When I got to my college radio station, in the late nineteen-eighties, I was anxious to start discovering artists who were entirely new to me. But I also appreciated the safety of those artists I’d heard repeated on the radio over and over again, even if it was with only one or two songs. Even more than that, I was somewhat proud that college radio could serve as a safe landing space for gifted performers who’d taken a spin with commercial success but were ultimately deemed too iconoclastic to become recurring residents on those parts of the dials. It matched … Continue reading One for Friday: Todd Rundgren, “The Want of a Nail”

A little more than eight years ago, I began working at a unique little college nestled in the Swannanoa Valley in Western North Carolina. Surrounded by mountains, equipped with a full working farm, and populated by students who came to the place knowing full well that their education was going to necessarily include fifteen hours each week devoted to keeping the operations of the college going, in every facet from office work to heavy-duty landscaping to cleaning floors and toilets. I’d come from an institution of higher learning with a fair number of enrollees who were just checking boxes in … Continue reading One for Friday: Dan Rousseau, “Good Morning Swannanoa”