Photo: Peabody Awards via Wikimedia Commons
Ira Glass
Ira Glass
For close to 30 years, the voice of Ira Glass has been what most people think of when they hear the words National Public Radio. The success of “This American Life,” the weekly program that Glass created in 1995 and continues to host, is undoubtedly behind such an association. “This American Life” remains remarkably relevant, highlighting a brand of journalism that freely blends fact-based reporting and a more lyrical approach to storytelling.
In many ways, Glass’ early life prepared him to embrace such an approach to radio. As a child growing up in Baltimore, Glass was drawn to cultural products like comic books (Spiderman and the Fantastic Four were among his favorites) and Broadway soundtracks from such productions as Fiddler on the Roof. “I could sing you, to this day,” notes Glass, “Jesus Christ Superstar from beginning to end, or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” These records served as Glass’ introduction to pop music, where he gravitated to records like Tommy by the Who and singer-songwriters such as James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen.
Yet Glass was also a fan of comedy—“I really loved George Carlin”—and his first job, as a teenager, was writing jokes for Johnny Walker, a proto-shock jock DJ in Baltimore. Such an experience, however, did not lead to Glass falling in love with radio. When he took a position at National Public Radio (NPR) at the age of 19, it was because “they gave me a job. I had no special interest in radio.”
Looking Critically
Such a perspective allowed Glass to look critically at the programming offered by NPR. He quickly found himself wanting to hear stories with “more feeling.” And he knew what he wanted to do about this. “There was something in me,” Glass explains, “driving me to take the radio pieces I was making at NPR and turn them into something that felt like a Broadway show.”
This would be the formula that Glass would perfect through “This American Life” a program that allowed Glass to develop his own unique brand of storytelling. Looking back on his professional evolution, Glass now realizes that “what I ended up doing was inventing a genre of radio that would be fact-based like reporting but give you the feeling from Fiddler on the Roof. The stories would start off funny and they would get more serious until finally they would get very emotional and about something very big and epic.”
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The stories told on “This American Life” are indeed often very big and epic. However, Glass’s accessible delivery style makes it feel like he is talking, at that moment, just to you. Interestingly, Glass credits both Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh as influences on the way he came to address his audience. “There was a certain thing in the liveness of their presentation that felt way better,” notes Glass, “and I tried to invent a narration style that I could perform that would be different than the kind of way that you read a script on NPR but would feel more live and more like Howard or Rush.”
Audience members will get to hear how all these disparate influences come together to create the distinctive voice of Ira Glass at the Pabst Theater on July 20. As Glass prefers such live events over performing on the radio, it is a performance that should not be missed.
