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…

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 …

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 a…

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 st…

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…

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-…

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!Di The Department of Tangents

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 …

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 pandem…

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…

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, …

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 stri…

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 …

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…

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 …

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 ar…

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 Y…

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, ho…

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 b…

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 wit…

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 i…

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 mu…

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…

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 questio…

This is the third and final interview I recorded at NECON 2019, which I have previously described as a mashup of a horror writers conference and summer camp with adult beverages. I attended NECON for the first time in 2018, and this week’s guest, Matt Moore, was my roommate. Lucky for me, he is also a fine and thoughtful writer. His debut book is I…

This is the second interview I recorded at this year’s NECON conference, which is part horror author’s conference and part summer camp. It is with Scott Goudsward, a very busy fellow. I’ve been trying to catch up with him for months, but as you are about to find out, Scott has a lot of jobs. He has written two novels -- Fountain of the Dead and Tra…

Pornsak Pichetshote edited other people's books for DC for years before he attempted to write his own. He didn’t give himself an easy out. His first series, now collected as a graphic novel, is Infidel, a horror story that explores xenophobia. It’s hard enough to do horror and politics well separately without trying to combine them in a graphic for…

In early July, rumors started to surface that MAD Magazine was going to cease publishing new material and just reprint old stuff with new covers. MAD has been around since 1952 and has influenced multiple generations of smart asses. The eulogies came quick and heavy, and they’re still coming, even though we’ve never gotten a terrible clearly statem…

This is episode 100 of the podcast, and I thought about doing some sort of compilation of previous interviews, as I’ve done a couple of times in the past, to commemorate that. I decided against that for a couple of reasons. First, I haven’t accomplished everything I want to with this podcast yet, so it’s not time to celebrate. Hopefully, that comes…

This episode was originally planned to be a minicast, but when Lucette and I started diving into her songwriting and her new album, Deluxe Hotel Room, the conversation went a bit longer than I had thought. Which is fantastic, because it means you get to hear more from Lucette about how this album reflects more of her true self as a songwriter, her …

I had been thinking a lot about how sound - the score and incidental music - effect the mood and even the story in horror movies and looking for a way to discuss that on the podcast when I came across the book Blood On Black Wax: Horror Soundtracks On Vinyl, written by this week’s guest conversationalists, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas. It is, as…

If things had worked out as Lucy Isabel had originally planned, she would be firmly planted in New York right now, using the theater degree she got from Yale as a working actor. Instead, shortly after graduation, the New Jersey native left theater behind and moved to Nashville to become a touring singer/songwriter.If things had worked out as Lucy I…

If you want to make anything funnier, just add Lamont Price. It certainly made watching Godzilla a much more enjoyable experience, which is the point of much of this podcast. This one has been brewing for a couple of years, starting with a conversation we had after a more formal interview with Price when he organized the comedy portion of the Bosto…

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes in this job of talking to notable people, you get kind of a day off. You talk to someone with such a long history, with such a broad view of the world of entertainment, with so many stories, that your presence is barely required. That was the case with Christine Ohlman. I just needed to pitch a topic or two ou…

Face it. Bernard Fowler has a better job than you. Not only does he release his own solo work, like his new album, Inside Out, he has also toured the world singing with the Rolling Stones for more than thirty years. He first started working with Mick Jagger on his solo album, She’s the Boss, in 1985. Producer Bill Laswell had told Fowler he had a j…

Nathan Ballingrud has a wonderfully demented imagination. He has a way of reaching into your brain and finding all of those creepy little corners where you hide the things that make you cringe and make your skin crawl. In his first collection of stories, North American Lake Monsters, there was a bit more realism in his stories and characters. Hulu …

Jimmy Tingle is one of the first people I interviewed in the Boston comedy scene years ago. He was hosting and producing a stand-up show on race relations that featured, among others, Patrice O’Neal and Sue Costello. During my twenty years covering this scene, Tingle has always been a community-minded guy, whether it’s been as a theater owner for f…

If you have not heard Erica Rhodes’s comedy, you have the perfect excuse to dive in on June 18, when her new album, Sad Lemon, comes out. Rhodes has been performing in some fashion since she was a kid, modeling at five and playing the voice of Garrison Keillor’s conscience on Prairie Home Companion at ten. She was a dancer as a child, then dedicate…

Carole Montgomery is 61, and she won’t hesitate to mention her age onstage. That is somewhat unusual in an industry obsessed with youth. But Montgomery is proud of her age. She has been doing comedy for roughly forty years, slugging it out in the clubs and balancing stand-up and family. She told Forbes online she once had to leave her baby son with…

There is so much to explore in Karen Haglof’s career. She started out playing with a band called The Crackers in a Minneapolis scene that included Curtiss A, The Suicide Commandos, The Suburbs, and Flamingo before bands like Soul Asylum, the Replacements, and Husker Du put that scene on the map nationally. If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with that b…

If you follow the Department of Tangents Blog, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of Christina Raia’s work. I featured her delightful ghost story Hello on October 23 of 2017, and another of her horror shorts, Night In, a month later. This past November, Raia debuted a different kind of film for her, a heist film called Enough with an ensemble c…

I have been working on this one since last fall when I saw Jim Breuer at the Comics Come Home benefit show in Boston. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, it’s an annual event hosted by Denis Leary with an all-star lineup of stand-up comedians, many of whom have local ties. Lenny Clarke is there every year, and the 2018 edition featured Bria…

If Nat Freedberg’s voice sounds familiar, it may be because you’ve heard him on this podcast way back on EP32, when I interviewed his band, The Upper Crust. Of course, back then, he wasn’t speaking as Nat, he was speaking as his character, Lord Bendover, the snarling 18th century aristocrat in a powdered wig and finery that wielded his Gibson SG li…

If you are a fan of music or comedy, you should already know Geoff Edgers. He was a longtime arts writer with The Boston Globe before moving to The Washington Post, where he has written some extraordinary pieces on Roseanne Barr, Chevy Chase, Norm Macdonald, and the article that his new book, Walk This Way, is based on. He makes it clear he is a re…

This is the last of the four podcasts I taped last November at the NorthEast Comic Con and Collectibles Extravaganza, which happens twice a year out in Boxborough, Massachusetts. Philo has had a long and varied career, and we get into his resume straight away in the interview and drill down from there. You’ve seen his animation work on Disney’s The…

If you are used to our usual theme song, do not adjust your iPod at the beginning of this episode. This week, we open music from this week’s guest conversationalist, Micropixie. It is the title track to her latest album, Dark Sight of the Moon, and yes she does realize that sounds like another album you may have heard of. Throughout this episode, y…

I interviewed Daniel Sloss a few weeks back for the Boston Globe when he came to town with his new show X, a deeply funny and sometimes devastating look at masculinity and the #MeToo movement. You can find that piece in the archives at bostonglobe.com in the February 21 edition. There are two segments I wanted you to hear that didn’t make the final…

This week's episode is a conversation with Michael Gerber, publisher and editor of humor and satire magazine The American Bystander. There are hundreds, maybe thousands or more places to get satire and humor online. But The American Bystander is the one place dedicated to it in print. You can subscribe to a PDF version, but everything flows from th…

I first became aware of Ted Drozdowski when I was working at the Boston Phoenix, reading his reviews and features as I helped to transfer them from the print edition to the Web. It wasn’t until later, when I put together a benefit show and Ted stepped in as a player and an organizer, that I really got to see how powerful a guitar player and songwri…