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The Department of Tangents Podcast


Years ago, playing a sort of improv game with friends in which we all picked super powers based on our personalities, I dubbed myself “Tangent Lad.” I was not a very strong superhero, and I could not defeat a super villain on my own, but I could distract them with Monty Python quotes and football trivia. I have many times since apologized to an interview subject in my capacity as a journalist by saying, “I am either very good or very bad at tangents, depending on how you feel about tangents.”

I had a rough time coming up with the concept and naming this blog/podcast. I knew I wanted to create a place where I could address things I’m passionate about – comedy, music, and horror. Finding a name that communicated all three of those things proved a bit impossible. I bugged my friends, and they all tried to help. To no avail. Then I thought, maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle. Maybe my lack of focus should be the focus.

As a journalist, I have written for The Boston Globe since 2000, starting out writing CD reviews and then writing a regular column on comedy for seven and a half years. I still contribute there, and to Kirkus Reviews, and other publications. I’m also a musician, and released my debut full-length album, Blue Skies and Broken Arrows, in March of 2015. And I’ve been publishing short horror fiction for a couple of years.

I like to climb into things I love and see how they operate. That’s what the Department of Tangents is for. The main thing here is love. To talk about the things that make I’ve loved forever, and some new things that might stand the test and be around, at least for me, for decades to come. I’ve had to be critical in my writing at times, and it might not all be nonstop roses here, but in the end, what I really want to talk about is the good stuff. That’s why I will regularly write about things I think are “Perfect,” even if someone can demonstrate empirically that they are flawed. Still perfect to me.

Also, fish.

I hope you, dear anonymous surfer person, will come to expect only the highest-quality, free-range, grass-fed tangents. And I hope some of you love the same things I do and find it useful. Or at least a welcome distraction until the others get here.

Dec 7, 2016

Sam Phillips fans have reason to celebrate this fall. She has a new mini-album out, called Human Contact Is Never Easy, which includes four songs that may wind up on a new album, called World On Sticks, she expects to release in 2017. You can read my review of the mini-album in the New Release Roundup from November 25, but it’s an impressive collection of songs. It includes a live rendition of “Reflecting Light,” which deserves to be called a classic song, and that’s included at the end of the podcast. It’s also featured in Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life, the reunion series that recently debuted on Netflix. It was an emotional moment for Phillips, and interesting for her to see it presented as a love song. We talk a bit about that, and writing the “La La Songs” that were used as interstitial music on the original show and the reunion. We also talked about songwriting, and the unique way she built the news songs, the fragility of the modern world, playing live, the way the new Gilmore Girls ended, and much more. You can listen to it below or find it on iTunes, Google Play, and wherever good podcasts are downloaded.