don't know how it works. The science of it is a mystery to me.
Luke Burbank: Can we also just mention for folks that might not know that's electroconvulsive therapy. Something that I think is called shock treatment pejoratively, like in the past. But so you actually had that procedure. What is that? What does that feel like and what did it do for your brain as far as you can tell?
Erika L. Sanchez: It made me able to function. It wasn't painful. It wasn't coercive. Like it gets a bad rap because of its history. Right. But I mean, all of this was completely consensual. I wanted this procedure and I felt like it was the only way to get out of this hole that I was in. And so it sort of reignited something in my brain. It's hard to really explain how that came to be, but I felt different. I felt like I could experience joy. I could, you know, talk to friends. I could eat food, you know, like even the simplest things were very, very difficult when I was depressed. And that shifted.
Luke Burbank: One of the things about this book is every time it goes into a really serious subject matter and you start to think, okay, well, now we're now we're being serious, you'll just have a line like you write about traveling solo through Europe, just trying to find some peen... That like makes me laugh out loud. Was that intentional of like how you wanted the rhythm of the book to be in terms of the lightness with also the more serious parts of it?
Erika L. Sanchez: It wasn't intentional in that I, I really thought deeply about it because that's just who I am. I can't go too long without cracking a joke. And I don't want the reader to go too long without feeling some light, you know? Like, it's absurd to be alive. It's absurd to be human. And let's laugh about it. You know, I had fun writing those lines. I had fun making myself laugh. And so it's great to hear.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Erika L. Sanchez about her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom. This book ends with like a really beautiful letter kind of to your daughter. I'm just wondering what it's like for you to be generating books and things, poetry out into the world, the kind of stuff that maybe you would have really wanted to have seen when you were a young brown girl growing up in America, like to get to be creating the stuff that you wish you would have had. What's that feel like for you?
Erika L. Sanchez: I feel like a great amount of responsibility in a sense, where I know a lot of people, a lot of young women in particular look up to me. They they love my work. They tell me so, you know, and it's it's beautiful. I'm so grateful. So I just try to be very conscious of that and and to be grateful for it and also to understand, like, what that actually means, that my words are very important to them. And so it's a little daunting at times, like now what do I write? You know.
Luke Burbank: How about an episode of The Simpsons? They take guest writers.
Erika L. Sanchez: I wish I could be on The Simpsons. That would be my dream come true.
Luke Burbank: Well, this is a really incredible book. It's Crying in the Bathroom by Erika L. Sanchez. It's a memoir. Erika, thanks so much for coming on Live Wire.
Erika L. Sanchez: Thank you so much.
Luke Burbank: That was Erika L Sanchez right here on Live Wire. Her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, is available now.
Luke Burbank: Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstops from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco. And as a member of the OneWorld Alliance, Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire as we do each week, we asked our listeners a question because we're going to be talking to the great Sam Sanders about pop culture. We asked our listeners, what is a pop culture moment that lives in your head rent free? And Elena has been collecting up those responses. What do you see?
Elena Passarello: How about this one from Ali? Ali can't stop thinking about J.Lo's green dress on the red carpet. We can never seem to get away from that dress. And that is true, because I don't know when she wore that, it was like 20 years ago. But then one of the two guys who makes South Park ended up wearing it a couple of years later.
Luke Burbank: Wait, was that the year that those guys took some very, very powerful hallucinogens and then showed up at the Oscars? I believe there's a whole subplot.
Elena Passarello: Well, that wasn't the only place where that dress ended up, right? Like, because I think last year --it's Versace is the dress -- J.Lo, who's now in her fifties and making all women in their forties mad. She wore the exact same dress in a fashion show. And then my favorite television show of all time, RuPaul's Drag Race, on its most recent season. Somehow, one of the queens, Kerri Colby, got a hold of that dress and wore on the runway. It's like a burp. It just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.
Luke Burbank: That is incredible. Had no idea how large that loomed in the pop culture, but you were like the perfect person to be selecting these responses because sounds like that dress is also a big deal for you.
Elena Passarello: Well, me and Ali must be tuned into the same channels.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. What's some other moment of pop culture that's just been kind of living in someone's head?
Elena Passarello: Katy brought up that time in 2020 when Gal Gadot and other celebrities sang Imagine.
Luke Burbank: I mean, I totally understand the spirit with which that was intended, which was to put something together that was comforting to people in some way. But I don't know if I can remember something that had more the opposite effect of what they were going for. This was, of course, right at the beginning of the pandemic. We were all very terrified and stuck at home and just trying to live day to day. And then you had all of these mega famous, mega beautiful celebrities singing into their iPhones and it did not have the intended effect. Okay. What's one more bit of pop culture that's been living in someone's head rent free?
Elena Passarello: Okay. Drew has got my number on this one. Drew says Beyoncé going solo, slash Beyoncé doing lemonade, slash Beyoncé doing anything. And that is totally true. Remember when she made that music video in the Lourve?
Luke Burbank: Yes.
Elena Passarello: Like what? Remember the Homecoming Coachella headlining special? I remember the new thing, Break My Soul, where she talks about quiet quitting and now everybody's doing it.
Luke Burbank: It sounds like this could be summed up as Beyoncé dot, dot, dot. Anything that Beyonce does.
Elena Passarello: Beyonce of being alive.
Luke Burbank: Beyonce taking in air on planet Earth lives rent free in everyone's head, the Drew's and Elena's. All right. Well, speaking of Beyoncé, that's actually one of the subjects of Sam Sanders' great podcast. Into It from New York Magazine and Vulture. You may also know Sam from his time hosting NPR's show It's Been a Minute, which you did for five years. These days, he not only hosts Into It, but also Vibe Check, a show that he co-hosts with Saeed Jones and Zach Stafford, where they talk about what's going on in the news and pop culture. We have been fans of Sam's for years and are so excited to welcome him to Live Wire. Sam Sanders, welcome to the show.
Sam Sanders: It is so good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: I got to tell you Into It, your podcast from New York Magazine and Vulture is one of my very favorite podcasts right now.
Sam Sanders: Oh my goodness.
Luke Burbank: It's an absolute delight to listen to. And I will admit that as a 46 year old whose only connection to pop culture is things that burble up on TikTok, I don't even know all the things that are being referenced, but it's a delight to listen to you and your guests talk about it.
Sam Sanders: I appreciate it. Thank you so much. It has been a joy putting this show together. It's been out in the world, gosh, maybe almost two months now. But I cannot take credit for all of the knowledge of Internet culture. I am a seasoned 38 years old at this point, which means a lot of days I consume a lot of my tiktoks through Instagram, but there is a whole team of folks of Vulture who help me out. And I want to specifically shout out our operations manager, Gabi Grossman. She knows the Internet backwards and forwards, and she is our resident Kardashian expert. We have a chat on the show this week all about the metaphysics and meaning and philosophy of Kim Kardashian and like that's more Gabi than me. So it's a team effort and I'm in the same boat as you. I feel my generation as millennials slowly aging out, and I will not go quietly into the night.
Luke Burbank: Well, I mean, for folks that haven't had a chance to hear it yet, it's this really great deep dove on pop culture, which of course also involves what the larger cultural implications are. You did a really great episode about the kind of business savvy of Beyoncé, not just the music side, but the actual businessperson head that she has. But you must find yourself in a position where some of the younger staffers are bringing you information and things from the Internet where you have to try to get outside of your brain that's a little older and a little more Abe Simpson, old man, yells at cloud like, how do you tell yourself that they know what they're talking about if it doesn't necessarily resonate for you?
Sam Sanders: Yeah. I mean, I'm always like, send me the receipts. I need to see this TikTok person. Are they a big deal? Can they do interviews? Can they talk on the internet? Can they talk on a microphone? Are the videos of them actually having a conversation? But I usually trust them. But yeah, it's a process. It's a journey. It is funny, though, to think that like both of you and I can probably agree, working in public radio for a long time helps you get really good at taking things that you might not know about and then making them digestible for the masses.
Luke Burbank: I'm curious about your childhood. You grew up in Texas. Were you really pop culture obsessed even as a kid?
Sam Sanders: Secretly, you know, it's quite ironic that I am now hosting this show for Vulture, probably Pop Culture Central online, because growing up I was raised severe Pentecostal and we really weren't allowed to access what was called the secular world.
Luke Burbank: I'm with you, man.
Sam Sanders: Oh, really? Were you also a Christian kid?
Luke Burbank: Oh, yeah, evangelical. And pretty much everything was considered worldly. I had a Christian rap music tape that my dad thought the beat was defiant, even though the lyrics were about Jesus. I mean, so I very much feel you on that kind of childhood.
Sam Sanders: Oh, yeah. To give you a sense of how severe it was. And I love my church and I love my family and all that. But like at one point in our youth, some of the kids in the church wanted to like put together a song to sing on Sunday. And we were like doing a demo run in front of some of the older folks in the church. And we got to talking to because we snapped our fingers. Christians don't snap. It was like, you better not snap on this pulpit on Sunday morning. How dare you?
Luke Burbank: So you had to be really undercover with the worldly pop culture that you were consuming.
Sam Sanders: Oh, yeah, it was so undercover. So my mother was the church organist at our Pentecostal church. So we were there whenever the doors of the church were open, and, as a rule, weren't allowed to really consume any music that was not Christian or gospel. And we really couldn't watch too much TV because it was too, too risque and we couldn't like go to the movies or go to school dances. But what I would do because I was a music head and I would like sneak as a kid and like watch MTV and VH1 Behind the Music. My way to get music to listen to was when my mother would take my brother and I to the mall. My dad never went. He stayed home. He was napping. My mother would go shop at like Lane Bryant or August Max Woman, and I would sneak over to Sam Goody or like, Hastings. And I would buy CDs and I would put them in the back of my underwear and I would bring them home. And the little Walkman that my parents assumed I only listened to gospel music on. I would take it into the bathroom and for hours listened to like the pop music and R&B of my youth. And I'm sure my mother and father thought I was either severely constipated or like nonstop masturbating, but that's how I got my music education. So to now have a show where I get to get paid to talk about popular culture, how ironic. I think the Lord loves that.
Luke Burbank: How did you get into radio?
Sam Sanders: Oh gosh, I remember exactly what it was. And it's funny. It was also kind of tied to church. You probably know this artist if you're an evangelical or former evangelical. We grew up listening to the music of Carlton Pearson. He was a prominent evangelical minister, an alum of the crazy conservative Christian University, Oral Roberts University. Yeah. And his church was called as Azusa street something. They had a run of pretty good gospel albums that my mother loved. And I loved them, too. And I remember just in my youth hearing him and his music and his choir, his church. Growing up, if my mother was driving, we only listened to gospel music. If my father was driving, it was only news radio. But when I began to drive my parents around, I got to choose the station. And I'll never forget driving my mother to church. One Wednesday night, we settled upon an episode of This American Life that was airing at the time, all about the story of this evangelical minister, Carlton Pearson, leaving the church because he stopped believing in hell and thought that it wasn't a sin to be gay. And my mind was blown. I didn't think that like what I thought was news radio and what I saw as this world of gospel could happen together. And it happened together beautifully, you know, with Ira Glass as a narrator. And I was hooked ever since then. And I would just only listen to NPR when I was driving and I got my mother hooked on it too.Well, not hooked. She endured it. But that was it. It was an episode of This American Life, which I heard when I was probably like, gosh, between 18 and 20.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Sam Sanders. He is the host of Into It from Vulture and New York Magazine and also one of the co-hosts of Vibe Check, which he hosts with Saeed Jones, friend of Live Wire and Delightful Human Being, and also Zach Stafford. Did you know you were gay at the time when you were listening to that This American Life piece as a teen?
Sam Sanders: Oh, my God. I knew I was gay. Yeah, I knew I was gay. I remember my first crush was on this other kid in, like, third grade. I know I was gay back then. I think I needed or had to perform straightness up until I was, like, not at home and not in Texas and could, like, pay my own way. But, yeah, I knew. I always knew.
Luke Burbank: Well, because I'm just wondering, that must have been an intense experience for you to be in the car listening to someone talk about like leaving the evangelical movement because they did not personally believe being gay was a sin. And you're this closeted kid in Texas and you're sitting in the car next to your mom. I mean, did you think she was on to you?
Sam Sanders: She was always on to me.
Luke Burbank: Really?
Sam Sanders: Yeah, it was. There was this wonderful, not wonderful, but like admirable acceptance from my family and my church, even as I knew I was a very, very gay kid. I was never bullied at church. I was never kicked out of the church. And everyone was kind of like, Oh yeah, we see how this one might work out. I'll never forget before I came out, my mother and I, I don't know how it happened. We watched Brokeback Mountain together, and I knew it was gay. Well, I didn't know it was going to go that gay. And we're watching the movie, and I'm like, She's going to read me the riot act once this film is over, she's going to be like, What the hell did you bring into my house? The movie ends and my Pentecostal church organist mother looks at me, eyes full of tears, and she says, I just don't know why they can't be together. And I was like, What? I just said, Me too, girl. But I knew that at some point when I came out, she'd be okay with it. And she was.
Luke Burbank: Wow, I'm really happy for you about that because it can go so differently for a lot people. I love pop culture, but I also sometimes feel a little insecure about my love of pop culture because, you know, there's a war in Ukraine and there are so many scholarly articles to be read about the world. And I'm just like, you know, really watching 13 different camera angles of if Harry Styles actually did spit on Chris Pine. Like, what is your feeling about the kind of legitimacy of pop culture as something that we study and talk about?
Sam Sanders: Yeah. I mean, even if you don't want to just like love it because it's culture, you can respect it because it's a multibillion dollar industry. You know, the creation of popular culture and the entertainment industry itself employs hundreds of thousands, millions of people across the world. It is their livelihood. It is worth talking about. Right. You know, we cover the economy, it's part of the economy for one. And for two, popular culture and entertainment gives us the script on how we perform ourselves. It tells us how to be. It gives us these templates and archetypes and sometimes stereotypes of how to inhabit our bodies and our lives and our communities. I didn't know how to be gay growing up. Rocky HorrorvPicture Show and Fame and VH1 taught me how to even imagine that world. Right. And so I think especially for people from marginalized backgrounds, it's the creation of possibility models that is actually really important to young people's self-esteem and to their growth as fully realized individuals. And then on top of that, when I think of the current news market, we have more than enough journalists covering breaking news, don't we? Yeah, we do. We don't have enough journalists thinking smartly and creatively about the ways pop culture affects all of our lives and connecting those dots. When I even think about the Movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd and pushes for criminal justice reform, our notions of the police and what the police should mean in everyday life are informed by shows like Cops and Pop Patrol. Those things tell us how to think about law enforcement writ large. You can't have a conversation about changing the role of law enforcement in this country without addressing that messaging and what it means. Right. So it's all connected and that's just one example.
Luke Burbank: I just realized something, Sam. Somebody is in their car right now and they're like, oh, sweet. It's Been a Minute is on. I'm wondering I mean, that show continues and it's still really great. But you you walked away from that very, very successful thing, which is hard to do these days in public radio, which is to create a hit show. Did you just want to be able to say things like Ben Affleck is dead behind the eyes, which I heard you recently say on an older episode of Into It. Like did you just want the freedom of of not being on an NPR show?
Sam Sanders: There are a few things going on. I mean, I think in general, I didn't expect to do one show forever. And I think what had quickly happened once the show became successful, I think, you know, we got on on over 400 public radio stations. You know, you realize the NPR model of success is like if you make a thing that works, you keep it going. They kept Car Talk on the air even after one of them died. And no shade on that. I love Car Talk. But I wanted and I've always wanted a career for myself where I'm trying on new hats every few years. I just do. Right. And so, honestly, doing that show for four plus almost five years was maybe a bit longer than I would have even expected myself to do it. So that was part of it too. I wanted to just have space to do new things. I also think that like one of the more interesting challenges of talking about pop culture and really sometimes recent cultural references is that it's sometimes harder to make it mass market. You know, when you're doing news on the radio, there's a certain baseline of language that everyone is kind of conversant in as news consumers. Newscast makes sense to everybody. Right. But unpacking a meme is harder. And a lot of times it felt like with It's Been a Minute there was a conversation I would have had if it were only a podcast, and there was a conversation I would have had if it were only a radio show. And there was a conversation I would have had if that was both, which was what the show is, you know, and I enjoyed having that kind of conversation. But I really wanted to scratch the itch of seeing what it would be like to talk about popular culture for just a self-selecting audience. It gives you a different kind of freedom.
Luke Burbank: Do you do other things to sort of nourish your soul? Like if you get done just watching a lot of Love Island or something that's very entertaining but maybe can leave you with a bit of a sort of saccharine taste in your mouth, maybe. Do you go meditate or like read Kirkegaard or something? Like, do you refill yourself with stuff that's not Love Island?
Sam Sanders: No. I mean, I love to sit in that space of bad TV a lot. Like, I watch good TV and movies, but I watch a lot of bad stuff. And when it's really bad, I want to read everything about it. I want to read every review. I want to read every recap. I want to discuss it with several group chats or online. I don't need a break from that. I want to, I want to swim in that water.
Luke Burbank: You have a great segment towards the end of of Into It, Culture-geist. Which is a genius name, where people talk about something that is just kind of, you know, they're thinking about in terms pop culture that week, what's haunting them. We ask our Live Wire listeners a question every week, and we asked a question of our listeners that's sort of in that neighborhood. The question is, what is a pop culture moment that lives in your head, as the young people stopped saying months ago, rent free. And I wanted to ask you that question, Sam Sanders what's a piece of pop culture that lives in your head rent free?
Sam Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. I would say my culture-geist this week or the thing I just can't get over this week. The thing that I'm stuck on, whatever we want to call it, it is whatever's happening with Mark Wahlberg's career. Have you noticed he's in way too many Netflix films right now?
Luke Burbank: Here's what I can tell you, Sam. I was on a flight from Tennessee last week, and the guy next to me was watching some kind of heavily Catholic film with Mark Wahlberg.
Sam Sanders: Father Stu! Father Stu!
Luke Burbank: Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson in it. And the guy on the plane next to me was sobbing. And I was ready to move aisles. I was like, what is going on with Mark Wahlberg? What I watched, I was just seeing it without the sound.
Sam Sanders: Yeah, this is what's crazy. So I am on Netflix several times a week, even though it's no longer my favorite streamer. But I've gotten like pushes from Netflix to watch not one but two Mark Wahlberg movies like this week and last week, one with Kevin Hart, the other where he plays a Catholic priest named Father Stu. I think there's been some others. Feels like he's making too many movies. And then on top of that, I keep seeing ads on Twitter to download this Catholic prayer app he's launched where you can like pray the rosary with Mark Wahlberg. And that got me into it. I was like, Why is this man working so hard and stuff that isn't at all boosting his signal? I Googled some more. He also has a used car dealership in Columbus, Ohio. I have so many questions about Mark Wahlberg's career right now. Namely, does he owe somebody a lot of money? What's going on here? That's what I'm obsessed with. I don't think I like any of this stuff, but I want to know what's the rationale behind his weird performance of Mark Wahlberg in this moment. And he also I think he also has that burger chain. Wahlburger. Is that him or his brother, Donnie? This man is working too hard and I have questions about it.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, well, those questions get answered each week on Into It, Sam Sanders' podcast over from Vulture and New York Magazine. And also you can catch him on Vibe Check with Saeed Jones and Zach Stafford. Sam, it breaks my heart to tell all of the people listening that this is actually Live Wire and It's Been a Minute, but we are huge fans of yours and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
Sam Sanders: And it is so fun to be here. I'm a huge fan of yours as well. This was delightful.Thank you.
Luke Burbank: That was Sam Sanders right here on Live Wire. Sam is the host of the podcast Into It, as well as Vibe Check, which he co-hosts with Saeed Jones and Zach Stafford. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We have got to take a very quick break, but don't go anywhere because when we come back, we will hear music from John Craigie. Stay with us.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. Our musical guest this week has been called the lovechild of John Prine and Mitch Hedberg. He's played with Jack Johnson and he's gotten fan mail from Chuck Norris. He describes his style as humorous stories mixed with serious folk and his latest studio album, Mermaid Salt, which I have absolutely been loving since it came out, is available now. Take a listen to this. Our conversation with John Craigie recorded earlier this year in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: What song are we going to hear this time around?
John Craigie: I'll do one off the new record now.
Luke Burbank: Okay. Yeah. What's it called?
John Craigie: This is called Drown Me. One thing I think that I'm getting worse at is the whole human interaction part of my job. If you ever meet me in person, I apologize. I mean, I was always awkward before, but I just. It's gotten more awkward now that I'm back into the world. I was, uh, just doing this, um, festival. It was this cruise called Keyamo in Florida. Yeah. It was weird because it was at sea, and I don't normally perform at sea. I would say roughly 100% of my shows are on dry land. But you're on this boat with all the all the audience members. And they're very sweet, but they're very intense. And so people would come up to me and then they would say, Are you John Craigie? And then I would say, I don't know. It's not a good answer, you're just getting bad at it. I was with a friend recently and we were walking and some stranger came up and said, Hey. Has anyone ever told you that you look like John Craigie? And I said no. And then he said, Do you know who that is? And I said, yes. And he said, Do you think you look like him? And I said, Yeah. And then my friend was like, Dude, this is John Craigie. And the guy was like, Why didn't you just say that in the first place?
[Drown Me Plays]
Luke Burbank: That was John Craigie right here on Live Wire. His latest album, Mermaid Salt, is available now. All right, before we get out of here, a little preview of next week's show, which, by the way, was our first show back in front of a live audience since the pandemic started. So it was a really big deal for us. Tom Scharpling will be on the program. He, of course, has been hosting The Best Show for the last eight years. It's a call in radio show. He was also a writer and the executive producer of the TV show Monk, and he's got a memoir out which chronicles his struggles, his triumphs and his, I would say, surprisingly deep dislike for Billy Joel. We're also going to hear some hilarious comedy from one of our favorite comedians, Mohanad Elshieky. And we're also going to hear some music from the super cool Oregon band MAITA. And as always, we're going to be looking to get your response to our listener question. Elena What are we asking the Live Wire listeners for next week's show?
Elena Passarello: Next week's question is What's a controversial musical opinion that you have?
Luke Burbank: Okay, I can see that. Well, I've got a few. I don't know, we're really trying to not yuck anyone's yum now, on the show, I learned that from you, by the way. It's like my new favorite phrase. But yeah, I got some hot takes. Maybe we'll lay a few of them on the listeners next week, if you would like to respond to that question. A controversial musical opinion that you have, go ahead and hit us up on Twitter or Facebook. We are at Live Wire Radio pretty much everywhere. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Sam Sanders, Erika L. Sanchez and John Craigie. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer, Heather Dee Michelle is our executive director. Our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our assistant editor is Trey Hester. Our marketing manager is Paige Thomas and our production fellow is Tanvi Kumar. A. Walker Spring composes our music. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer and our house sound is by Neil Blake.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the James F and Marian L Miller Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Richard Pelzer of Beaverton, Oregon, and Martin Jones of Austin, Texas. Martin is also a member of our Live Wire Board. Thanks, Martin. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Live Wire Radio Dot Org. I'm Luke Burbank. For Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week.
Elena Passarello: PRX.
