It seemed like the most minor of mysteries, the kind a friend or spouse might indulge before gently changing the subject: A man who can’t remember the name or artist of a favorite song from his youth struggles to find either online.
But the closer PJ Vogt looked at the case (Could a person remember a song that never existed?), the deeper he sank into a mind-bending rabbit hole.
What lay at the bottom — past detours into the nature of obsession, the science of memory and the forgotten history of 1990s alt-rock — is the subject of a recent viral episode of “Reply All,” a popular podcast hosted by Vogt and Alex Goldman, that the Guardian called “perhaps the best-ever episode of any podcast.”
Vogt, 34, and Goldman, 40, have made a specialty of exploring the strange and ineffable experience of life in the internet age. When they started the podcast in 2014 — adapted from their earlier New York public radio show, “TLDR” — it was sometimes described as being about the internet, a simplistic characterization that reflected the relative innocence of the time as much as the self-consciously nerdy sensibilities of the hosts.
But in more recent years, as increasingly ambitious episodes have taken listeners inside telephone scam rings in India and to a maximum-security prison in Illinois, the show has become much harder to pin down.
It’s also found a growing audience. Since the release of the forgotten-rock-song episode, “The Case of the Missing Hit,” on March 5, the number of overall listeners to the show is up 35 percent across platforms, according to a spokeswoman for Spotify, the owner of Gimlet Media, which produces “Reply All.” (The company doesn’t release listenership data for individual episodes.)
I spoke to Vogt and Goldman about their work and making “The Case of the Missing Hit,” which involved a trip to Los Angeles to record a new version of the song, a Hail Mary call to the Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page and an abandoned foray into the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics.
These are edited (and spoiler-free) excerpts from the conversation.
This story started with an email from a listener named Tyler. What made you think it should be an episode of “Reply All”?
PJ VOGT I think Alex and I both get really frustrated when something should be solvable and it’s not, or when it upsets our idea about how the world should work. Either this song should exist or the guy made it up. The fact that there was some evidence that it existed and yet it seemingly hadn’t been documented anywhere really bothered me.
I also related to both the little problem of having a song stuck in your head that you can’t find and the bigger problem of having a snag in your brain that won’t go away until you fix it.
In the episode, we follow along as you run into a number of dead-ends. How do you balance creating and maintaining suspense with delivering an ending that justifies the journey?
VOGT I think if you can solve the problem too easily, or if solving it doesn’t teach you anything, than it’s not a good radio story. With this one, things just kept escalating. At one point I talked to a quantum physicist because Tyler had this theory that he’d somehow slipped into an alternate universe. I think you want to take the listener into an interesting world so that they feel good about spending time there. We eventually realized that this one was secretly a documentary about late ’90s alt-rock.
ALEX GOLDMAN As long as you’re learning something about the world, we find that the process of reporting is generally pretty interesting. There are times when we’ll pursue something that ends up being both a dead end and boring, and those are the stories that don’t make it to air.
Why do you think this episode struck a chord the way that it did?
VOGT I think a lot of people just really related to Tyler’s experience, including me. Part of what I think happened was that I was in a bit of a rough patch personally when I was working on it — I’d just been in a hall-of-fame-level bad breakup — and this problem was so delicious and weird that I just kind of transferred all of my frustrations onto it. In a similar way, I think the episode became something for anyone else who felt stuck and needed something to focus on.
What do you think it is about your show, or maybe about podcasting in general, that allows for that kind of personal, discursive storytelling?
GOLDMAN We’ve been doing the show together for a long time, and I think the continuity of PJ and I’s relationship is part of what keeps people interested. Because they hear us talking in their heads, it becomes this strangely intimate thing.
VOGT They trust our curiosity and that we’re not going to waste their time. I also think that in podcasting, more than other kinds of media, you can be up front with the audience. You can say: “This is what we’re thinking about right now. Here is what we made you. We hope you like it. And, if not, we’ll have something else next week.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
