The Department of Tangents Podcast

I know I haven't dropped a new episode in a long time, but it's the holidays, and I love the holidays, so I wanted to present an audio version of my reaction to seeing The Nutcracker for the first time. This is my assessment of the story, using only the visual cues from the ballet as it was presented.  Merry Christmas and happy holidays! 

Jon Rineman started his career with as tumultuous and triumphant a 15-year run as a comic could envision for themselves. He started in 2003, then freelanced jokes for Jay Leno, wrote jokes for Seth Meyers including one infamous zinger at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner that earned the ire of a future president, and wrote for Jimmy Fallon at Late Night and the Tonight Show u...

The Stay Scary Podcast is a silly podcast about serious horror, as described by host Lisa McGolgan. Every episode, Lisa and co-host Yinh Kiefer take a theme in horror films or horror lore, everything from insects to puberty, serial killers to doll parts, and have a ripsnorting good time going wherever that topic takes them. The show is as much fun to listen to as it is to be on, and taping this ep...

At first glance, Rob Kovacs seems to have wildly divergent interests in music. His latest album, Let Go, is lush and rhythmic piano pop. It's organic and melancholy, and tells a very human story about snakebit would-be lovers who can't come together and yet can't quite find their way out of each other's orbit. It's built for sepia-tinged sunlight and dry scattered leaves. Look again, and you see h...

Last spring, I read a Tweet from author Paul Tremblay apologizing for his upcoming horror novel, Survivor Song. When he had turned in his final edits for the book months before, he could not have known how prescient it would seem, especially to his friends in the New England horror writing community. Survivor Song is set in Boston in the opening stages of an epidemic. A virus is spreading, hospita...

Being an artist often means you spend your life looking for a place that feels right, finding it, and then leaving it as quickly as you can. Creative fulfilment as Brigadoon. In 2021, Jenee Halstead released Disposable Love, an album that sounds in many ways like the one she was always meant to make. With producer Dave Brophy and collaborators like Susan Cattaneo, Halstead has crafted an elegant p...

I first spoke to Johnson in 2019 for The Boston Globe, and back then he was already an established headlining comic with a distinct voice. He is a smart joke writer at ease with his own vulnerability, and those are qualities that are only enhanced as he gets bolder as an artist. Most of this episode is centered around Elusive: A Mixtape, his album-length exploration of comedy and music. Johnson is...

Season Two of the Department of Tangents Podcast coming Tuesday June 29! Six episodes, guests are comedians Josh Johnson and Jon Rineman, Stay Scary Podcast hosts Lisa and Yinh, author Paul Tremblay, and musicians Jenee Halstead and Rob Kovac!  New format! Tune in!

This week I speak with Bethany Van Delft, a comedian and storyteller and so much more. Bethany hosts Artisanal Comedy every Wednesday on her Instagram , and she's got a lot brewing she can't quite mention yet. She adapted her show to the online comedy world very quickly, partly because she's not willing to just give up comedy when real world stages are not available. We also talked about taking ca...

Welcome back to the Department of Tangents Podcast, a special new episode with Paul Hansen of The Grownup Noise. You may have noticed I haven't done an official episode of the Department of Tangents in several months. More recently, I've been doing the Artist Check-In Podcast which focuses on how creative people are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. That series has a very particular focus, and t...

This week I speak with horror author and storyteller Gregory Bastianelli . Gregory released his winter-themed horror novel Snowball at the end of January. He had planned a full slate of appearances and conferences to promote the book, and all but a couple of these wound up being cancelled because of a COVID-19 quarantine. That has left him without a direct line to fans, something that an independe...

This week I speak with comedian, actor, and now kid's show host Corey Rodrigues . Corey was working on a cruise ship as late as mid-March,  just as the full weight of the pandemic was coming to bear, and he tells us what that was like. Like most every comedian, Corey lost his bookings for the year, which gave him the excuse to start Corey's Stories, the show he hosts every weekday at 7:30 now read...

 This week I speak with book editor, writing coach, and self-described literary omnivore Tanya Gold about how her job has changed, and how it hasn't, during the quarantine. We get into the finer points of the job – why every editor isn't always a fit for every writer, the subjective nature of editing a poetry collection, the need for writers to strive for improvement. Tanya also went through a cor...

My day job is talking to artists for different publications, which means I know a lot of people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the quarantine associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. In this limited series I'll be talking with comedians, musicians, sound engineers, authors, and creative people about how they are handling this personally and professionally. This week we get the comedy club o...

My day job is talking to artists for different publications, which means I know a lot of people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the quarantine associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. In this limited series, I'll be talking with comedians, musicians, sound engineers, authors, and creative people about how they are handling this personally and professionally. This week it's Don White , musici...

The Artist Check-In is a limited series of conversations with comedians, musicians,  authors, and creative people about how they are handling, personally and professionally, the quarantine conditions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. In this episode, I speak with Chris Johnson, a musician and sound engineer, who is responsible for the sound of this show's theme song. He is also the bass playe...

My day job is talking to artists, mostly comedians, for different publications, which means I know a lot of people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the quarantine associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a limited series for which I'll be talking with comedians, musicians, sound engineers, authors, and creative people about how they are handling this personally and professionally. Up...

I know I have said this podcast is on hiatus for the year, and technically, it is. I'm developing new ideas, both for the Department of Tangents Podcast and some new podcast projects. But, this interview came through after I had made that decision, and it has a bit of a special meaning for me as I get ready to head back to home to Bloomfield, New York for the holidays. Bloomfield is just outside o...

This is the Department of Tangents special joy of Halloween and horror episode with Lamont Price. I love Halloween, and so does Price. And that's really the only inspiration for this episode. Price is an incredibly entertaining human being, so we sat down with no real notes and not much of an agenda other than to discuss why we love the holiday, horror movies and books, what scares us and what doe...

If you ask a random reader to name foundational women horror writers, you might get two or three names. Mary Shelley. Shirley Jackson. Maybe Daphne du Maurier or Anne Rice. But as Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson point out in their new book, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction , if that's where our knowledge begins and ends, we're missing out on a lot. Eli C...

Sue Costello is someone I saw early on in Boston, specifically playing a show organized by Jimmy Tingle that featured Costello, Patrice Oneal, and Steve Sweeney. She has always been tough, and she wears her Dorchester roots with pride. We got into some thorny topics here, including pervasive sexism in the entertainment industry and her dealings with CBS as the Les Moonves scandal was breaking. She...

Dave Ross has a fantastic new album out now called The Only Man Who Has Ever Had Sex . You can download it, but if you see him at a show, you can buy a download card with a special flipbook he's made with some beautiful photos and silliness. It's Ross's attempt to give you a little something extra for your participation, which is something he does in his comedy, as well. A few years ago, I reviewe...

Mike Watt is a bona fide punk rock legend. And he probably hates being described like that. His work with The Minutemen and fIREHOSE is seminal stuff, and hard to describe, especially The Minutemen. The second you hear it, you know it's punk, but it's also funk and jazz and so many other things, and completely in-the-moment music. It's as if all music, past and present, lives on the same plane, an...

David Demchuk's first novel, The Bone Mother , came highly recommended to me at NECON this year by Matt Moore, whom I interviewed in EP104. Demchuk and Moore are both on ChiZine Publications, which had a table in the dealers room. So I picked up The Bone Mother , not knowing what to expect, and innocently set about reading the first fifty pages later that evening. It's a novel told in short storie...

I have met my tangenting match. I went into this interview, backstage at the legendary Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a slate of questions for Steve Poltz, about his new album Shine On, about writing "You Were Meant For Me" with Jewel, about humor in music. I probably could have gotten a good hour with Steve with two or three questions. There is no telling where his mind might flash...