What Am I Making Podcast

Chad Patterson is more than just a friend. He is family. In fact, he’s the very best kind of family, the chosen sort. We collided into each other’s lives just after high school in the halls of the theater department at Lansing Community College. Our separate paths that led to the same spot on the planet were mirrored in many ways. Sports and pop culture, specifically movies at an early age, drove...

The first time I told my bandmates in The Stick Arounds about my blossoming online friendship with Jon Carroll, the other dudes seemed to think it was cool that I had made pals with a veteran who had spent his life working in the music industry. The second time I told them about it, they were somewhat shocked when they finally realized that I had made a genuine connection with somebody that we all...

I love listening to Barry and Abigail Hummel talk about records and beer. Certainly, it helps that there are few things in this world I would rather do than talk music over a pint. But the real joy of Pops on Hops is the connection and conversation between a daughter and her dad.  On each episode , the Hummels choose a record, and then pair it with a flight of beer from a specific brewery and Barr...

What Am I Making is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Andrew Sandstedt is one of those people that makes the cultural clock of a community tick. It seems rare to attend an event of much import in our beloved city of Lansing, and not see his boyish grin surrounded by a frock of white beard. He is a man about town,...

I would guess that Jared Yates Sexton and I would have either been the best of friends, or hated each other if we had gone to high school together. We would simply have had too much cultural overlap to be apathetic about each other. The enlightened, mature side of me is sure we would have been fast friends had our ages and geography coalesced in a different cosmic plane. The more reasoned and logi...

The first time that I interviewed Maura Quint, we got interrupted. Like a lot. That was a damn shame, because we were hitting on some really good stuff. But after eight or ten internet drops, and a series of awkward and stilted attempts to restart the conversation, I called it off and begged for another opportunity. In that first chat, Maura and I got going on the concept of adulthood as a destina...

I’d already had the pleasure of interviewing Christian Finnegan a few months back for an episode of Stand Up with Pete Dominick . Christian had just started a substack called New Music For Old. I really wanted Pete to promote it on his show. Pete doesn’t feel at home talking about music. Actually, that’s a kindness on my part to say that he doesn’t enjoy it. It would be more accurate to say that w...

When I first began to formulate a way to collect all the disparate ideas in my head and turn them into a podcast, blog, conversation, just something, I was always stuck in the mud. There were a million sparks and flashes. But they felt much more like a hundred fireflies flittering around than a cohesive universe of thought and philosophy. The more I hemmed and hawed, the more impatient I got deep...