-
10 Questions with ... Kyle Meredith
November 21, 2022
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. -
1. What was your favorite station to listen to when you were a kid?
96 STO out of Owensboro, KY. I'm from a little town, Leitchfield KY, which had it's own station that would occasionally play some oldies, but mostly just news and "tradio". WSTO was Top 40 at a time when the format was also playing lots of alt rock. Like most of us, I spent countless hours taping certain shows and playing them back with my own DJing in place of the real host. They were also the first station that I ever called in to request a song, two in fact, Everclear's Santa Monica and Toto's Africa. To my surprise (even to this day), he played both them back to back.
2. What got you interested in the radio business?
I was always sort of obsessed with radio for as long as I can remember. When my school friends would come over, I'd have us map out and record hour-long broadcasts with commercials and everything. It just went hand-in-hand with being a music nerd from birth, pouring over every liner note in the back of the CD booklet, planning my days around Casey Kasem as much as which MTV VJ would be on. I did my first interview in high school with a member of Santana and lied about my age so I could get a field rep job with Hi Frequency so I could help promote acts like Dave Matthews and Elliott Smith before I had even graduated. I always wanted to be part of the mix. Once I got to college, I got an internship with WLRS and that officially started my career.
3. You've worked in Alternative radio, as a record promo rep, and in Triple A. What is the same and what is different about these gigs?
If you're in the right places, you're surrounded by other people who are as music obsessed as you are and that is true for whichever format I've been in, as well as promotions. The fun thing about being a promo rep was being able to help discover artists and get them in the right places to be heard. The biggest difference in Alt radio and Triple A, for me and the stations I was in at least, is the freedom. Not just to play a bit more of whatever, but also to be creative in coming up with segments and shows and ideas. Alt radio really showed me a lot of important Radio 101, but new Adds tended to be tied too much to research and charts. Triple A is so community based, which allows for taking lots of chances, getting to know what works as much as what could potentially work. There's a tightrope sense of danger that keeps us on our toes and really makes the job exciting. And at the end of the day, our audience votes with their wallets. The fact that we have one of the highest percentages of sustaining memberships is pretty great job satisfaction.
4. You had a weekly syndicated show called "The Weekly Feed" back when blogs were just getting rolling. How did this evolve into your current podcast "Kyle Meredith With…?"
When I launched The Weekly Feed, blogs were breaking songs ahead of radio and I saw the open lane to bridge the two and get the music to the airwaves sometimes months before it was being serviced from record labels. The show had over 100 affiliates, as well as a video partnership with Salon.com and a transcripted version with Paste Magazine. But times eventually caught up and I saw that I had taken it as far as it would probably go, so I took the most unique part of the hour, a small interview segment that anchored the episodes, and built those into a series called The Speed of Sound. Those were 7-minute, hyper-produced pieces that we serviced to most of the same affiliates, but it was launched around the time that podcasts really were becoming the standard, so I once again decided to pivot and just concentrate on the longform version of the interviews. For the first year, I did 8 interviews a week and only aired them on WFPK. I wanted to build a new resume and also find my own style. Once I felt like I had gotten to a good point, I reached out to my friends who ran Consequence of Sound and pitched them an interview series that would be in partnership with WFPK. They loved the idea. but only asked me to do one thing. Slow down. I was producing more than they were able to adequately promote, so we arrived at a three episode a week podcast, which has really been entirely life changing. The episodes go up on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays and are frequently picked up by dozens of other brands and sites. In 2020, I began to incorporate TV and film stars and started molding it into an icons series. Once the interviews premiere, I then take clips from it and build a one-hour themed playlist around it that then airs on WFPK.
5. Tell us about how you connected with Joe Scarborough, and got on "Morning Joe" on MSNBC
Joe had been a somewhat closet musician his whole life, but waited until 2017 to officially release anything, which he did through RED. I checked out his EP and was pleasantly surprised to hear it as a mix of Green-era Weezer and The Cars, so I reached out for an interview. The allotted 10 minutes turned into an hour, and we became friends. Sometime after I first visited the Morning Joe set, I mentioned that it would be fun if he and did a joint interview with a few artists, and the smart fella he is, thought to use the platform he already had on the MSNBC airwaves. So, I became the Music Correspondent and we've done interviews with Pixies, Sheryl Crow, Pete Townshend, Liz Phair, and several others. It's just an every-now-and-then type of thing, but it's always a ton of fun.
6. Where do you find new music?
There's dozens of official playlists I follow on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple and then websites such as Consequence, Stereogum, etc. I check Reddit every day to see what pops up there, as well as keeping an eye on Youtube. Of course, talking with all of our great label reps brings the lion's share. I'm fortunate to work in an adventurous format that brings so many styles and genres together, so I'm able to cast my net pretty wide when looking for the right songs.
7. WFPK just celebrated 20 years with Waterfront Wednesday. Crowds of 10-20K people show up. Tell us about how this grew so massively.
So much of our success with WFPK Waterfront Wednesday is due to my program director Stacy Owen's hard work. She was there at the beginning and helped grow it from a few hundred people every month to what it's become with, as you mentioned, crowds of 20k happening at least a few times each season. So much of it has to do with community. The series is a trusted event that people look forward to every year, even if they're not familiar with WFPK. It's a place where people come to discover new artists, see long time favorites, and hang with so many other members of the community. We hear from a lot of people that it doesn't even matter who's on the bill. They make the plan to come anyway. We're now in a moment where we have a summer staple that still has the ability to grow, so we're constantly dreaming up what that might look like. In the meantime, Stacy is already booking the next season.
8. We share a common love for Les Claypool as Primus was the first artist I ever worked at radio. Tell us the South Park 25th anniversary story.
Les is definitely one of my favorite artists to interview and I've built some trust up with him over the last decade. His brand of weird is a lane I enjoy walking in, to put it simply. But even with that, I was kind of knocked back when I got a call from a publicist in charge of the 25th anniversary of South Park. To go along with the celebration, Primus and Ween were going to do a show at Red Rocks. When asked if they wanted to do any interviews, they just mentioned me, and I can't really imagine a higher compliment. These are our heroes after all and we're just playing in the sandbox we created for ourselves when we were younger. So yeah, that was a moment of me impressing my younger self. But it's also the job satisfaction. The first rule I made for myself was to not waste anyone's time. That meant putting in the hours of research no matter who the artist was. Don't waste their time. And I feel like the hard work pays off when I get an opportunity like that, that I've earned some trust.
9. If you were to leave the radio business today and you could choose any other occupation, what would it be?
Oof. That's a hard one. I started making radio broadcasts in my bedroom when I was 8 or 9 and got my first industry job at 17, so this is really what I'm built for. Maybe something in sociology. But even then, I'm sure I'd just find another way to bridge that back to music and movies and before long, I'd be pitching an idea to a TV exec. In fact, I think you've just given me one…
10. Fill in the blank: I can't make it through the day without …
Aside from music? A double shot of espresso in the morning and a cup of tea after noon. And any kind of sweet bread is a nice way to finish it all off.
Bonus Questions
Last non-industry job:
Sorting the magazine and book racks in grocery stores
First record ever purchased:
My first 45 was "The Gambler". First cassette I bought with my own money was Green Day's Dookie. I think the first CD I bought was Shaq-Fu Da Return.
First concert:
Garth Brooks at the beginning of the 90s. First one without my parents was Farm Aid '94, which was also my first contact high.
Favorite band of all-time:
REM and Pearl Jam. I'm unapologetically a product of my time.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time away from work?
Watching my son navigate his way through high school and acting. Traveling with my wife. But also? I like to flip through old copies of R&R, Gavin, and CMJ. As a hobby. Because I'm a nerd.
-
-