An Indie Podcast That's A Feast For The Ears, The Soul and The Mind
Nightwalking, from Bianca Giaever's Constellation Prize, is a beautiful and unique compote of sound and ideas. Stay to the end for a convo with John DeLore about how they collaborated on sound design
My faith in humanity has been restored. Bianca Giaever has her part in all of this…and we’ll allow part of this to rest on the return of Constellation Prize, her indie podcast partnered with The Believer Magazine, a quarterly literary magazine that has been around since 2003 and is now part of the McSweeny’s diaspora.
Constellation Prize reminds us that despite the giant industry shifts, the mass layoffs, the cancellation of prize-winning shows, the consolidation and migration of feeds, the influx of celebrities, there are still, and can be, and should be, truly independent podcasts.
And that they can be excellent, not a pittance of what others do. And that they go on to thrive and do all of the things they are supposed to.
Constellation Prize, and Nightwalks, remind me of the necessity of this.
It just takes some vision, a mountain of work (over multiple years), a collaboration of art and ideas, a few ounces of risk, and the desire to actually just go out and do it.
But without it, without them, the rest of the landscape feels a bit bleak, soulless, and slightly margarine-tinted (not in a Wes Anderson sort-of-way). This is how this industry, this storytelling format, this ‘new medium’ was built. And it’s nice to see small pockets where it stays this way. And that the other pieces in the puzzle can also innovate to make it happen.
It all began with SPAM
After the cold open where Bianca’s grandfather admits he’s scared of the dark, tracing the roots of why her family left religion, and a refrain of the early pandemic days, she admits where the idea for this project came from. It was, actually, a spammy email from the PR agent for Terry Tempest Williams, writer, thinker, activist, and currently Writer-In-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School.
I was listening to this episode on a day walk, in my local park, watching the trees flower and sneezing from the pollen in the air. Briefly, I thought of my recent spam:
Hello! I’m Azim Hashim, an Indian business tycoon, investor and philanthropist. I’m the chairman of Wipro Limited. I gave away 25 per cent of my personal wealth to charity…I have decided to donate $1,800,000 US Dollars to you*
* actual email from yesterday
Terry herself admitted she was embarrassed and slightly horrified by the ask to be “a guest” on Bianca’s podcast. Because it’s just not that sort of thing…the ‘guesting’ universe is deep and wide; this is not one of the wells.
Here’s the first lesson to divine from this podcast: take the spam, put it through an ideas and opportunity filter, allow some imagination, and look to see what pops out the other side.
What emerged was an idea to undertake a collaborative project, between two strangers, who lived on opposite sides of the country, lived in different ways, born in different decades; but like the rest of us, could do little else during the pandemic but go for walks.
Maybe we are reaching the art explosion part of the pandemic, where we can finally make some sense of it, and art is the only machine that reliably knows how to do that.
The terms of the experiment were set: Bianca and Terry would both spend 10 days going for nightwalks, leading up to the full moon. They would walk, and then return home, write a letter to the other person, and then record themselves reading the letter to the other person. In that order.
It was a magical experiment, with no clear goal in mind, other than to find meaning in what the meaning of what it all (perhaps) meant.
If it sounds vague, it wasn’t. This project had rigor. It had a schedule and a process. There were rules. There was an agenda. It mapped onto the contours of the world. And because of this, because it hung on something quite clear and obvious, it brought magic along with it.
This post is structured into three parts. You’ve finished the first. The second is where Bianca answers my questions by email. The third part is about how Bianca and John DeLore collaborated on sound design. John DeLore left me the most wonderful voice memo, about how they collaborated, and I’m going to include bits of that too. Stay to the end for this gold.
The following is an email interview with Bianca about the process of making Nightwalking.
Samantha Hodder: You launched Season 1 of Constellation Prize right as the pandemic began. The series begins by talking about how you felt lonely - you were ahead of the curve! I’m guessing this was all a coincidence (it would have taken you longer to make that series than a few months and it was launched in July 2020). How was the loneliness that you felt different by the time you made Nightwalking (maybe this started right after it launched?)
Bianca Giaever: Yes, it was a coincidence. I think by the time I made Nightwalking, loneliness was something that everyone was talking about more openly, having all experienced the isolation of the pandemic. So I felt even more confident that it was a good theme to be grappling with in the podcast.
My editor (Daniel Guillemette) and I went on a journey with how much to discuss the pandemic in the season. While we were making it (2021-2022) we were deep in the pandemic, and we were like… we are so sick of talking and thinking about the pandemic.
But then once we reached 2023, we began to feel that it was nice to make art that was set in the quarantine, as a way to start processing that experience and what it meant. This is a piece that was naturally born out of the creative restraints of that historic moment.
SH: How did the collaboration come about with The Believer Magazine? I love the indie spirit of this, very open to collaborative ideas and artfully executed. Let this be a signal out there to lots of other indie-pubs that this sort of like-minded collaboration makes sense for them too! How does this make sense for both of you?
BG: It’s important to say that The Believer Magazine doesn’t have a lot of money, and I don’t get paid to make this. I feel like that’s what makes the whole thing work. I’ve written for the magazine before, and I pitched them this podcast. I feel we are both getting something from the arrangement.
Obviously they get a podcast; I get editorial support from their editor, affiliation with their terrific magazine and brand, help promoting the podcast, and a small sum of money that I put toward paying the musicians and sound mixer.
SH: I enjoyed how you left the early awkward details in there, which allowed for a resolve by the end. Did you see it that way?
BG: Yeah, I mean embarking on an intimate art project with a stranger is awkward at first, for sure. I wanted to capture that awkwardness. And even though I was playing it cool, there was a power dynamic in the sense that Terry is much older and more famous and successful than I am.
Keeping moments like my weird breathing while she compliments me felt honest, and as we kept writing I grew (somewhat) more comfortable.
SH: You went from Hey, to Dear, to Dearest, to Love, to I Love You, as the letters progressed. I felt like I was also witnessing a love affair of sorts.
BG: She addressed every single letter to me “Dearest Bianca” from the very beginning to the end. I think I was “Dear Terry” pretty much the whole time. Then she progressed to “I love you” and I believe I said things like “lots of love” or “sending love.” So I was always one step behind her in that sense.
That said, I deeply admire Terry’s ability to give and show love. It’s something I’m always trying to replicate.
SH: Why did you end the series back in New York? Why was it important to you to nightwalk in both of the locations where you lived that year?
BG: My editor Daniel Guillemette told me I should end the series back in New York — it was 100% his idea for me to go nightwalking in the city and interview strangers. This idea came out of lots of conversations — I distinctly remember him lying backwards on my living room couch, and us racking our brains trying to figure out what this podcast is really about.
It ended up really fitting with the first season to be back on the streets of New York, interviewing strangers. And it helped open up the story to include the rest of the world, after three episodes of being mostly confined to the voices of me and Terry. In a “hero’s journey” sense, it also made sense to end up back in the real world, applying what I learned from Terry.
I wrestled with whether it was inauthentic to not say in the last episode “I went nightwalking in the city because my editor and I thought it would make a good ending.” But saying like that wouldn’t really fit with the style of the storytelling, and what preceded it.
SH: What clarity came to you on an urban nightwalk, rather than the Vermont ones?
BG: It helped make extra clear that I would never be exactly like Terry in the ways that I had initially hoped, and that I would probably never find the existence of God in nature the way she did.
That said, there is a glimmer of magic in the act of interviewing strangers that continues to be the closest thing to God that I have experienced. It also helped confirm that I was not the only person wrestling with these questions. Pretty much every person I asked on the street had an answer to these questions, was excited to talk about them, and I was excited by the diversity of responses.
SH: I believe you also work at the NYTimes as an audio producer? Is this full-time? Share with others how you managed to fit this project into a full-time schedule? Lots of folks are pushing to do these sorts of projects on the side, after hours. What pushed you to pull it through the finish line?
BG: I was full-time at the NYT as an audio producer until fall of 2021. Now I’m a freelancer for them, technically my designation is called “casual employee.” So the recording and early drafts of this podcast were all made while I was full time. But it was also the pandemic, and I was single, so it was possible to be working a lot.
It’s important to note that this podcast probably would have been MUCH more difficult were I not able to make a living directing film commercials after I left NYT. Thanks to that income stream, I was able to dedicate a couple of months full time to finishing these edits. It’s sad that there’s not more financial support for indie podcasts, who knows what beautiful voices and stories we’re missing out on.
SIDENOTE: If you would like to donate directly to this project, as Bianca suggests in the last episode is the way to sustainably make these sorts of projects, please go here.
SH: If someone remembers one thing from this series, what would you wish that to be?
BG: I don’t really care what people remember, I think there are so many things people can hopefully take away from it. Maybe it ends up being something that a stranger said on the street, something Terry wrote to me, a moment of my narration, etc.
Hopefully what people take away reflects what they’re looking for.
I pulled all of this together very quickly. And so when I reached out to Bianca, who put me in touch with the sound designer John DeLore who worked on this project, I realized that I had hit on something here which was very precious and quite delicious.
For a newsletter that likes to focus on craft, which is often something that’s very hard to pin down and define, to uncover a conversation between two collaborators, on something as difficult to articulate as sound design, which actually makes sense and also provides actual examples, it was just too good to pass up.
Bear with me for this long post. It’s going to be worth your time…
Here was my original question to Bianca:
SH: Nightwalking is beautifully sound designed; John DeLore is so talented (I went to his panel at Third Coast, maybe in 2018, so interesting…he got me thinking about sound in new ways).
Tell me more about how this collaboration worked in practical terms. Did you script it all (because I imagine some of it would read like a screenplay). Or did he come up with ideas and send you off to record different things? Or were they already in the can and then he edited them into their existing format? Examples would be great.
Bianca: He began listening to my BAD drafts about a year before we started the final mixing process, and he gave a round of purely editorial feedback. Then I went on a big bike trip, came back, and finally finished my drafts.
He didn’t start sound designing until we entered the sound mixing process, so he was doing both simultaneously. At that point, I had already handed him completed drafts with sound design in them — I had reversed bat noises to make the swishing sounds of the council, pitch-shifted my voice to be “the council,” [listen to ep 1 to hear “the council”]
John just made everything better, played with the timing, and added his own ideas. Then I would listen to what he did and add comments. The sound of episode 2 was a fun collaboration where we handed the session back and forth a couple of times to land on the final product. He took this section and made it a lot better, but I wanted it to be even more ecstatic, so I went in and added myself whispering and making weird popping noises with my mouth.
For better or worse, we were mixing, sound designing, and making editorial changes simultaneously… so it was a bit complicated. The first episode took us many edits, but by the time we got to the second and third episode, we got it down to just a few rounds. I could make changes forever, so there was a helpful moment when John said I was allowed only three notes per episode. (Of course, I started stretching the definition of what a note was.) In the end, we did a final listen together in person, and made our last changes.
When I then reached out to John DeLore.
With an impossible timeline, to offer anything extra to the conversation, late in the evening, after work but just before he slipped into his dad mode to put his kids down to bed, he generously sat down and recorded a Voice Memo for me, while his kids popped in and out offering him ice cream cones.
His first example of how they collaborated was about “The Council,” which will make more sense after you listen to the first episode.
John DeLore: How did we collaborate on the sound design? I think for me, I mean, you can start with "The Council," it was sort of playful approach to like the interior monologues that are going on in Bianca’s head.
When I heard that idea, it sort of suggested to me that this was going to be a show that was not only approaching the sort of serious, big sort of philosophical questions of God, or a higher power, or whatever…but it was going to do it through sound and through this sort of playful sound.
For me, the collaboration started with just sort of knowing that this was a project that would give permission for exploration, for trying things in sound, for leaning into things like reverb, or affected voices, or panning; using music in certain ways. There was a lot of room for experimentation from the beginning.
[Samantha] And then John got specific about certain examples:
There's the the "coin toss," [also in Ep 1] This is the time when her and Matt are tossing the coin to decide which way to turn: left or right.
I was like, alright, well, let's use a coin toss sound effect. And that in itself is a literal sound design, leaning into the sound of this coin.
And then I took it a step farther…what if we add this sort of effect, slow down [that] sound of a propeller [sounds like whoa, whoa whoa], so you get a sonic picture of the coin going into the air, and then almost going into a visual slow motion.
So I did something like that. And I [asked Bianca] What do you think of this? And she really liked it. So that was, you know, an example of me trying something or experimenting in a space where I was free to do that.
And then there were other places, the scene with where she goes to visit her grandma, which was a little more heavily sound designed, but then we pulled it back, we scaled it back, to leave it a bit more sparse.
[Samantha] And then John goes on to describe in more detail how their collaboration came together for Episode 2 Dark Country Roads. First he describes it with words, but then you’ll really have to hear him describe it by listening to the sound clip below.
John: There was an energy to the writing, she'd already picked that song, so it already had an energy when she handed it to me. My job there was not to ideate, or come up with the conceit for that scene, but to really just tighten the pacing, and make it work. Just to turn up the energy, I guess. And so I did that.
“I think this put it as a placeholder, but I loved it, so I used it…” (listen below, words don’t do it justice)
That's was a lot of the joy of the collaboration in this project is that Bianca brought a lot of vision for sound design, across the whole series. She brought these ideas, and then I had the opportunity to help execute them, and then to add to them to build to them to build on top of that. It spurred creative dialogue back and forth around some of these scenes.
The collaboration was really just sort of like her creating a world and a project and a concept that is both serious and literary and spiritual, but also vulnerable and playful, and willing to go, or ready to go, in any direction.
That's just like a really, really delicious place for a sound designer to step into.
[Samantha] One of the biggest pitfalls of working independently is that you go deaf to your own project. After you’ve sat alone listening to your own voice and your own thoughts for long that your ears…we just don’t hear properly any longer.
The term and the thing that we are all looking for is Fresh Ears…and that’s when someone can come in and listen to things without all the time and the baggage.
John made the connection that this is another role that sound designers can play: To be fresh ears, and also to offer the material back, to offer fresh ears to the producer who has gone deaf.
John: In a way, I was fresh ears on the project. And then I was able to, [through] sound design and mixing, let Bianca hear some of those scenes or some of those episodes with fresh ears.
This always felt like a moment of success—when you can give somebody who's worked on a project, as long as she's worked on this one, the ability to hear it anew. It felt really creatively energetic.
[Samantha] I also asked about the practical terms of what sound design looks like, as a collaborative process. Was it scripted? Was it all defined? What is one person’s job, or both together. John’s answer offers a wonderful template for how to begin a fruitful collaboration between Producer and Sound Designer:
John: Yes, some of it was scripted. And again, I'm always a fan of encouraging producers to think about sound design upstream on paper.
Put in mood words in your script—like “thoughtful” or “doubt” or “moment of discovery”— the emotive context you want the scoring to lift or underline.
Know where you want music. Or at least know: "I want to build this 'council scene' in this way."
[Bianca] had direction. She was already [writing those details] on the paper. That allowed me to tunnel closer to her vision.
Whereas if there was the script has none of that direction, then I'm just superimposing what I hear in my brain.
Bianca came into the project with a lot of the scripts and with stuff in the script. But then again, she also gave me permission to ignore that, or to change it, or to move around, to move things around. But having that initial vision laid out in the document was incredibly valuable.
So I think [the collaboration was] a mix of the both: Me executing ideas that she came up with, maybe me reacting and adding to those, or hearing certain things in a new way that she hadn't thought of; And then, trying it. Just being able to try it.