This series of posts covers my long, beloved history interacting with the medium of radio, including the music that flowed through the airwaves.

My participation tonight in the eleventh annual staging of Reunion Weekend at my undergraduate alma mater has spurred me to reminiscence about my various dalliances with radio over the years. Each of the four hours of airtimes allotted to me will be devoted to one of those individual era, which means the last sixty minutes will find me casting back to days spent in a certain Florida basement. After I hung up my headphones and exited the commercial radio station where I drew a paycheck for a time, I assumed that my days in broadcasting were over. A few years later, however, I found my way back to the the part of the radio dial where I feel most at home when I was hired to be the advisor to student-run radio station WPRK, which is located at Rollins College and broadcasts at 91.5 on the FM band. Sometimes when it seems like the book is closed, there are actually more chapters to come.

Although most of my personal tales about broadcasting tend to revolve around the music I played or the programs I participated in, the truth about my time at WPRK is nothing was more meaningful to me than the relationships I forged with the students who were part of the organization. I can certainly expound on the artists, tracks, and albums that I discovered while living on the air in Winter Park; I have before and undoubtedly will again. What can really get me going at great length, though, is the opportunity to tout the creativity, insight, thoughtfulness, dedication, and accomplishment of the students who were the real leaders at that station. I was only a success to the degree that I helped them fulfill their goals.

That typed, the conceit shared by this week’s posts is a single song that is representative of each slice of my radio time, so let’s pick one. Towards the tail end of my tenure at the station, a CD with a bright yellow cover showed up in on the main studio’s new releases shelf. The cover featured the band in standing in strong, striking poses while garbed in polka-dotted frocks. The styling promised retro-pop gems, and the music of the shiny, spinning disc fulfilled that implicit pledge. This was exactly the sort of the obscure gem that I was likely to miss away from the blessed confines of a station located at the left end of the dial with devotion to celebrating music that had practically no hope of breaking through into the mainstream, and I joyfully played cuts from We Are the Pipettes nearly every time I was afforded some time behind the microphone. Every song on the album is terrific. “Pull Shapes” is ever better than that. It’s pop perfection.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Radio Days” tag.