The podcast industry continues to explode before our very eyes. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being sought after by hundreds of thousands of shows all looking to be the next big hit.
But long before venture capitalists and yearly think pieces declaring that podcasts are a thing now, one podcast carved itself a solid sphere of the marketplace, fanning out into a network of series, consistent live tours and a ravenously supportive fanbase.
“Welcome to Night Vale” launched in 2012 in the spirit of a community radio station broadcasting the eponymous town’s bizarre, confusing and at times disturbing goings on. Inexplicable paranormal phenomena are given the same clout as a local bake sale, but let’s be real: the latter might end up being just as horrifying.
As artist and writer Kate Leth described it, “Night Vale” is like “if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman started a game of ‘The Sims’ and then just left it running forever.”
On Thursday, “Night Vale” will bring its latest tour, “A Spy in the Desert,” to Bloomington’s Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
Ahead of the show, co-creator and writer Jeffrey Cranor spoke with us about their new tour, how the show got its start and the state of the podcast industry.
For tickets and information on “A Spy in the Desert,” you can check out the “Welcome to Night Vale” website.
All hail the mighty Glow Cloud.
PAYTON KNOBELOCH: Bloomington and the small desert town of Night Vale don’t have much in common. Maybe that’s a good thing. Our Arby’s doesn’t have any lights above it. Most of our dog parks are…actual dog parks. And here at WFIU, station management is marginally more forgiving than where Cecil works.
CLIP: When I got back to my desk area, all of my belongings were gone. And there was just an open pit. A hole that seemed to go on into eternity. And, knowing management, it likely does.
PK: But the two will cross over Thursday, September 12 when the award-winning podcast "Welcome To Night Vale" comes to the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre. We spoke with "Night Vale" writer and co-creator Jeffrey Cranor ahead of the show’s performance.
CLIP: Hot singles in your area are staring into the forest and grinning absently. Welcome to Night Vale.
[theme music plays, fades out]
PK: "Night Vale" has been in production since 2012 as this darkly comedic, "Twilight-Zone"-meets-community-radio series. How did you and your co-creator, Joseph Fink, come to start working on this show, and how has it changed over the years?
JEFFREY CRANOR: Joseph and I met back in 2009 in New York City. And I was in a theatre company called the Neo-Futurists. And Joseph came to a lot of our shows and volunteered for us, and we got to be friends that way.
We wrote a play together, and we staged that. We co-wrote, co-performed a play in 2011 in New York City. And it was a lot of fun. We had a great time working together. The thing about doing plays and self-producing a play is that they’re very expensive, and so we were sort of exhausted, both physically and financially after doing the play. But in the process of making the play, we got to talking a lot about podcasts and how much we loved various podcasts. And there really wasn’t anything that was storytelling out there, there really wasn’t any kind of serial fiction podcast.
Joseph came up with this pilot episode. He wrote it over the course of several months, and then had our friend Cecil [Baldwin], who is also in the Neo-Futurists, record the voice for it.
About a year in when it kind of blew up in popularity and we started touring the show and it kind of became a full-time job for all of us, that completely caught us by surprise. We weren’t trying to escape our jobs through a podcast. We were just trying to make a podcast because it seemed fun.
PK: The show’s sense of humor comes from taking what should be these terrifying mysteries and unspeakable cosmic horrors and giving them all the gravitas of a flat tire or your in-laws coming to visit. Why did you and Joseph go down that route as opposed to just trying to emulate Lovecraft, or go straight horror?
CRANOR: It matched our sense of humor to play around in that way. It seemed weird, and also different. Joseph is a much bigger horror fan than I am, and neither of us are fans of H.P. Lovecraft, necessarily, although, beyond the respect for what he gave to the horror canon.
One of the things we were both interested in as artists was taking an expectation and then subverting it. You take a cliché or an archetype or a trope and then you try to subvert it in some way. And so, taking something banal and making it really meaningful, or taking something really meaningful and making it banal is kind of a fun way of twisting things around.
PK: And speaking of twisting expectations, a lot of the episodes have fiddled with the podcast format, like the one where there’s a clip show, but none of the clips are actually from previous episodes. What’s it like to write around these constantly changing concepts and this big world you’ve created? And is that freedom ever daunting, like you have to top yourself in your own strangeness?
CRANOR: We both like to challenge ourselves from time to time. So there are many episodes that have the base Night Vale structure of, "Hey, this big thing is happening. Here’s some other things, like a community calendar or horoscopes or traffic report." And then we resolve the big story by the end. And then some of them take on, you know, a completely second-person narrative, like “A Story About You.” Or they try and play with the format a little bit. And those are just experiments we like to play with ourselves, as artists, to say, "Let’s see if I can pull this off."
CLIP: One day, you were walking from the glass box of your office to your old Ford probe, and a vision came to you. You saw above you a planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick, black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It was so far away. So desolate. And so impossibly, terrifyingly dark. And that day, you did not go home.
PK: I wanted to get your thoughts on the state of podcasting in general. How have you seen the medium change since “Night Vale” started?
CRANOR: Oh my god. How long do you have? It’s crazy. It’s great in so many ways, because there are lots and lots of people now who can use podcasting as a form of expression, as a form of artistic outlet. And there are a lot of people who are also using it as a way to try to find money, as well. And people are pouring lots of money into it, and that’s the less exciting part of it.
There’s only so much shouting I can do from my end of like, “Here’s a podcast you have to be listening to!” And people aren’t, because it’s not part of some larger network, of some larger investment of VC capital.
I don’t know that if “Night Vale” started in 2016 it has the same trajectory. It is harder, but I talk to so many people who make podcasts, who may not have an audience the size of “Serial,” at all, or anywhere close to it, but they do find their audience. I don’t think for most people it’s ever enough to quit your job, but it’s enough to want to keep going, to have a Patreon, to have enough people who at least pay for the cost of your microphone and maybe in some really great cases, pay for the cost of all the time and effort that you’re putting into it.
I do think that it’s such an enjoyable thing to do, and it’s a fun form of communication to other people, a way to tell a story, to share a space with friends and come together. And I think people are having that level of success right now, and I think that’s still possible and there’s still so much room in the podcasting world for that type of success to happen.
PK: As of a couple years ago, it’s a pretty regular thing to see venues sold out for live podcast tapings, but you guys have been at this since 2013. What do you think makes a good podcast live show?
CRANOR: I think it’s similar to what makes a good podcast, which is just that relationship to the audience.
It’s a different skill set entirely, but it is the same basic concept, which is: You now have people in front of you in a room. This isn’t Broadway where you aren’t allowed to interact at all emotionally with what’s happening on stage. Those people are in a fishbowl, and you don’t tap the glass on Broadway. But for something like a podcast live show, we’re all coming to your show because we’ve gotten to become best friends with you, even though you don’t know us, as the host. You don’t know me; I listen to you podcast and I’ve gotten to know you really well and I want to see you in person.
But it always comes down to how well are you on stage able to take in all of the audience and then give all of yourself back to them.
PK: This new live show you’re bringing to Bloomington is called “A Spy in the Desert.” Is there anything about the show that you can tell us ahead of time?
CRANOR: “A Spy in the Desert” was our play on a John Le Carré novel...you know, styling it after a spy thriller novel. Again, with “Night Vale,” it’s really fun to play with form. We also, with this show, with all of our live shows, we try to involve the audience in some form or fashion. This was one of our more fun and creative attempts to pull the audience into the show. I won’t explain how, because it’s sort of an integral part of the show.
But it’s been really fun to do and it’s a really neat theatrical device that’s subtle and fun. And it’s been a real gift, I feel like, to the audience members who have been involved with that scene throughout our touring.
PK: Before I let you go: "Night Vale" is distinctly set in the southwest, in the desert. Since you’re coming to Indiana, I have to ask: What do you find unsettling or disturbing about the Midwest? And is there anything we could be doing to be more creepy?
CRANOR: [laughs] Oh, I know what it is - cornfields are creepy as hell. I live near a cornfield here in upstate New York, and it’s right along our property and I mow around it sometimes. Mowing around that cornfield is really disturbing, because you just get little glimpses of row after row of things, and you just keep waiting for - seeing something in one of those rows as you pass it. Cornfields, I would say, are the number-one creepiest thing in the Midwest.
PK: That was Jeffrey Cranor, writer and co-creator of the hit podcast, “Welcome to Night Vale.”
"Welcome to Night Vale’s" “A Spy in the Desert” live show will be at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre on Thursday, September 12th. Tickets and information are available at welcometonightvale.com.
For WFIU Arts, I’m Payton Knobeloch.
