Clockwise: Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway; What’s the Team with ACP, hosted by Elliott Paige; Monocle on Saturday hosted by Georgina Godwin; Santa Fe Opera’s Key Change, hosted by Andrea Fineberg
(Santa Fe, NM) - Are you sick of your screens yet? Have once high live video grooming standards fallen considerably? It’s understandable. Given how often we already engage in virtual consulting across various live video platforms, we prefer often a good old fashioned phone call over looking directly into someone’s pupils.
In the same way, podcasts have become much more enjoyable and the go to necessity here at OI HQ.
We enjoy quite a few pods, some of which are niche, political, or fall outside the intersection of opera, brand, tech, culture and global innovation. However, we’ve stayed on brand for these recommendations, sharing a short alphabetical list of pods that have sustained us through 2020 up to the current moment.
Brenda, Call Me
Our first entry is our most recent favorite. And we’re a little surprised because even though we’ve always enjoyed drag artists, we’re not Rupaul’s Drag Race diehards nor very conversant on new, happening artists beyond those we already follow on Instagram, Having said that, IG was how I discovered Brenda, Call Me. Generally speaking, it’s a 100% NSFW, sex-positive conversation between two drag queens who also happen to be best friends. Courtney (“caught in the”) Act and Vanity are long established in home country Australia and quite famous internationally, too. But more than a few people around the world have asked me if I’ve heard this pod yet, which indicates a broad global audience that’s finding and loving them, too.
Centered on specific topics or a guest interview, it’s probably quite structured, but the back and forth always feels real and organic - both are excellent conversationalists. Yes, there’s lots of raw BTS chat, but Courtney and Vanity are, first and foremost, shrewd business people, so useable creative industry insights found here; come for the famous drag queen worldview but stay for the personal anecdotes, which are often scream out loud funny, surprisingly poignant or both.
Fun facts: I had the pleasure of seeing Courtney Act perform with Cheyanne Jackson and the San Francisco Symphony in 2014, which Wikipedia states as the first time a drag queen had ever sung with a full orchestra (please fact check us). Courtney also starred in DJ Dan Murphy’s 2014 Sydney Mardi Gras promo video, which featured a remixed sample of Maria Callas. It’s been a pleasure getting to know Vanity through BCM - I absolutely remember seeing her perform right before I left Sydney. Her beautiful candor during a pod that veered into body image and body dysmorphia is something I’ll always remember. It takes two to tango in in this special BCM world, crafted by two artists at the top of their game. A candid, eye-popping delight with Australian accents. More, please.
Why do we listen? We lived in Sydney several years ago, as part of an ongoing 25 year love affair with Australia. Given that Sydney remains central to Australian LGBTQ life, we relate to many of the people, places and experiences that come up during the pod. But at its core, Brenda, Call Me captures two best friends explaining how they manage show business careers anchored in the art of illusion.
Take away: Save the use of classical voice, how different is that from opera? Listen below.
Key Change
We’ve called Santa Fe our opera home for several years. When we heard that the company was thinking about launching a podcast, we knew it’d be good (it’s far better than ‘good,’ trust). In short, Key Change is the perfect, real-time brand extension of SFO’s Opera for All Voices, an initiative founded by a consortium of opera companies to create innovative, compelling and portable new works. We called OFAV an opera startup a few years ago, but an opera “incubator” for bold, new works is more accurate. Founded in 2018, its third season in progress, we’re enjoying the journeys Ms. Andrea Fellows Fineberg and her guests have taken us on, delivering an NPR-esque vibe with humor and the most perfect pauses. This season’s episodes have had a finger on the pulse of everything happening in the world, catching us up from the before times to now, going deep on social justice, immigration and our state of union, all in a matter of fact way, with heart and honesty. From the Apple Music podcast notes:
“Opera for All Voices (OFAV) began as a consortium of North American opera companies committed to co-commissioning and co-producing new operatic works for audiences of all ages that bear the same artistic integrity and depth of storytelling as mainstage works. Over several years it has grown in its mission to tell "stories of our time." Follow host Andrea Fellows Fineberg from The Santa Fe Opera and OFAV collaborators and stakeholders as we explore the process, the context, and the story of commissioning and producing new operas in America.”
Why do we listen? We’re hard-pressed to find another major company podcast that focuses on the new works it incubates while simultaneously approaching today’s hot button social issues. With a beautiful frankness that consistently leaves us hopeful, Key Change is where art, music and shared experience live.
One more thing. A quick question to Canadian Opera Company Communications. For the love of branding, please let us know why CoC also launched a “Key Change” podcast. If Opera Innovation is noticing this odd, unforced error, others probably are, too. Unfortunately, the Instagram search isn’t kind.
Listen to Key Change’s most recent episode below. Key Change returns this summer after a short hiatus.
Monocle on Saturday | Monocle on Sunday
Although both of these pods are from Monocle’s M24 Radio mothership at Midori House London and Zurich, respectively, they differ greatly. Monocle on Saturday is hosted by the effervescent Georgina Godwin, who spotlights the week’s biggest stories in Saturday’s UK papers, reviewing front pages with various correspondents, editors, consultants in the UK and globally. Monocle Editor in Chief Andrew Tuck’s weekly column tends to be a bit introspective while remaining global, which makes for beautiful and sometimes poignant storytelling. And Contributing Editor’s Andrew Mueller’s satirical news reporting is something to look forward to every weekend. Given Monocle’s focus on culture, design and all things geopolitical, Georgina and her guests thoughtfully share stories though these lenses. Continuing in that vein, Monocle Magazine publisher, founder and OG entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé holds court in Zurich with Monocle on Sunday, usually with a larger panel of Monocle journalists and regulars - some in-studio, others from their transcontinental postings - which often feels like having a seat at a weekly, fabulously diverse working lunch in a cool brasserie that might migrate to someone’s lake chalet at any moment. Last week’s episode was heavy on Eurovision, but we also learned about the global shortage of timber due to COVID, which, interestingly, played directly into a client brand’s real-world increase in construction costs.
Why do we listen? Monocle is a critical global publication. If the BBC, The Economist, Architectural Digest, Advertising Age, Inc. and WIRED were a UK-based publication/digital media company/broadcaster, this would be it. Monocle - "keeping an eye and ear on the world" - was launched in 2007 "to provide a briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more." Both of these pods are required listening for anyone building a global career in the arts, business, design, finance, communications and beyond. Each deftly demonstrates why geopolitics matter, encouraging listeners to enlarge their worldview. Learn more here.
Listen to the latest episodes below!
PIVOT
We regularly listen to all of our picks, but if we had to pick only one, this would be it. We’ve been listening to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot Podcast since its September 2018 inception - unbashed fan boy found here. Fun fact: pre-Pivot, I met Kara Swisher - arguably tech’s most famous journalist - while she getting out of an Uber on Post Street in San Francisco. Once spotted, I said a quiet hello and we proceeded to have one of those fun, IYNYN kind of conversations San Franciscans have - I’ll cherish it always. Scott, like Kara, has been pivotal to my understanding of brand, brand strategy and business and a Day One OG regular on my Twitter feed since 2009. Together, these shamans of tech, business, popular culture and politics are heard religiously twice a week at my house, in my car or anywhere with wireless reception (new pods drop every Tuesday and Friday). Speaking to the latest tech and business stories, sometimes with killer friends of Pivot, “Junglecat” and “The Dawg” break down everything in understandable terms, conversations peppered with humor, mutual admiration, disagreements, mini-rants and more humor. Also where you’ll learn what SPACs and NFTs are, how Silicon Valley really works and find that definition of crypto you’ll use forever.
Why do we listen? We think we’ve done a pretty good job of explaining that already (this section of the blog literally wrote itself in 10 minutes), but for people working in the opera industry, to not know about what Kara and Scott discuss is a liability. Too often, opera has styled itself a siloed experience only understood by the people who work within the industry and those who admire, support and fund it. This must end. It’s a business sector / industry like any other and absolutely intersected by tech, brand, culture and global innovation, the basis for the Opera Innovation platform. But this isn’t about us, opera world friends. Pivot Podcast will absolutely help expand your understanding of how everything we cited can be and should be connected to your chosen art form. Make it so.
Helpful hint: Try to remain current because these pods are directly influenced by the tech and business newscycle - what might be true this week may not be true nex.t
What’s The Tea with ACP
We’re excited to round out our picks with the fabulous, fun and always on point #WhatsTheTeaWithACP, hosted by tenor Elliott Paige in collaboration with Aural Compass Projects. We had the distinct honor or being a WTT guest on the August 30, 2020 Facebook Live, joining Elliott and YAC Tracker founder & tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts for a conversation on “the Novel-TEA of…innovative ideas in opera.” Elliott moderated a far-reaching, in-depth discussion powered by a series of questions, our group exploring respective projects, as well as everyone’s thoughts on the the future of opera - listen here.
Why do we listen? Through humor, frank discussion and his own brand of gravitas, Elliott consistently creates interesting, touching and insightful conversation with his guests, discussing their work and success, but also, when pertinent, how to be actively anti-racist, the absolute need for increased artist equity and why social justice must be addressed, voiced within the business of opera and across American culture as a whole. Like Key Change and a few other select, pandemic-era podcasts, Aural Compass Projects’ WTT successfully reads the room (if that room is the US opera industry). It also has its own bespoke theme song! As we’ve previously stated in OI blogs and across social media, the pandemic is like the meteor that hit the earth and did away with the dinosaurs. We’re grateful that podcasts like WTT continue to ask US opera’s most pressing questions, providing the best answers and insights possible in that moment. BRAVI.
Listen to highlights of Elliott’s discussion with Soprano Leah Hawkins HERE.