Started in 2012 with a fellow Sushi lover, The Beard began as a fun and not very serious outlet of volunteer creativity. Fellow Sushi lover has since moved on to becoming a Yoga master while I mire about in the musical tundra of the far north.
At times difficult to compel myself to put time into a local radio show, Beard Radio, on KUCB, I have more or less, been on the air every Friday night for the last 250 or so weeks (give or take a few trips off island) at 10pm (replay Monday at 8pm). Beard Radio has attempted to strike a balance between the music that I love and what I think people want to hear. Let me be the first to say that I don’t have a huge audience, but as anyone who ever saw Pump Up The Volume knows, when it comes to radio, someone somewhere is listening. Hopefully it’s the people that the music connects to somehow. More than likely it’s people at work who have no other options. I’ll take what I can get.
Despite being overworked and a father of two small children–which means often not having time to find where they hid my phone, let alone any new artist that I like and that has released an album that is relatively radio-friendly–I still push myself to attempt to please as many listeners as I can. Which doesn’t mean that it happens. My overactive imagination has shown me all sorts of crocheting fireside listeners groaning melodramatically at a three-week long Lou Reed Tribute, my obsession with post-emo Emo, and the head-scratching cross-genre juxtapositions I give airtime to. Regardless of my own overwrought machinations (like this sentence) I persevere, because I think mostly listeners do enjoy hearing fresh tracks that are underplayed (or mostly not played at all except on college campuses), as well as the fact that it gives me a kind of catharsis that I can’t believe the local station GM lets me get away with.