Shaking Out The Numb Is The Perfect Holiday Listen
It's both an album and a podcast...and it's an absolutely gorgeous hybrid of the both
With the holidays upon us, our inboxes clogged with the Best Of 2022 Lists, and the Tweet threads with even more great suggestions of dark and who-dun-it mysteries…it got me wondering:
What if you just want to listen to something to while you wind down, relax and unwind?
It’s late in the year for solving cold cases, and maybe your bandwidth for political thrillers has waned…what about taking a moment to just listen?
What if a moment of poetry is what you actually
need to help all the rest of all of it make sense?
If you think you can find an hour-and-some to be on your own and disappear into a whimsical musical world, where you won’t feel alone, you will likely feel inspired, and it will definitely relax you with the sound of crickets…I would like to introduce you to this one-of-a-kind podcast, Shaking Out The Numb (Apple link).
It’s an album, and an intimate conversation with indie rock/electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso, while at the same time being a mediation on how they create and write music… it also allows for a few moments to stop and listen to the crickets (actually).
Don’t expect to be told what it all means. The focus is more clearly on what it all makes you feel, which is the notable unit of measurement here.
Shaking Out The Numb is a collaboration between Erica Heilman and the two bandmates, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn. It succeeds at being its own unique sort of album, a beautiful companion that offers unseen layers to some of the Sylvan Esso tracks on Free Love, the album which inspired this podcast.
I stumbled across this podcast last Spring. A bunch of podcast people I respect were all saluting the work of Erica Heilman for her episode Finn and the Bell, from her independent podcast Rumble Strip, which had just been nominated for a Peabody Award (she went on to win this award in June). I followed the links to listen, loved it, and wondered what else she had done? Whereupon I discovered this gem.
At the time I was accidentally quarantining in a crappy hotel by myself, semi-delusional with Covid. The day before, while still at home, I began to feel sick, but I knew I had to get my daughter to this town two hours from home so that she could play in the provincial volleyball tournament the following weekend. I had to get there while I was well enough to, driving double-masked, and then check-in to the hotel while still negative—which I was. But the writing was on the wall, so I got her her own room, and “supervised” her from across the hall (but mostly relied on the other parents on the team-ty).
The next morning I did test positive, which is how I came to be holed up by myself for three days, captive to the worst migraine/vertigo/nausea headache I’ve ever had. Listening was the only thing I could do to pass the time.
Shaking Out The Numb was like an oasis on a long weekend desert horizon of the Crown Plaza 3-star hotel I found myself in
Lying there, bored, uncomfortable, and hungry but unable to eat, this podcast became the perfect escape hatch to some other reality that didn’t expect much of my thinking brain. Instead, it asked me to feel things.
Since then I’ve gone back to listen to it a few times. It’s experimental and eclectic without being random. It offers a different thing to me each time I listen.
As I planned this piece, I listened again, and more questions came up.
So I reached out to Erica Heilman to ask her some questions that came up for me. She kindly obliged, despite having the flu and a winter storm that cut off her power for most of the weekend. The following is from our email exchange, which offers some lovely insights and ideas about how a magical project like this one, came to be.
Samantha Hodder: I keep going back and forth on the opinion of whether or not it’s best to listen to the album first, or listen to this podcast first…what’s your opinion of this?
Erica Heilman: I am agnostic on this question. I think it’s personal preference. I mean if you love Sylvan Esso already then you probably already know this album and I think you’ll love getting to spend time with Nick and Amelia in this different way. They are utterly charming, smart, strange, authentic people.
SH: It sounds to me like there’s an old friendship here, which gives this experience very detailed and layered…is that the case? Or is your connection to Amelia and Mark more recent?
EH: Years ago after I made a show about seasonal depression when I was seasonally depressed and Trump had just been elected. The show was pretty much me hanging out at Dunkin Donuts begging people to talk with me. After it aired I got an email from Amelia saying she liked the show and the email mentioned she was in a couple bands. But I’m old and I had no idea what Sylvan Esso or Mountain Man was and after a couple weeks I looked them up and I was like, ‘Oh.’ Anyway. We became friends. Amelia’s one of the only people I talk to on the phone about big existential things and also pizza pockets.
SH: What’s it like to collaborate with old friends (or newer friends / spiritually connected like-minded folks) on something as personal as songwriting? Was this easy or instinctual to navigate, or did you need to spend time laying out a roadmap to follow?
EH: I had no idea what I was doing and they are some of the only people I could feel comfortable having no idea around. (Or with?)
They were sure they didn’t want standard interview format and they didn’t want to talk about what the songs were about and I was sure I didn’t want that either.
I try always to do recordings in person but it was during Covid and so we agreed to try and simulate ‘doing stuff’ together, which mostly meant me on the phone with my recorder in Vermont and Amelia on her phone with a recorder wandering around in the woods or down by a river near her place, or Nick making soup. Talk is usually more interesting when we're doing a couple things at once.
No…it wasn’t easy because making things is never easy. It’s always about 80 percent confusion and despair and 20 percent something way better than despair.
The difference here is that Nick and Amelia understood that process completely so I didn’t have to hide my confusion and despair while I was editing, and they gave me excellent edits/suggestions without any weird ego issues. We were making it together and there was a lot of mutual trust.
I remember at the very end of making the series, Amelia and I were working together on the phone…on some promotional teaser or something. I’d done a first pass and then we worked together and she kept pushing me to tighten here, let it breathe there…and it was really just like working on a song. She’s got a great ear, obviously.
SH: Was this a collaboration, or did you go off and do stuff, and then come together…how does one actually collaborate to write a concept podcast album about a concept music album?
EH: It was a collaboration. Also it wasn’t written. I mean the intros at the top of the shows are written but the shows are made from lots and lots of conversation in a variety of circumstances. I think I asked Amelia to sit in a dark closet to talk at least twice.
We were certain that we didn’t want the shows to be conversations about what the songs are about because what’s the point of that? But I wanted the conversation to dovetail with the themes in the song. I wanted to use the songs as a jumping point to stories from their lives or things they believe in or think about or are preoccupied by.
And most important, in my estimation, what Amelia and Nick make is often something transcendent. Their songs are always pointing to something that is not describable in words. Call it Love, call it God, call it whatever you want. But their songs are a cocktail of ingredients that get us close to the Sublime and I wanted the shows to reflect that without ever stating it explicitly because again, there aren’t really words for those things.
SH: Was this your Covid project? I hear some of those emotions of social isolation and melancholy that throws me back into Covid lockdown times.
EH: I had a lot of Covid projects and this was definitely a great one. Amelia also appears in my other big Covid project which is a series of seven shows called Our Show, which I started making as soon as lockdown started. I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t interview anyone in person so I asked listeners to send in sound from wherever they were in lockdown and we’d make a show together.
The tape I got was so good it was staggering. Strange and heartbreaking and intimate. Songs and stories and weird bathtub monologues. And Amelia appears a few times, once on a trampoline. She’s also the music for Show 4. She sent me the most beautiful song she made with hand habits and said I could use it to track one of the shows but instead I asked if she’d hum the whole thing and I could use that to build to the song, which plays at the end.
SH: This is like the ultimate concept album; It has the music, the backstory, personal connection and some poetry too … that’s how I “see” it, how it hits my ears. What was the original concept when you began this process? But then each episode is also framed as a standalone episode…was it conceived as a whole or as pieces that connect?
EH: I guess the original concept was, ‘Let’s make something!’ And then we experimented until we found what it was. Again, we knew what it wasn’t. But we didn’t know what it was until we recorded lots of conversation and sounds and I started to play around with it.
SH: I’m so curious about the production process…did you narrow down a list of topics down to the essence of each song, and then begin a conversation about the process of doing this? Or did you begin with a broad-reaching interview, and zero in from there?
EH: Lots and lots and lots of tape to play with. The topics were loose. I have no idea how Nick launched in on the higgs boson. That was supreme. I remember we talked about Cher during one of those interviews. I can’t remember if Cher made the cut? I loved that conversation. I think I listened to the songs and thought about what they did to ME and then fished for stories/pictures/images that would complement the experience of the song.
SH: How did you record that recording in the car when you’re driving over the covered bridge in Vermont? I only hear two of you in the car - and it was still early enough in Covid times that you felt like you had to justify this - and I want to know actually how this sounds decent, and not like you’re in a car, if you put the mic in the cupholder?
EH: She was driving my car and I was holding a mic in her face. That was done before Covid and much of that tape is in a Rumble Strip show.
SH: Did you also do all the sound design and mixing for this? And did you have access to the stems of the music to do this? Did you collaborate with either Nick or Amelia on the nitty-gritty edits and sound mixing of this project, or was that your end?
EH: Nick sent me all the stems so I could play with layering elements of the song behind the talking, and adding effects to them. I actually can’t believe he let me play around with his music like that, particularly because I was once fired on a job where I couldn’t edit music backgrounds fast enough. I’m really terrible at that. I’m also not much of a mixer. I mean I can DO it, but I do it all by ear and I don’t know what I’m doing. I think I had it professionally checked over at the end by a real grownup audio person. Did I? I can’t remember.
SH: Were you ever physically in the same location when you made this, other than the car recording? Were those Zoom interviews with them in Durham, and you in Vermont? They sound so intimate…but there are clues in the series that tell me otherwise. And the crickets sound lovely and like a good microphone was used…
EH: So. Many. Crickets. I love crickets. No, we were never together. That recording you allude to…the car interview…that was for my own show, Rumble Strip, and we did that drive while they were in Vermont doing a show.
SH: What was the impact of Covid on this project? Would you have done it differently in another world? Or was this a Covid project from start to end?
EH: I think if it hadn’t been for Covid I would’ve gone down to Durham and hung around recording. That said, my son Henry was in high school and we live alone and so I might NOT have done that. I’m not sure what we would’ve done.
SH: This is a truly original project….I can’t think of anything else that I’ve ever heard that sounds like this. Did you have any inspirations going in with this?
EH: No. I’m music illiterate. So in terms of band movies or bio-pics or musician interviews…I don’t know anything. And they knew this and were ok with it. I think we just wanted to make a project that was a hybrid of our different mediums.
SH: How did the licensing of music rights work within a podcast? I believe Sylvan Esso have their own record labels…did that make this collaboration easier?
EH: I don’t actually know. They dealt with all that. All I know is that I was allowed to use all of it, which was like playing in the best sandbox in the world.
SH: What advice could you give to other podcast producers who might want to take on this sort of project with a band? The music industry is notoriously difficult when it comes to licensing for a podcast…because I don’t know if the industry has figured out how to count “plays” or “downloads,” is anyone tracking that for the podcast, which features large or whole songs?
EH: I gave up trying to figure out download metrics on Rumble Strip. I finally asked myself, ‘What is it going to change if you know how big the audience is?’ and the answer was ‘Nothing.’ So I stopped trying to figure it out.
In terms of metrics for Shaking out the Numb, it’s possible that the band’s tracking it but I’m not sure and I kind of doubt it.
In terms of advice? I’d just say that working on a show in collaboration with a band is fascinating and fun for all the implied reasons. You’re working with people who make things, but different things, and things that complement your things, and you’re all on that creative continuum of confusion and curiosity and hopefully catharsis…so what’s not to like about making something together?
Here’s the Apple embed for the show, Spotify at the top of this post.
Episodes: 6
Total Listen Time: 75 minutes
Release Structure: All episodes released November 22, 2020
Produced by: Erica Heilman, with Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso.
Follow Sylvan Esso on Apple Music and Spotify and Twitter
Definitely put Rumble Strip on your monthly diet of listening.
Happy holidays to everyone, far and wide! Next week I’m going to re-release an early post that features a Q+A with Zayd Ares Dohrn, producer of Mother Country Radicals, the podcast that was Bingeworthy #1, and it’s gone on to top every Best Of List for 2022.
If you are looking for a gift for the podcast lover in your life, please consider gifting a subscription to Bingeworthy.