Episode 677
Dylan Marron and Brittany Davis
Writer and podcaster Dylan Marron chats about his book and podcast of the same name, Conversations with People Who Hate Me, and how a phone call can forge a deeper connection than social media; and musician Brittany Davis explains how music became their first language as a blind person, before performing "Loud Loud World" from their EP I Choose to Live. Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello unpack some unexpected topics of conversation.
Dylan Marron
Author and Podcaster
Dylan Marron is an actor, author, podcaster, and activist whom Glennon Doyle dubbed “the internet’s Love Warrior.” He is the host and creator of the critically acclaimed podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me, a social experiment where he connects strangers who clashed online, whether by calling up his own detractors or moderating calls between others. That project has now become a book, Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers. He is also the voice of Carlos on the international sensation Welcome to Night Vale, an alum of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company, and the creator of Every Single Word, a video series that edits down popular films to feature only the words spoken by people of color.
Brittany Davis
Musician and Producer
Brittany Davis is a soulful, genre-breaking musician and producer from Seattle. Born blind, Brittany’s musical journey began when they realized they could play piano by ear. They started recording music at age thirteen while homeless. Now signed to Loosegroove Records, the Seattle label co-founded by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, Brittany is experiencing a meteoric rise. Their debut EP, I Choose to Live, was released to rave reviews, and their Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is highly lauded. Brittany is also a member of supergroup Painted Shield, which features Gossard, folk singer-songwriter Mason Jennings, and drummer Matt Chamberlain.
Show Notes
Dylan Marron
Dylan’s podcast is Conversations with People Who Hate Me.
Dylan’s book of the same name is Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers.
Live Wire Listener Question
What's the most unexpected conversation you've ever had?
Brittany Davis
Brittany’s song, “Loud Loud World,” is on their EP I Choose to Live.
Check out Brittany Davis: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert on YouTube.
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Luke Burbank: This episode of Live Wire was originally recorded in August of 2022. We hope you enjoy it. Now let's get to the show.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire this week, podcaster and writer Dylan Marron.
Dylan Marron: Debate is the only word we have for conversation across differences so we think that the only way we can actually communicate with someone that we disagree with is to fight them.
Elena Passarello: And music from Brittany Davis.
Brittany Davis: Because there is sound, there is life for me and from me. And all of it has its own purpose, and it all has different dimensions.
Elena Passarello: I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now, the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Thank you so much, Elena, thanks to everybody tuning in this week from all over the country. Of course, we asked the listeners a question. What's the most unexpected conversation you've ever had? And we're going to read those responses coming up a little bit later on in the show. First, though, it's time for the best news we heard all week. This, of course, is our little reminder at the top of the show. There is still, just have to trust us on this, some good news happening out there in the world. We find it for you. Elena, what's the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Oh, I love this news from Indianola, Iowa. Population 16,000. You know, if you probably are super aware of this, over the past decade or so, quite a few small town newspapers, maybe the vast majority of them have been bought up by these big media conglomerates and they lose their staff, they lose a lot of their heft and they really lose the local attention that makes small town newspaper is what I consider to be like. One of the most important parts of American life.
Luke Burbank: Yes, absolutely. It's a tragedy in this country because it is extremely hard to be profitable in the print newspaper business. And so you have, yeah, this consolidation and conglomeration that takes so much of the specific local flavor out of these things. It is a real bummer.
Elena Passarello: For sure. But good news is that the opposite thing is happening in Indianola, Iowa, where The Record Herald had been bought out by a huge media company and a couple, a married couple that had both worked there. They had a shared 50 years of experience at The Record Herald, Amy Duncan and Mark Davitt. They first started kind of like a local news website to kind compensate for the fact that their newspaper had closed. They had to like go from house to house and help people understand how to get the news on their iPads. But Gannett, the media juggernaut that owns a lot of these papers now, has recently made offers to certain small town outfits where the small towns can buy the papers back. And since Amy Duncan and Mark Davitt had already spent all this time, A, at the original paper and B, doing this great digital work, they bought the paper and they're gonna give it a shot. So that means people who know this community well are gonna be reporting for this community. There are gonna tons of opportunities for that kind of discourse. And if you're within a 6,000 mile radius of Indianola, Iowa, maybe you wanna subscribe to keep this paper going.
Luke Burbank: That's so awesome. [Elena: Yeah.] Well, going from kind of hyper local news to an actual world record, Elena, the best news that I heard about this week, this actually happened a little while ago, but it just came onto my radar, is the story of a guy named Chad Kempel, who is the father of quintuplets, which, if you're not great at math, like me, I had looked up, that's five, five babies, a quint. And he decided he wanted to run a half marathon. Pushing his five, he actually has seven children. These are just the five that came out at the same time. So he decided to run a half marathon, pushing the quints, they're four years old now, between the stroller they were in and the kids, that's 240 extra pounds. [Elena: Oh my gosh.] That Chad's pushing along for a half-marathon, which of course is 13.1 miles, half of a regular marathon. He did this in Oakland, by the way. And he wanted to sort of teach people or remind people that anything is possible. So we had this inspirational sign that said anything is possible and, um, he, his wife, who he credits with rightfully. So by the way, with doing the hard work, as far as these babies are concerned, right, like anything he does with, uh, you know, physical activity around them. He says, yeah, this is, this pales in comparison to what my wife went through carrying these quintuplets, but his wife was riding on a bike next to And he, it was really hot and. It was a lot of children to be pushing. So he almost quit a couple of times and she was like encouraging him from the bike and he managed to get through it. He did the whole thing in two hours and 19 minutes, which is really not bad. Actually considering what he was doing, there's a couple of things about this one. Anytime I'm out for a jog. In fact, this just happened. I'm not kidding you this morning. I was out for little run in my neighborhood in Portland and I was feeling a little tired as I was on my way back. And I saw a dad pushing twins in a stroller and I thought, okay, he can do that. I can with without any encumbrance, I can finish this little jug. So I'm inspired by people who are out there pushing their kids around in strollers. The other thing is the report is that his kid's main response to him pushing them in the half marathon was to yell at him to go faster. And there's a photo of him with this. The stroller is wild. It's like so long and kind of, it's almost looks like a like a bobsled or something, you know, you'd get in. [Elena: Or like a row of grocery carts being returned to the corral.] That's a good description. This guy is just working so hard to make this happen and set this record. But the kids in the photo look deeply bored. Like, which I feel like is parenthood in a nutshell. Like, that is what being a parent is, doing something exceptionally hard and your kids completely not realizing how hard it was.
Elena Passarello: Breaking a global record. I was just thinking about how I just got out of an airport and I know that my suitcase weighed 26 pounds and I had to drag it for, I don't know, about a quarter of a mile, and it was a tenth the weight of that stroller and I was like, ugh, I quit. [Luke: Yeah.] I quint. I quint!
Luke Burbank: So knowing, by the way, that the experience of parents is universal, no matter what we do, our kids are going to probably not be that impressed. That is the best news, weirdly, that I heard this week. All right, let's get our first guest on over. He is the host and creator of the critically acclaimed podcast, Conversations with People Who Hate Me. It's sort of a social experiment that started with him calling up people who'd left mean comments online about him. And he wanted to find out kind of like what their deal was and try to make a human connection with them, if he could. That podcast has now turned into a book by the same name. Dylan Marron is also the voice of Carlos on the hit podcast, Welcome to Night Vale. And he created this really interesting project, Every Single Word. Which is a video series that he edited down popular films so that the final product features only the words spoken by people of color in the film. And it is quite revealing, I'll tell you that. Dylan joined us on stage at Revolution Hall in Portland back in June. Take a listen to this.
Dylan Marron: Hi guys.
Luke Burbank: Dylan, welcome.
Dylan Marron: To the show. Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: Let's actually start with every single word, because I think that's one of the things that really put you on the internet's radar, to a large degree. How did that idea come to you to edit these films down?
Dylan Marron: Um, so I was like acting at the time that was my entry into the creative forum and I was noticing that auditions so in casting notices, I don't know if you're familiar, but there's like a description of the character right and so there will be one character that describes everything about them, it gives you their biographical data, what they feel, how vulnerable they are, like their relationship to empathy with others. And then there's others that's like a deli worker, five lines, and then it will list every non-white race. So it's like, you understand that these long, flowing casting notices were for white characters. And so I wanted to kind of identify the whiteness of Hollywood films, but in a way. That would ideally bring more people to the table. And so I disguised it as a supercut series, right? It's like this shareable, bite-sized form of internet detritus that we're all familiar with. And it was cloaked in that was a conversation about representation on screen.
Luke Burbank: I have to say it was shocking to me, as a white person, to see a film that I love like Moonrise Kingdom. Yeah. That I've watched. And you know, I mean, as white person you're legally obligated to love anything Wes Anderson does.
Dylan Marron: Yes, yes, yes.
Luke Burbank: So it never occurred to me, because of my lived experience, how little representation there is in that film. It's like less than 10 seconds.
Dylan Marron: Yeah, yeah. And I think to explain, I was picking films that were told universal stories and were cast as white by default. So the Lord of the Rings trilogy, all three movies. It came down to, I think, 47 seconds. That's the trilogy. But those are short films anyway. And those are tiny, tiny films. So that's, I mean, we have to also put that in the record. Yeah, I'm mean, they're TikToks, basically. [Luke: Yeah, right. The Vines.] Yeah, so vines, thank you. A classic TikTok vintage.
Luke Burbank: Well, I was just... I was saying it was surprising to me to realize how many of these films that I've just watched and, again, because of kind of my perspective, it didn't occur to me that there was such little representation of people of color until I was watching your series.
Dylan Marron: Yeah, I think the complicated thing as a person of color is you also take this for granted too, right? I think like, the problem wasn't that I didn't like these movies, the problem was that I loved all these movies that I was editing down. And so I think what the project asks, I sound like an artist statement, you know, like print and what this project interrogates... Is, you know, what are you not noticing? And what are we subconsciously taking in? What messaging are we sub-consciously taking in if we watch, yes, okay, clap. Make it slow, slow build through what I'm saying. But I think what it's saying, it's like, what are we letting in? What are we subconsciously understanding it if we are baking into our brains? Movies are essentially empathy machines. I think that's a Roger Ebert quote. That's how we understand ourselves. That's we understand our place in humanity. And what is it saying for? People of color who are seeing avatars continuously relegated to the sidelines. And so again, it's just a super cut series. And so I think that project was what helped me learn how to take a big idea and express it in an online format.
Luke Burbank: Another thing you did that got a lot of attention were these unboxing videos, where you unboxed abstract concepts like masculinity and ableism. And that seems to also be when the trolls really started to come out. Was that your experience?
Dylan Marron: You know, every single word, I wasn't in those videos. Those were edits of popular films. And when I started making videos with my face in them and those videos started becoming really popular and I was coming from a very progressive perspective, yes, and I think context is important about this, which is that this was 2016, 2017, and this was on Facebook. So this is like. Right when we were experiencing this national public square on Facebook, this is when Facebook video was popping off, and I think that is what set the stage for what came next.
Luke Burbank: Well, what I'm really interested in is what you talk about in this book and on the podcast, which is when you started reaching out to some of these people that were posting really mean things about you. So we're gonna hear about that in a moment. First though, we've got to take this quick break here on Live Wire. We're talking to Dylan Marron. His new book is Conversations with People Who Hate Me, 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers. Back with more Live Wire in just a moment Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We're talking to Dylan Marron. His new book is Conversations with People Who Hate Me, 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers. So you were producing a series of different videos taking on some pretty serious topics, but doing it with a kind of a, I think, a fun and somewhat light approach. But this also was drawing a lot of attention from people who disagreed with what you were saying when you were say hey, we're too ableist as a society, or masculinity is out of control, things like that. So what were people actually saying to you that was negative? What were the kind of posts that you were getting?
Dylan Marron: Um, you know, a lot of it was homophobic. I think a lot it took swipes at my masculinity, which just to be clear, we were never angling for alpha. You know, like, we're going for delta, we're goin' for zeta, we're goin' for bottom of the barrel here. Yes! Zeta male in the... Um, I think it was like those typical jabs, you know, I think the common terms of cuck, you know, a man who has been cheated on by his wife, which to quote Twitter, you have to laugh. You know, the, uh, to call me a cuck is like I would love for whatever woman I was married to, to cheat on me. I encourage it. Um, my hope she cheats on me that she needs a strong sense of self. Um...
Luke Burbank: So people are coming at you with all this stuff that they think is insulting you, but the things that they value are not the things you personally value in the same way.
Dylan Marron: Yeah, I mean, that's 100% true. I also think it's like I had to develop the sense of humor about it because that was the only coping mechanism I had. And so I would. Do the traditional things that we all do, like make fun of their typos. And that makes you feel amazing because you are the better person and they misspelled there. And that's it, we're getting Trump out of office. You corrected a typo, you know? And I'm obviously saying that like joking now, but like, you kind of felt that, you're like, got them, you know, that's a dunk. And then I think that that didn't feel like it was doing anything. And I also kind of realized that I was just essentially fighting fire with fire. So I wanted to find an alternative.
Luke Burbank: So one of the people that you reached out to, they write about a book with someone named Josh. Josh had posted something about how being gay was a sin and all of your opinions were basically wrong. How do you go about establishing contact with somebody who has gone on the internet just for the purposes of saying mean things about you?
Dylan Marron: Well, Josh was the very first person I ever spoke to on the phone. And I would say he fully cracked open this project for me. I was receiving hundreds of messages like this. And I received Josh's DM. And I had developed this unexpected coping mechanism for myself, where because this was Facebook, this is where Facebook comes into play. It's not YouTube. It's Twitter, right? It's like, this is a platform. Where you have already been encouraged to upload every single picture ever taken of you. You're tagged in photos. So I could click on my detractors profile pictures and I was taken to a partial family tree. I would know what their aunt's favorite band was, you know? And it's like, I would use these disparate details to construct this full three-dimensional backstory as a coping mechanism so that I could convince myself that these were human beings that could be reached. And I bring that up with Josh, because Josh was really just like, when I clicked on his profile, sure, I was met with all the memes that I expected that indicated that we supported different political ideologies, but also real vulnerability. He was a senior in high school at the time, and he was talking about loneliness and isolation. And if anything, that was something that I related to. You know, like, if I had Facebook. In that time, and I was the last year to not have Facebook in high school, and thank God for that. I'm so serious because I think we should normalize drafts of ourselves and understand what is and isn't okay, and to have a permanent record of that is challenging for all humans, I think, but especially for young people. And so he was sharing things that I'm like, oh, I would have written that I was lonely on a Friday night, you know? One thing led to another, and I don't know if you want to go into full detail. It's a much longer story that is available in the book. [Luke: There you go.] But one thing led another, we jumped on the phone. And that phone call was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I was so used to sharpening my dagger for my videos. Taking aim at the other side through a lens. And it's like, honey, you're not, you're just talking to your people, you know? And talking to him felt like I was actually building a bridge and doing something that I hadn't done before. Yeah, yeah.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Dylan Marron about his new book, Conversations with People Who Hate Me. I have heard audio from this conversation with Josh. And it's really powerful, because you hear somebody who's dealing with what they're dealing with. And as is probably often the case, it's hard for someone to continue to be cruel when they're talking on the phone with the person who's the object of their cruelty. Like that other stuff, my guess is, falls away pretty quickly. But is that? Common with the people that you've now dealt with and communicated with who have been very critical of you is that this is them kind of projecting their pain on someone else.
Dylan Marron: Yes and no. Like, I think we love clinging to this idea that hurt people hurt people, which I think is true a lot of the time, not all the time. You know, like, I think the ease with which we can communicate online and take jabs at people actually disproves this like 100% hurt people-hurt people notion because like, sometimes they're not hurt, You know, and like. I don't use the word trolls anymore because I don't think it's an accurate word and I also think that we must collectively move on from this very false understanding that it is, and this is in quotes, but like lonely guys who live in their mother's basement because one, if they're lonely, that's just relatable. If they live in their mom's basement, I lived with my mom after college, deal with it. You know, things are expensive. But that's our way to soothe ourselves into saying, it's like, oh, it's those people over there who do this, when these platforms actually encourage that. To get back to your lovely and brilliant question, I took us on a tangent. I think sometimes it's projected pain. But I will say, always, people felt so profoundly different on the phone than they did in a text medium, because you don't actually see that the person you're talking to his human. And the one thing that I was discovering over and over again, and this is when I was talking one-on-one to people and when I moved into the moderated format, when I started hosting calls between people, is that so many times the honest answer is, I just never thought you were gonna read it.
Dylan Marron: On the one hand, there's justifiable criticism there. That's like, well, that's a human. Of course they're going to read it. And on the other hand, these platforms are so good at making us feel anonymous and invisible, and we don't matter, and we're just particles floating in space. So who can kind of blame them for thinking that this missive is never going to reach its supposed target?
Luke Burbank: I'm wondering as somebody who's spent a lot of time looking at this world and being now a part of this world because another thing you do with the podcast is you, like you said, you'll now get two people who've had some kind of a disagreement going and you'll kind of moderate a conversation there. I mean, do you have any reason to be optimistic about like the way that we treat each other online going? I mean is there any hope for this or is this just sort of going to continue to become even more and more toxic as a place?
Dylan Marron: Yes and no is the most honest answer I can give. The experience I have on the phone calls that I've been lucky enough to be part of has shown me that people are hungry for connection with each other. People are eager to get to know people, to show themselves to other people, to build these bridges, that we are chastised for even bringing up that word because it's too chuggy, you know what I mean? I'm like. And at core, people are hungry for that. People are excited for it. But that's when you get them onto the phone. I cannot even begin to tell you how hard this podcast is to produce because so many people are so hesitant to do this, understandably so, right? Like there are some people who don't have the energy to build these bridges of radical empathy with their detractors. I fully understand that. But I also feel hopeless when I spend more than five minutes on Twitter because, sure, we have to say that, yes, necessary information can travel very fast and very far. And that's absolutely true. And it's absolutely good as a bullhorn for a video of, say, something like police brutality, right? It's like, we'd have to get this message across, and no one's going to believe it if they don't see it. But all of the other conversation that happens is so gamified that it's more that we are all, and I very much include myself in this, we are playing this game for points where you get more dopamine hits by dunking on someone than actually having a conversation.
Elena Passarello: When you brought up games, it made me think of this thing in your book, too, that I never categorized it this way, but so many things that we think of as conversations are debates, and debates can't be conversations because debates are sports. [Dylan: Oh, completely.] How did you come up with that concept?
Dylan Marron: I think it's from not understanding sports, and always being terrified of sports, and being, let's be real, bad at them. But I think that came up for me when I started this project. And even still now, if people know the concept of the show, they'll praise me for hosting a debate show, even though I've been vocal that it's not a debate show. And at first, I was kind of annoyed by that. It's like, this is conversation, you know, like. But then I realized debate is the only word we have for conversation across differences. So we think that the only way we can actually communicate with someone that we disagree with is to fight them, is to battle them. And I think debates work when there's a shared pool of facts. And debate, as a concept, falls apart when we can't agree on the facts we're there to debate on. So it comes up with a climate. Yeah. It comes up with the climate change discussion, or let's be real, debate, which is like, if, let's say your position is, climate change mostly comes from oil companies and not, you know, unrecycled plastic bottles, and then the other person's position is climate change doesn't exist, there's no debate there. I think what I learned is, really ways, and what the book is really about, is ways to foster meaningful conversation and conscious conversation. It's a tightrope to walk, right? I'm very careful to not sloppily be like, just talk to each other, and the world will be good. You know? That's unhealthy for a lot of people. And so I think we're having this huge backlash against kindness. And bridge building because, like I said, it's a little too cheesy for people. And for very good reason, its kindness is absolutely not a substantial political platform. Right.
Luke Burbank: Well, a lot of people who have been marginalized feel like the advice being just be nicer to the people who would have been oppressing you, they are like, that's not really how we should be fixing this.
Dylan Marron: And I think that, yes, absolutely, and I think that's in fact harmful to many marginalized people. But just because some people very understandably can't walk across certain bridges doesn't mean you shouldn't if you feel that you have the ability to, you know what I mean? Like it's really, I think this work is for people who have the energy to do it and not for the people who don't. It's not a solve. Empathy alone is not going to cure everything that ails us, but I think it is a necessary ingredient that the gamified space of social media is making us forget.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, yeah all that and more in this great new book from Dylan conversations with people who hate me Dylan Marron. Thanks for coming on Live Wire.
Dylan Marron: Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: That was Dylan Marron, right here on Live Wire. We recorded that at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, back in June. Dylan's book, Conversations with People Who Hate Me, is available now. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. Support for Live Wire comes from the Celeste Hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota. An independent boutique hotel, this former art conservatory and convent is on the national list of historic places. For booking and for more information, visit thecelesthotel.com. This is Live Wire. Of course, each week we like to ask the Live Wire listeners a question. We were inspired by Dylan Marron's podcast about kind of unexpected, possibly tense conversations. And so we asked the listeners, what's the most unexpected conversation you've ever had? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What do you see?
Elena Passarello: Well, speaking of Dylan, this is from a Dylan, I think it's a different Dylan, who says, I had a conversation with my professor in which he told me there was no future in my major.
Luke Burbank: Wow.
Elena Passarello: That's always a hard thing when the person who's teaching you the thing that you're learning is like, yeah, kid, good luck.
Luke Burbank: I was a drama major in college up until probably my junior year and we were doing some kind of acting presentation and I will just say some of the monologs were I thought less than stellar. Some were great but there was a real range but the response was the same. Everyone was so effusive and so supportive of every monologue, even the ones that were great. I thought, wait a minute, are we? All diluting ourselves. I was like, I thought mine went pretty well. Everyone seemed excited, but they're also being pretty excited about some ones that seemed less great. And so I said, I got to switch my major to a real tried and true moneymaker journalism.
Elena Passarello: Oh yeah. I know. I was thinking about all the majors and minors that I've had over my several degrees and none of them have futures in them. French, anthropology, literature, creative writing. So me and Dylan and you, Luke, we can form a club.
Luke Burbank: What's another unexpected conversation that one of our listeners had?
Elena Passarello: Bill says, I was once speaking to a friend about our passions, and we eventually got to talking about being patriotic. And that's when he told me he only wears American-made clothes. And then we had an interesting conversation about the day he discovered that his American flag T-shirt was made in Bangladesh.
Luke Burbank: Wow. You see that sometimes something that seems extremely quite unquote patriotic and then you turn it over and you find out it was made somewhere far away from here. When I was a kid growing up in the 80s, I feel like there were a lot of ads extolling the virtues of buying American. [Elena: Oh yeah, for sure.] Just seemed like as a kid there was always ads and it was like people were wearing jeans and turning the you know waistband out it said like made in America and it like, you know, lots of waves of grain and. Flags fluttering, it seemed like a real priority.
Elena Passarello: Maybe there's so few now that, like, there's no point in advertising it.
Luke Burbank: Right the like consortium of American manufacturers. There's not enough of them to put in for the TV ad buys that I was seeing as a kid. That's right, one more unexpected conversation before we get to our next guest.
Elena Passarello: This is a great one about, I guess about taste. Jay says, one time a friend and I were talking about our favorite movies and I started things off by saying my favorite movie was The Hateful Eight and my friend told me that he unironically loves the B movie. [Luke: The Jerry Seinfeld one?] Yeah, I don't know, I think both of those are interesting choices for favorite movies and I would love to see a mashup of the two.
Luke Burbank: I will say that's a real, pretty hard pivot between the hateful eight and Daisy Daisy Domergue, that really memorable performance by Jennifer Jason Lee. Uh, and then you just going right over to Jerry Seinfeld playing a B.
Elena Passarello: That reminds me when David tried to show me that scary movie, Halloween, and I got so scared, and he was like, I knew you were gonna get scared, so I also rented this movie. This is back when you rented movies. And the Chaser movie he had rented for me was Lady and the Tramp. So we went from Halloween to Lady and The Tramp.
Luke Burbank: That's when you know you're with the right person. [Elena: Amen.] He's at the blockbuster or the red box or whatever service y'all were using, just anticipating we're gonna need a palette cleanser after the scary movie. I mean, that is love.
Elena Passarello: I'm so afraid of those. One time there was a scary movie, it just, the opening shot was of a doll and I was like, turn it off.
Luke Burbank: All right, thank you to everyone who wrote in responses to our listener question. We've got another one for next week's show, which we will reveal at the end of today's episode, so stick around for that. In the meantime, this is of course Live Wire. Our next guest is a genre-breaking musician and producer from Seattle. Born blind, Brittany Davis' musical journey began when they realized they could play piano by ear. And by the age of 13, they were recording their own music. Brittany is now signed to Loose Groove Records, which is the Seattle label. Co-founded by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, and their debut EP, I Choose to Live, was released just this year. Brittany Davis, welcome to Live Wire.
Brittany Davis: Thank you.
Luke Burbank: So excited to get to talk to you. I've been hearing all about you for a while now. I'm curious, when did you start writing music?
Brittany Davis: I began writing music really young. I started playing piano at the age of two and started kind of writing my own songs at four, five.
Elena Passarello: Wow.
Luke Burbank: What are those songs about when you're four or five, like the popsicle truckers here?
Brittany Davis: They're mostly instrumental, but to me, they were about a lot of things. I can't remember now, but everything is music to me. So I guess everything was a song.
Luke Burbank: Hey, did I read correctly that you could actually play bird songs on the piano when you were really young? [Brittany: Yes.] So how would that work you would hear a robin and or something and then you could come in and approximate it on the piano.
Brittany Davis: Yeah, you hear this little bird, the little birds. And you're just play it, you know.
Luke Burbank: Now, as a person who's blind, it sounds like you've always had a really strong connection to sound. I read that you said sound is light to you. What do you mean by that?
Brittany Davis: Sound is light, silence is darkness. I mean that because there is sound, there is life for me and from me, and all of it has its own purpose and it all has different dimensions. The same way that different intensities of light can give you different perceptions of things, the way that it bends, the way it shifts. You know, like if it's a shadow, you know, you still need light for that. So the different sonic dimensions are just the same, you know, dimensions as light, you know. As a matter of fact, there was a little study done, was like, people who are born blind, their visual cortex is actually stimulated when they read Braille by touch, or when they hear things by sound. So a lot of the times it's like we're, we're seeing two times. You know what I mean. You know?
Elena Passarello: Right, wow.
Brittany Davis: Because that's how we see. So, you know, even though we don't have the visual organ, we have the most powerful organ, I believe is the brain, the mind is just the dimension of the brain. So that's why I say that sound is light because it is a dimension and it requires dimensions in order for it to work. Same is light.
Luke Burbank: So my guess would be that as a kid growing up, sound and music and song was just vitally important to you. I mean, what was that? What did it mean to you as a young person?
Brittany Davis: Well, I always like to say that music was my first language. It played a role in everything that I felt emotionally, sometimes different scents, things that you would smell or things that you touch, different textures, had different notes, had different tonal scales. Of course, I didn't know nothing about music theory back then and I'm still learning now because I wasn't trained. I've had beautiful mentors and people come in and teach me things and help me navigate the landscape of music, but the language was always mine.
Luke Burbank: I think something that's kind of funny is that you're signed to Loose Groove Records, which was founded by one of the guys in Pearl Jam, Stone Gossard, but you were not really like a Pearl Jam head before you got signed? [Brittany: No.] Do you have to now listen to Pearl Jam because the label you're on was founded by one the Pearl Jam people?
Brittany Davis: No, I love it though. [Luke: Oh, really?] I listen to it, you know, because it's one of those things where you get curious. And every side of music is kind of a side of me. So it's like, yeah, we need the we need to goofies. We need to the sillies. We need the dark and punchy and grungy. We need too fast to stop having to stop since three in the morning still going type of music. We need it all. That's the same thing with language. You have things that are good and that are pure, but then you also have those things which is like, okay, he's going off the deep end. He's cussing. He's using all kinds of colorful language. It's very important to be able to express oneself in all facets. And so that's why, you know, I listen to Pearl Jam. I'm getting into a little bit of rock and roll. I'm starting to get into some Neil Young. I'm gettin' into some Jimi Hendrix. I'm lovin' me some Jimie Hendrix right here. Well, bein' that you're in Seattle now.
Luke Burbank: Well, being that you're in Seattle now, I think you, you know, you're like legally required to get into Jimi Hendrix, right?
Brittany Davis: Ha ha ha ha! I love the guy though man, can't get enough.
Luke Burbank: You know, something that I read in an interview with you that would have never occurred to me was that because you're blind, you have to basically kind of decide who you're gonna trust about an outfit that you might be wearing in like a video or for a performance. Like right now the listeners can't see but you have this beautiful yellow head wrap on and matching shirt and some pearls, you look great.
Brittany Davis: Thank you.
Luke Burbank: You said sometimes you get conflicting information from people and like you have to decide who you're gonna go with
Brittany Davis: Yeah, it's what I call inter-projection because I have to project from the inside out what I want to represent because people around me have to see that in everything that I do so that they know what I'm trying to do because if they can't see it, they don't know it because I can't show them. I can go, I want it to look like name archetype. I can only say that I like the materials that feel like this, or the fit, you know, as far as how tight or how loose something is, how breathable it is. That's what I'm trying to say. The breadth of an outfit. How much room do I want in the outfit? Do I want it skin tight? You know, I can't say I want a skin tight like so-and-so, because they would understand that, of course, but I don't know that because I've never seen so- and-so. You know what I mean? So it's like, you have to trust in yourself to be vulnerable and say, I really like patent leather or I really liked soft cotton materials that remind me of home, that remind of Africa, that remind be of earth.
Luke Burbank: You're listening to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are talking to musician Brittany Davis, but we've got to take a quick break. Stay with us though. We will be back with much more, including a song from Brittany. So don't go anywhere. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Are you ready for a little station location identification examination?
Elena Passarello: Did Davey Crackett kill a bar when he was only three?
Luke Burbank: And you used the proper pronunciation of bar. All right, here is how station location identification examination works. I'm going to talk about a place in America where Live Wire is on the radio. Atlanta's got to guess where I'm talking about. Okay, this place is home to the world's largest bear subspecies. It can exceed 1500 pounds. They're only found in this place and on surrounding islands. And the way that they got there was brown bears migrated to this area about 12,000 years ago and then sea level rose the end of the ice age and then these bears became an isolated population. Kodiak bears. Kodiak Alaska. Where we're on KODK radio in Kodiak Alaska. Good thinking, Elena. I know my bars. You sure do. All right, before we get to this week's musical performance by Brittany Davis, a little preview of what we are doing on the show next week, the author, Melissa Febos is going to stop by to talk about her book, The Dry Season, which started off as a 90 day experiment with celibacy. I know a lot of us have done that without even declaring it to be a project, but then this ended up stretching into a year of self discovery for Melissa. She's going to talk to us about why she thinks it was actually her most erotic year. The one where she was not actually having sex, and also how people-pleasing can actually be sometimes people-using. Then we're gonna talk to the journalist, Evan Ratliff, about his podcast, Shell Game. This is what he did. He created an AI version of himself. Then he unleashed it on unsuspecting friends and family, even his therapist. We are gonna hear from both the real Evan Ratlifft and also the AI Evan Ratliff. And I just have to tell you, it is mind-bending. Really something you want to check out. Then we're gonna hear some music from Tropa Magica. That is all next week on Live Wire. This is, of course, Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are talking to musician Brittany Davis. Take a listen to this. Can we hear a little bit about the song that you're going to perform today? What's it called and what's the story of how it came about?
Brittany Davis: The song that I'm gonna be performing for you today is called “Loud Loud World”, because the world in which I exist can really get overwhelming. It can get loud, it can get disturbing, it can become overstimulating because I listen to it so much. You know, we say this thing all the time. We say, would you just listen? You know? But what people don't understand a lot of the time is that I listen. More than I want to and sometimes it has a profound effect on the way that I process things. Everything has to be right. It has to taste right, smell right, feel right, sound right. It got to have all of these different facets to it. There's a depth of understanding that comes through my listening and I wanted to write a song that inspired people to really look at some of the... Characteristics they assign to visually impaired folks and our ability to hear, like we can hear just like anybody else, but we still suffer and we're still impacted emotionally by the things that we hear sometimes, the same way as anyone else would be. But it also comes to a place where we have to accept the fact that we're different. We're only human and that's one of the biggest messages in this song is that though I'm blind, I'm not a superhero, I'm just me.
Luke Burbank: Well, let's hear that song. This is Brittany Davis here on Live Wire.
Brittany Davis: [Brittany Davis performs “Loud Loud World”]
Luke Burbank: Brittany Davis right here on Live Wire Thank you again of Brittany for taking the time today. We really appreciate you
Brittany Davis: Thank you, Live Wire, this has been great.
Luke Burbank: That was Brittany Davis right here on Live Wire. Their EP, I Choose to Live is out now. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Dylan Marron and Brittany Davis. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our assistant editor is Trey Hester. Our marketing manager is Paige Thomas. Our production fellow is Tanvi Kumar. Our house band is Mike Gamble Pony, Ayal Alvez, and A-Walker Spring, who also composes our music. Molly Pettit is our Technical Director, and our house sound is by D. Neil Blake.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the James F. And Marion L. Miller Foundation, Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Megan Millard of Portland, Oregon, and Brett Sherman of Happy Valley, Oregon. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank, for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team, thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
