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Director's Notes – Episode 130

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Joseph and I have talked a lot about the notions of faith and veracity. For millennia, humanity has devised gods to explain what it couldn't comprehend. Long before existentialism existed as a literary/philosophical movement, it existed as simple star-gazing. Those stars are gods. Their placement dictates our health and future...

Director's Notes – Episode 129

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Well, here I am. Doing my best to write to you in my sixth day of illness. During those days I have gone to Chicago to do the first ever live show for I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, and to New York City to do events at BookExpo and Bookcon. It has, in short, not been the most restful of sick days I’ve had, and I’ve m...

Director's Notes – Episode 128

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

These director’s notes are a few days late, and the reason is that I made a mistake and just didn’t write them. So apologies for that. I’m writing them now from my upstate home, here in the woods. Yesterday I saw a fat little bunny run across my yard. Later I saw that same bunny dead in the road. Then that bunny was eate...

Director's Notes – Episode 127

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

The idea for this episode came about during a live stream. Over on the Alice Isn’t Dead Patreon, we have occasional live streams for donors, and in this case the stream was me and Jasika chatting one evening from our respective homes. During the course ...

Director's Notes – Episode 126

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

There was a guided meditation track I listened to once in the bathtub. You're standing in a calm ocean, near the shore. You visualize each of the things that are bothering you, one at a time, as a small wave. You watch the wave approaching, you let it wash over you, and then you let it pass by and disappear out to sea. You are...

Director's Notes – Episode 125

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Whenever we write about Madeleine LaFleur and the Tourism Board, I get to thinking about what tourists in Night Vale are like. 

My wife and I returned last month from a week in Hawaii, and it was - to no one's surprise - beautiful and relaxing and fun. We stayed on the island of Kauai for all 8 days, and it might be...

Director's Notes – Episode 124

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

This new episode reminded me to talk to you about pancakes.

I love pancakes. Everyone loves pancakes. Everyone, except the following types of people:

1. assholes

Obviously, there are people with strict diets and food allergies who cannot have pancakes, but they still love pancakes because they are good, if al...

Director's Notes – Episode 123

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We shifted to this new format of multi-part stories, rather than year long slow building arcs, for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that this is our sixth year doing this show and it seemed good to shake ourselves up creatively. The second is on the production side, short arcs are a little easier to plan and write. Co...

Director's Notes – Episode 122

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello from a jetlagged writer. I flew home from Sydney, Australia yesterday. We existed within February 15 for 43 hours, which is a disquieting number of hours for a day to last. My wife and I looked at each other with shell shock last night. “How is it still Feb 15?” we asked. “How is this nightmare possible?”

A...

Director's Notes – Episode 121

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

I’m a firm believer in the use of limitations and random constraints in the making of art.

When I first moved to New York City, almost a decade ago (!!!), I encountered the work of the New York Neo-Futurists. They made theater, but under a set of very specific rules. Their work was strictly non-illusory, which meant th...

Director's Notes – Episode 120

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Religions are scary. Lots of tales of people getting eaten by whales, or laughed at by God, or getting murdered by relatives, or trading body parts for other body parts as a form of punishment. 

Of course religions are also beautiful and meaningful. Taking care of the needy. Sharing love with others. Drawing borders...

Director's Notes – Episode 119

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

I am a fan of outtakes, first drafts and ideas that were floated but went nowhere (I gasp when thinking of Billy Wilder's 1961 plan to direct “At the UN” starring the Marx Brothers).  But in listening to the Night Vale eGemony episodes I recently helped write, they sound so seamless to me that I don't want to suggest ...

Director's Notes – Episode 118

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

New Zealand cares deeply about good coffee. Not iced coffee. They give no shits about iced coffee, which I learned when my friends ordered iced coffees and they brought them milk shakes. 

I'm fine with this. I don't like iced coffee. I respect NZ's ridiculous parody of Americans' need to put ice cubes in everything ...

Director's Notes – Episode 117

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Joseph and I first met in 2009, shortly after he had moved to New York. I was writing and performing in a theater collective called The New York Neo-Futurists. Joseph volunteered often with our tiny little company, and he and I became friends bonding over writing and theater and storytelling.

Our connection to the Neos h...

Director's Notes – Episode 116

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

One of the awful things about being in high school band is you have to go to pep rallies. This is, of course, more than balanced out by the extreme popularity you earn by playing, say, the euphonium while wearing a ruffly jacket and coffee-can-shaped hat while walking in precisely measured steps to 100-year-old music while mak...

Director's Notes – Episode 115

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Since you're obviously a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, I'm pretty sure you'd like to hear about gravel.

I live in a rural area of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Our address is technically on a main road, but our house is settled about a quarter mile off it at the end of a long gravel drive. We own this road, per ...

Director's Notes – Episode 114

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Not everyone in Night Vale ages normally. 

Jackie Fierro was 19 years old for many many years. Earl Harlan and Cecil Palmer also experienced some kind of delay in aging during their youths. Time doesn't work in Night Vale. 

But Tamika Flynn seems to be aging in the usual way. She turns 17 this month. Can ...

Director's Notes – Episode 113

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Dessa wrote this episode, and I'd love to talk to you here about what an incredible writer she is, but you can experience that for yourself - not only in this episode but in her music.

I want to talk to you about Dessa as a performer. I've long been told you can teach acting but not stage presence. Dessa has toured a cou...

Director's Notes – Episode 112

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

In high school, my friends and I invented a game where we would sit in the town park and compete to identify each person that drove by. Whoever yelled the person's name first was awarded the point. We sat in the park for hours shouting things like “Hank Rayley!” “Tess Freeman!” “Bill and Sadie Daubenspeck!” There w...

Director's Notes – Episode 111

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We are entering Night Vale’s sixth year. So it seemed as good a time as any to look back to the start and see how much has changed.

I wrote the first lines of what would be Night Vale in March of 2012, when I was 25 years old. My father had died about six months earlier, and then about five months later I had been fire...

Director's Notes – Episode 110

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Often, listeners of Welcome to Night Vale call our show "Lovecraftian." Often, I bristle at that because I don't love H.P. Lovecraft as a writer or a person. Always, I take it as a compliment, though.

The flipside of this are the concerns from listeners that Night Vale began as a Lovecraftian podcast but now it is not, a...

Director's Notes – Episode 109

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We have a running joke that Jeffrey knows every person through his time working with the Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas. The biggest example of this is St. Vincent, who, before she was collaborating with David Byrne, was Jeffrey’s intern. Another amazing person that Jeffrey knew from his Kitchen Dog days was Tina Parker, who ...

Director's Notes – Episode 108

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Like Cal in episode 108, my mother had a 1980 Mercury Monarch, brick red, four doors. She and my dad bought it brand new. I was five. That car was one of my earliest memories, and I hated it, was borderline scared of it.

First off, the late 70s and early 80s were the nadir of American car-making. The rise of imports has ...

Director's Notes – Episode 107

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

This is an episode I’ve wanted to do for a long time, switching between two parallel versions of the same town. In my original conception for this episode, the other version of Night Vale would be a kind of “normcore” Night Vale, a version utterly without weirdness. For the necessity of plot, I had to mostly drop that id...

Director's Notes – Episode 106

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

When we wrote the first Welcome to Night Vale novel, we got to tell the story of this town from the points of view of characters who were not Cecil. It was great getting to actually go inside the library and see the extent of danger and gore present there. We got to eat at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. We got to ride a bus and ...

Director's Notes – Episode 105

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

People ask about the visuals of Night Vale all of the time. What does Cecil really look like? What color is this or that character’s hair? What pattern apron were they wearing?

The answer to all of these things is: I have no idea. I’m not sitting on a trove of visual information that I’m not sharing with you. I jus...

Director's Notes – Episode 104

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Fictional deaths are dramatic. The hero's best friend dies in a massive choreographed fight sequence. Or a symbol of innocence, like a child or a dog, is shockingly struck down by a villain. Or a spouse ultimately succumbs to a two-hour long struggle with a fatal disease, and their family must come to tearful terms with their ...

Director's Notes – Episode 103

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Growing up in the 80s, it was pretty common to spoof the clean-cut suburban culture of the 1950s. 80s music celebrated the digital to the 1950s analog and manual instruments. 80s hair was tall, teased, bright and wild, compared to the slicked parts and bobbed dos of the 50s. Sarcasm and cynicism were the cornerstone of a good ...

Director's Notes – Episode 102

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

It’s my fault you’re getting this a day late. Sorry! I’m on the road right now, in a super secret location doing some research for Alice Isn’t Dead (the super secret location is Imperial County, CA). 

Well another Valentine’s Day come and gone. The day, of course, is named after Saint Valentine, whose life...