RiYL
RiYL
Brian Heater
Episode 064: Dan Kennedy
1 hour 17 minutes Posted Jul 30, 2014 at 3:49 pm.
0:00
1:17:47
Download MP3
Show notes
Over its 17 year existence, The Moth has shaped the age-old art of
storytelling into something uniquely its own, a style as instantly
recognizable as any music style or movie genre. And like a great song or
movie, there’s something in a perfectly executed Moth story that leaves
the listener feeling as though they could never imitate such a perfect
feat. Of course, if the organization’s show runners are to be
believed, just about anyone with a story and the willingness to be
coached by a few professionals can do precisely that. And that, really,
is one of The Moth’s greatest attributes: the ability to balance
populism with transcendence. In some sense, the podcast’s host Dan
Kennedy embodies exactly that, at least the way he tells the story:
jobless, furnitureless, recently dumped and newly sober, stumbling into a
storytelling night so many years ago.  Until I heard perform the
story of a magazine-assigned trip to Indonesia to search for an elusive
nine-foot reticulated python on the Moth’s weekly podcast a couple of
months back, I knew little about the guy beyond what he sounds like
attempt to convince a large internet audience to redeem an Audible
coupon code. Turns out, just as one would hope from the host of The
Moth's weekly podcast, Kennedy is a man brimming with stories — and over
the years, he’s gotten pretty good at telling them. In fact,
he’s got a few books to his name. There’s Rock On, which revisits the 18
months he spent working marketing for Atlantic Records and Loser Goes
First, a memoir of Kennedy’s uncanny knack for stumbling into
interesting situations — not unlike the one that brought him to the Moth
in the first place. But first a conversation about Roger Daltrey's mic technique.