Some weeks ago I had a rare day on which no interviews were booked.  A day like that is perfect for wading into the mountain of music cd’s that accumulate on my desk.  I give each artist two songs.  If the second song doesn’t grab me, the cd goes to the reject pile. On this day, the reject pile was climbing pretty high.    Then I tried “The Living Side,” by Meg Hutchinson. Meg got me with the first words of the first track titled Hard to Change: “Train whistling home in the dark—-Christmas lights up in the trailer park.” With those very spare words I have both audio and visual cues.   She went on like that—-supplying multi-dimensional images in a song about class and economic justice. I didn’t need the second song to decide we were going to have her on the show, but after that first, I longed to hear them all.   None of them disappointed me.   My favorite is called Gatekeeper and it’s dedicated to Kevin Briggs, a motorcycle patrolman with the Marin County, California police department. Meg had read about Briggs in a 2003 New Yorker story about the Golden Gate Bridge as a final destination for people who want to end their lives.   Briggs intervened when people looked like they were about to jump off the bridge. His technique was to ask two questions to which he already knew the answers. “How do you feel?”    “What are your plans for tomorrow?” When told there no plans, Briggs would say, “Well let’s make some—and if they don’t work out, you can always come back here.” Briggs said he’d been successful all 200 times he’d done this.   A guy like that deserves a song—and Gatekeeper is a gem.

Click here to read the New Yorker article about Kevin Briggs.

Bob

When preparing Laura Miller’s interviews, I always ask her to share more fiction than nonfiction titles with our listeners, since we cover far more nonfiction books on the show.  But I have to admit that after today’s interview, I found myself eager to get my hands on the last book she recommended: Stanford literature professor Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them.  While I love Anna Karenina as much as the next bookish person, I have never considered myself obsessed with Russian literature… but after just a few pages of Batuman’s witty memoir/literary analysis/travel narrative/scholar’s journal, I’m already planning for a summer full of Dostoevsky, Chekov, Tolstoy, and others.  Here is a list of all the books Laura recommended:  

The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee

The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee

The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris

The Room and the Chair, by Lorriane Adams

The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them, by Elif Batuman

Each week Bob is joined by Dan Gediman, the Executive Director of This I Believe, Inc. to discuss one of the original essays from the 1950s radio series. This week’s featured essay is by Robert Heinlein who won four Hugo Awards during his 50-year career as a science fiction writer. Born and raised in Missouri, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929 and did aeronautical engineering for the Navy during World War II. Heinlein’s books include “Starship Troopers” and “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In spite of his successful career as a science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein’s beliefs are more down to earth. He believes in the decency of his neighbors, and the future of the human race. Click here to read a transcript and hear the audio of his “This I Believe” essay.

And here’s a link to purchase the latest collection of the original 1950’s essays, edited by Dan Gediman.

Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe

by Chad Campbell, Senior Producer

Bob conducted this interview a month ago, and ever since I volunteered to produce it he’s been asking how I like Suzi’s music. Bob has become a big fan and once I finally started mixing the songs together with their conversation, I also began to appreciate her talent. The songs really are good. Her latest CD is actually a double album. The project and disc one are both called Best Regards. It contains six new songs. Disc two features two new songs and four older songs and is titled Less of the Same. Suzi Ragsdale is the daughter of music icon Ray Stevens, who is known for novelty songs like Ahab the Arab, The Streak and Guitarzan. He’s also the guy who put fiddles and a banjo on his arrangement of “Misty” and won a Grammy for it. A five-year-old Suzi got her start in professional music as part of the children’s chorus on her dad’s feel good song “Everything is Beautiful” and today he is her music publisher. Despite her early start in music and family connections, Suzi was actually a late bloomer and took the slow road to the front of the big stage, singing on demos and playing with and behind other artists first. Now she is emerging as a unique artist on stage and in the recording studio. She also spends a lot of time in the kitchen and in the yoga studio.

Sing for your Supper- Valentine’s Brunch from Suzi Ragsdale on Vimeo.

Find Suzi’s recipe for grilled pork tenderloin in this link.

And if you ever need to feed 70 people, try her recipe for Silver Moon Chili.

Suzi Ragsdale is also WAY into yoga, as evidenced by this picture. She says she’d like to arrange a tour of posh spas around the country combining a yoga class, homemade dinner and a musical performance. Sounds perfect for her.

Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – March 13-14, 2010

HOUR ONE

The Pacific is a 10-part miniseries that portrays the real-life journeys of Marines fighting across the Pacific Theater during World War II.  Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are the producers of the HBO program which is based on the book also titled The Pacific by historian Hugh Ambrose. He talks with Bob about the stories from his book, which is the official companion to the miniseries premiering this weekend on HBO.

In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of Robert A. Heinlein.  He won four Hugo Awards during his 50-year career as a science fiction writer. Born and raised in Missouri, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929 and did aeronautical engineering for the Navy during World War II. Heinlein’s books include Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.

HOUR TWO

For the first time, the best essays of Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss have been collected into a single volume. Into the Story brings together essays about Bill Clinton’s childhood in Little Rock, Barack Obama’s rise through the dreams of his mother, Jesse Jackson’s relationship with Martin Luther King and many other stories by Maraniss about his journey through life, politics, sports and loss. 

Suzi Ragsdale has sung background vocals on more than 60 albums including Whisper My Name by Randy Travis, but recording her own music has been a slower process.  This year, the songwriter, vocalist and pianist has released a double album.  The project and the first CD is titled Best Regards, an eclectic set of Ragsdale’s most recent tunes. Disc two, Less of the Same, is a mix of songs written over the course of her career.