Podcast Talk: SH*T-Town

Most things in our lives are built on unseen mechanics, be it how the lights turn on when we press a switch or how we know it's time for a tea break at work without even looking at the clock.

Most of us operate with these structures, some built by us, some by others that can vary from being scant to excessive but do exist nonetheless. 

For the uninitiated, the same notion applies to writing stories. 

Popular convention says there is a formula to how you write a script or structure a show. From three-part to five-part acts, the purpose of these methods is to grasp the attention of the audience through tried and tested methods. 

The podcast ’S Town’ is no exception but it’s hard to pinpoint how it has been composed because the true-life story evolves at a pace that makes it hard to be analysed in a conventional way. 

Shit Town Alabama

The genesis of the show lies in an email that a person by the name ‘John B McLemore’ sends to the people behind ‘This American Life’, a long-time popular radio show and podcast based in the US.  

McLemore, an horologist who works on antique clocks and lives in the rural south, urges them to investigate an alleged murder that has occurred in his town, a place that he refers to as "Shitown" for reasons you will know early on in the show. 

The crime, McLemore describes, has been committed by a young man from an influential family who openly admits to the deed to people around the town. 

The story, much like the antique clocks that McLemore fixes, is delicately structured.

The podcast episodes quickly unfold and leave the listener surprised not so much by the twist and turns (pssss...there is hidden treasure) but by how it makes you care and emotionally invest in an unlikely person. 

I am not going to discuss the story of the podcast, that is for you to discover, the same way I did.

In terms of treatment, this podcast has been recorded in a documentary format with interview recordings and the narration done by the show’s producer Brian Reed who befriends Macklemore and is an active participant of the story. 

S-Town was also the first series released under the Serial Productions banner and was jointly produced by the makers of Serial and This American Life

It's A Hit

S-Town became a blockbuster soon after launch in 2017. The podcast series was downloaded 16 million times in the first week of release, attracting 1.8 million subscribers to its podcast feed during this period, breaking all podcast records.

When the history of the podcast medium is looked back at, this will be one of those watershed moments. 

But how did a story about a rural, unheard of town in America capture the imagination of people across the globe?

A simple answer would be that it is a riveting story. It would also be an inaccurate answer.

The real sauce behind the outstanding success of the podcast is its incredible soundtrack. 

Set in a cultural setting unfamiliar to most with an eccentric protagonist who is prone to rambling, it is the music that pieces together the emotions and helps the listener make better sense of situations and make space for empathy.

The soundtrack composed by Daniel Hart, who has worked on scoring music for movies such 'A Ghost Story', is all about conveying the melancholy of unattainable love and its undying pursuit. 

A classically trained violinist and founder of a band called Dark Rooms, Hart has composed the soundtrack for more than a dozen films and TV shows but S-Town was the first podcast he worked on.

Here is an edited extract of Hart’s interview from the website centraltrack, wherein he talks about the process of scoring for the podcast- 

Q) How much of the text you had to reference when you’re putting things in. Were they saying, here’s this part of this episode – we need x amount of music, or is it just a matter of putting together what you have, with them moving things around as they see fit?

Hart- There were only a couple of times where Julie emailed me and said, “Hey, I’ve got this specific part and I’m wondering if you can do something specific for it. I tried putting in this other piece you made, and it’s good, but not quite right — can you make something else for it or tweak this piece to make it fit better?” But, other than that, I was just writing a bunch of music based on the direction they were giving me, and they found the places in the podcast where they thought it would fit best.

Q) What’s it like scoring for a podcast, where the work is completely auditory?

Hart- I found it’s actually not very different from writing music for film or for TV, in the end. There’s no picture, but the story itself is so full, even without any kind of visual, that it felt very much the same. I felt like I had a picture in my brain of the story, and the way it was being told, in a way that gave me as much information to go on as I needed, in order to figure out what music would best suit the story being told.

Listen to the complete soundtrack of S-Town.

Key Takeaway

S-Town is not a musical but in terms of impact, it comes close.

And this has ramifications when it comes music and podcasts because as Tom Webster, a senior executive at Edison Research, notes in a blog post from 2019, that music labels are seriously eying podcasts because they see it as a threat. Here is an excerpt from his post-

"We still listen to more music than spoken word, and we always will. That’s in our DNA. If podcasts can fully integrate licensed music, we will consume a TON more podcasts. Royalties will flow back to the labels and the artists, audiences will be happier and larger, and the concept of podcasting as an overwhelmingly spoken word platform will die in a fortnight"- Webster

In a country like India, this would not be that far fetched of a idea for obvious reasons and maybe we could see an early adoption or experimentation.

In podcast terms, S-Town is a fine example of music and storytelling coming together to weave in an immersive experience. It's a series that should be on your hearing list.

Check out the S-Town podcast below on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcast.