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Interview with the Common DJ: DJ LeGoom

On this week’s episode of Space Time Music I pour a cup and hop on a Zoom call with DJ LeGoom of New Jersey and get a Gen Z perspective on 20th and 21st century pop culture, audio formats and music.

DJ LeGoom is one of the coolest teenagers you will ever meet and yes, she is my niece so I am not completely objective but I’m pretty sure I’m right. I’ve been doing a series of episodes on my podcast where I interview my friends and get to know them a little bit better through their love of music and my niece was keen to get in on the action and I was excited to hear what the kids are listening to these days.

Just to be clear, only one of the people I’ve interviewed so far has ever been an actual DJ, my husband DJ Habit. Everyone else is just like you and me (unless you’re a DJ), regular folk who love listening to music. I ask each guest to create a DJ name for themselves as I think it helps get one in the mindset of being a music curator. Are we not the DJs of the soundtracks of our lives?

My niece’s DJ name is DJ LeGoom. She explains that it’s a stylized version of a part of her baby nickname, Bean. I think it’s cute and clever, much like my niece.

I then ask my guests a few simple questions to get the music memory juices flowing and their answers create what I like to call their music profile, the auditory lens, if you will, through which they hear all other music.

Boy, oh boy, was I not ready for the wave of nostalgia that smacked me in the face when I read her answers. (I have guests send me their answers ahead of time so that I can do a little research and prepare the music.) Memories of her tiny toddler self, sitting in the back seat of her mom’s car singing along to her favorite tunes, little legs dangling over the edge of her car seat as she sped down the New Jersey Turnpike and crossed the Arizano Bridge (she couldn’t say Verrazano back then) to come visit her aunt in Brooklyn (that was me). Tears.

Now she’s a teenager listening to K-Pop and bossa nova but I don’t want to spoil the episode for you. You’ll have to listen for yourself. You can find the interview questions in the show notes of any one of the “DJ” episodes. And if you just want to hang out, listen to some tunes and covers, follow a sample chain or two, check out some of the other episodes.

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Guess Who Has a Podcast?

The Raisin at the Hot Dog’s End podcast

Me, Kettle Talkers! That’s right, me and my fellow American in Iceland Jonas launched our podcast earlier this month. I broached the idea back in December or January–sometime before I started my second job at the Kindergarten and was feeling a bit bleh about everything. We were going for a walk because it was allegedly a nice day out and all the snow was melted. But when we reached our destination, a park whose name I cannot recall, we discovered that everything out in nature was still covered in snow; a thin layer of snow that hid slippery as hell ice underneath. So as we gingerly walked (engaging our cores) and then slid and slipped along, we talked about what we were going to do in Iceland. I confessed that I wanted to try my hand at a podcast and secretly harbored a desire to do voiceover work. We talked about our favorite podcasts (shout out to 2 Dope Queens and My Favorite Murder) and what we would do if we had podcasts. We left it at that. Nothing planned, nothing concrete, just thoughts blowing away in the gale force Icelandic winds.

After a pilgrimage back to the motherland for some hot sun and family time Jonas returned to Iceland rejuvenated and invigorated. “We should totally do a podcast,” he said. “Right?!” I answered. That’s basically the way the conversation went. We both have kids and Jonas’s are not yet in elementary school and by this time I had started my second job but we weren’t going to let lack of time and mental energy get us down. We had podcast meetings in the brief time between getting off work and kid pick-ups. We rambled into a borrowed microphone we barely knew how to use and I hacked and pieced our first episode together and oh the fun we had doing it! After getting our own, less high tech but more user-friendly microphone, the episodes came fast and furious cause when we get together, we go on and on. Through my cold, an impatient one-year-old, airplanes flying overhead and completely not recording one episode when we totally thought we were recording, we recorded five episodes. Woo! They are available wherever you listen to podcasts and on our podcast website.

Listen, enjoy and do me a solid, subscribe, rate us, write a review–all three would be great doing just one would be of immense help. We are @raisinandhotdog on most social media.

Takk, takk and bless, bless y’all! (Thank you and bye-bye y’all!)