This isn’t a story about fire and brimstone.   I’m not going to tell you about my woeful transgression with purposeful melancholy.  I won’t weave a tale of MuZZy’s raging descent into Hell to purge himself of sin. And  nor will I confess my engagements with dark and sultry arts in the shed behind my house.

No, today I’m going to do something very different.  I’m going to tell you about radio: about how radio is structured and layered and produced to tell a story, about how Ira Glass just wiggles effortlessly into your mind to plant plump and insightful considerations, and about how the little intricacies of radio careful pull on your heart strings.

And this is really important.  I’m being graded on it.  It would be heresy to turn the tables. They would be leave me out to dry.  I’d be hanged and quartered, flayed from head to toe, roasted alive! No, worse, I’d be viciously branded and disconnected from the cyber world, forced to roam the physical realm marauding innocent homes for something…

Well, I won’t do that.

House on Loon Lakes captures listeners from the very start.  The tale is a real-life Hardy Boy story.  A group of boys in New Hampshire venture into an abandoned house.  Underneath Adam Becker’s story of the fateful day of 1977 are series of tracks and gentle sounds that bring the listener in.  Creeping through the broken window and entering a place frozen in time means so much more when a eerie track plays along with his voice.  And then the narration stops but the track goes on in sweltering congruency.  Between the bits of narration there is dialogue from an interview splicing the story up to change the pace and flow.

Pace is critical.  Listeners must be brought in again and again.  Different voices, different tracks, different sounds and different levels all serve as a means to bring the listener back and to hold the narrative afloat.

Radio is about storytelling but storytelling isn’t just about the story.  Storytelling is an art.   An art that must capture the listener so that the listener doesn’t ever question their listening of the story.

This American Life is a master at it.  Ira leaves a hook and bait out to catch readers from the start, adding mystery and intrigue to the narrative.  And then once the story begins, there is action and meticulous precision in timing music and voices to push the listener around.  Keep you on your toes.  Keep you wanting more even if it isn’t the narration but the gentle ebb and flow of soft music and hard voices.

Sometimes you can’t even remember what you started to listen to.  That you just floated in space through this ethereal place, unaware of your own senses and thoughts.  Other times there is frightening reality to the tale; electrified imaginations prickling your mind again and again.

Radio is powerful.  Storytelling is powerful.

Fire and brimstone.