A few weeks ago I went back to Pennsylvania (again! for the third time in November alone!) to visit my dad and do a guest DJ spot on his Wednesday-morning radio show (shout out to 89.7 WDVR for serving our river towns with great community radio).
It was a fun time. I love being in studio, and I also love live radio for some reason. Even when it requires me to get up at four o’clock in the morning.
Fun fact about me, I set my alarms as though I am a person who can oversleep. I’m a morning person and don’t use alarms for normal work mornings, but when I do need to set one I almost always wake up before it goes off. Case in point, none of these alarms got a chance to make a sound. I was already downstairs drinking coffee and frying eggs.
I’ve done radio shows and podcasts before, both live and prerecorded, but this was my first music show. I learned a lot! First of all, an hour goes by way more quickly than you think it will. I ended up playing a total of eleven songs and forty-six minutes of music. Not much at all when you think about it. Just enough to leave me pining for another show.
I also had to do a lot more time math than I expected that early in the morning. The station cuts to a break at the top of the hour and if you’re still talking or playing music in the studio, you will get cut off. DJs also have to insert a few breaks throughout their shows. Between these breaks and our conversation about the music, we couldn’t really do the math ahead of time. I had to make sure I wrapped up a set of songs gracefully at the top and bottom of the hour. Fortunately I pulled it off thanks to my dad’s suggestion to insert a few extra songs at the end of my playlist. As we approached the end of my show, I removed one track (Miley Cyrus’ Wonder Woman) to ensure I had time to feature local Baltimore artist Katie Callahan‘s Low Tide (hear us get to that at 1:19:00). Then I swapped my original closing track (Brand New Colony by The Postal Service) for a slightly shorter one (Neko Case’s Hold On, Hold On) to give us time for a sign off before the bottom-of-the-hour break. Having a few extra options in the hopper kept me from scrambling when my timing was a few minutes off. Whew!
Anyway, I included a recording of the full show at the top and bottom of this post if you want to take a listen. I’m biased but I think my dad and I have pretty good taste in music.
Some useful timestamps:
- My Take the Mic segment begins around 28:30
- Manchester music scene highlight in honor of the Oasis Live ’25 tour around 42:50
- Local artist spotlight (Katie Callahan) around 1:19:00
And the raw playlist in its final form:
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