In 2013, St. Petersburg College student Robert Lamb walked from Seattle to Key West, 3,500 miles in just under seven months.
During the longest, loneliest stretches, the 26-year-old movie nerd and aspiring screenwriter passed the time by listening to audio books and episodic fiction podcasts.
Lamb had his mind blown, he says, by the immersive experience of the podcast.
“When you read a book, everything’s in your mind — you’re picturing everything,” he says. “But with audio dramas, you get to take it a step further. With sound effects and music, and people acting. It’s a little bit more movie-ish, but you’re still picturing it yourself.”
A fictionalized, serialized account of his cross-country walk — it’s called Story — is one of seven podcasts Lamb now regularly writes and produces under the moniker Seven Lamb Productions (web hosted by blogtalkradio).
The horror serial Paralyzed is his most popular; to date, it’s been downloaded more than 175,000 times.
And Lamb, who pays the bills by dealing poker at St. Petersburg's Derby Lane, is developing a new skill every day.
“Instead of submitting my scripts to Hollywood — which is like one in a million shot — at least I get to tell my stories, and it’s free for listeners,” he explains. “And while I have to spend a lot of time doing it, I still really enjoy it.”
The word podcast is a holdover from those long-ago days when everybody had an iPod, but the definition hasn’t really changed.
“It’s really just audio on demand,” says Sheila Cowley, a professional audio engineer who produces several local podcasts. “It’s audio storytelling, when you want it. And you pick and choose what you want to listen to. It’s completely user-driven.”
Fiction, like the work of Robert Lamb, is only one drawer in the big podcast desk. Cowley and her sound-designer husband Matt also write and produce audio tours for museums and art exhibits.
Sheila Cowley is the technical brain behind Arts In, the local-interest interview series hosted by Creative Pinellas executive director Barbara St. Clair.
The on-demand interview series, which began in late 2016 as part of a reorganization of Creative Pinellas, features St. Clair talking with local artists about their processes.
“I never thought of myself as a podcast person in particular,” St. Clair laughs. “But I wouldn’t want to sit and watch somebody talking at me for an hour or half an hour. Listening to a podcast when you’re driving is very satisfying.”
Indeed, you can listen to a podcast in a car, on a plane or on a bus stop bench (or while you’re walking across America, for that matter).
“It’s convenient,” Cowley says, and “it’s also very intimate. And so different from what radio is now. Nobody will tune in at 5:30 p.m. on a particular day, on a particular station, to hear something. You listen when you want to listen.”
Former registered nurse Cindy Stovall hosts Beauty and the Burg (Helium Radio Network), a wide-ranging interview show about the Bay area arts scene. Recent interviewees have includes Stageworks Theatre artistic director Karla Hartley and actress Vickie Daignault, discussing their extraordinary recent production of The Year of Magical Thinking.
Tampa-based Communion After Dark is a weekly podcast that spins and discusses new gothic, industrial, synth pop and power noise music; named in honor of a Sonic Youth album, Daydream Nation finds locals Shannon McCarthy and Eric Crosby talking about records they like (“basically a book club, but for records,” they like to say).
Shameless plug department: The considerable culture (and coolness) of the Tampa Bay area is also the bailiwick of Creative Loafing’s own podcast, alluringly titled The CLAP (that’s Creative Loafing Audio Podcast to you). In this series, the editorial staff discusses current events, what's in the new issue, and whatever happens to cross their minds as they sit around the conference table and cut up (editor's note: We also eat local and new food and drinks).
The Clap is produced by Ybor City’s Cigar City Management, founded and operated by Randy Ojeda and Jason Solanes. The company is involved with graphic design, marketing, promotion and a half-dozen other client services for its modest stable of Bay area bands, along with some based elsewhere.
Launching a Cigar City Radio podcast, says Ojeda, was a no-brainer.
“We realized there wasn’t a music-focused interview podcast in the area,” he explains, “something like they would do on NPR. So we saw a good opportunity to come in do a cool show, and it kept going from there.”
Launched in the fall of 2016, Cigar City Radio has so far produced more than 50 episodes, with Ojeda and Solanes chewing over local music news and interviewing visiting luminaries (past guests have includes B-52 Cindy Wilson, Replacement Tommy Stinson, Goatwhore’s Ben Falgoust and Florida Soul author John Capouya).
“In our management business,” Ojeda says, “we’re constantly talking with musicians and we realized how unique and interesting it is to be a touring musician, and to travel the country in this kind of way. It was ‘Man, these stories need to be recorded for people to hear.’”
Solanes agrees that Cigar City Radio fills a void.
“From my perspective, cataloguing music — as it’s seen at this moment in time — is important,” he says. “Whether we’re interviewing a rock star from the ‘80s, or someone that’s a small musician now that maybe will do something big — maybe won’t — or someone that’s big now. We’re seeing kind of a gap in that, as far as it relates to Tampa.”
Although the Cigar City guys have full plates with their boutique management company, they put a lot of time and effort into the podcasts, and have been rewarded with strong download numbers, from all over the country. And there’s a major expansion coming soon, they say.
They’re performing a public service, they’re having a blast, and if things keep improving, the gods of advertising will discover Cigar City Radio and they’ll begin to turn a profit.
Not that podcasting as a startup is prohibitively expensive.
“If you were serious about it, if you wanted to jump in with both feet, you could actually do it for less than $1,000 comfortably,” Solanes says. “With full production software, full interface and full microphones.”
You provide the talent, the ambition — and the voice.
Bill DeYoung was born in St. Pete and spent the first 22 years of his life here. After a long time as an arts and entertainment journalist at newspapers around Florida (plus one in Savannah, Ga.) he returned to his hometown in 2014. He is the author of Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought it Down and the forthcoming Phil Gernhard, Record Man. Learn more here.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.