#14 - Good Life / Inner City

The 1970s were a period of intensifying fears about the rapid spread of technological complexity in the wake of environmental catastrophes such as the Three Mile Island accident and the popularity of dystopian sci-fi and 'tech-critical' books which warned that technology was already harming human wellbeing and would soon be out of control. In this context, then, what are we to make of the development of a musical style in the early 1980s known from the very start as Techno? And what of the fact that techno’s most successful song contained an uplifting vision of human flourishing, Inner City’s 1988 single, ‘Good Life’?

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'Good Life' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. In August 1978, an evacuation began in Love Canal, Niagara Falls, a neighbourhood on the border between Ontario, Canada and New York State, which would eventually see 221 families permanently relocated with the assistance of the Federal government. It happened after a long campaign by local activists, which had garnered national attention, arguing that chemical toxins dumped in the area by the Hooker Chemical Company in the 1950s had been contaminating the town’s water supply, causing a high local rate of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages. President Jimmy Carter called it ‘one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era.’ In March 1979, a more notorious environmental catastrophe occurred when a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania led to the evacuation of 140,000 people, a $1 billion clean-up operation, and an abrupt halt to the growth of the U.S. nuclear industry, which saw plans for 51 new nuclear plants cancelled between 1980 and 1984. Philosopher of Engineering Carl Mitcham called the 1970s ‘a watershed in increasing consciousness of problems associated with technology’, in reference both to changing public opinion in the wake of these high-profile environmental disasters, and to the proliferation of tech-critical texts by writers such as Charles Perrow, who argued in his much-cited Normal Accidents that modern societies contained such a high degree of technological complexity that incidents like Three Mile Island were inevitable, advocating the abandonment of modern technology altogether. This view built on a traditional Romantic critique of technology which had reached something of a high-point in the mid-twentieth century through the work of writers such as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, although it can be seen back at the very dawn of the Industrial Revolution, in Scottish polymath Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 essay, ‘Sign of the Times’, which labelled the era ‘the Age of Machinery’, and lamented the replacement of craft methods by mass manufacturing: ‘Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside’, he wrote. ‘On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one’.

In this context, then, what are we to make of the development of a musical style, originating in U.S. midwestern cities, above all Detroit, Michigan, in the early 1980s, rapidly spreading to Britain and Europe, known from the very start as Techno? And, given the era’s widespread fear that technology posed an unprecedented threat to human well-being, what of the fact that techno’s most successful song contained an uplifting vision of human flourishing, Inner City’s 1988 single, ‘Good Life’? I’m going to look at this song in light of both the anxieties and the excitement people felt about new technologies at the time, and ask what it might be saying the ‘Good Life’ is in a world built in large part by the speedy, inanimate machines of modern industry.

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Understanding the optimism in 'Good Life' starts with the origin of the genre name itself. Juan Atkins, the Detroit-based record producer widely credited with initiating the genre with tracks like 1981’s ‘Alleys of Your Mind’, has said that 'techno' was a term taken from the 1970 bestseller, Future Shock, by the science writer Alvin Toffler, which Atkins had read for his high school 'Future Studies' class. With Toffler we encounter a quite different perspective on the value of technology, one which also had its roots in the 19th century, and which saw in technology liberatory potential, and viewed the rapid and apparently unstoppable spread of technological complexity as something to be celebrated. In fact, Toffler took on some of the tech-sceptics I just mentioned, writing, 'despite all the anti-technological rhetoric of the Elluls and Fromms, the Mumfords and Marcuses, it is precisely the super-industrial society, the most advanced technological society ever, that extends the range of freedom. The people of the future enjoy greater opportunities for self-realization than any previous group in history.’ As its name suggests, Future Shock tempered this idealism with a warning that there could be a danger in technological change for those unable to adapt to it: this is Toffler’s notion of 'future shock', a variant on 'culture shock', in which the future has abruptly arrived into the present, disrupting traditional ways of life and leaving many disoriented and distressed. By his follow-up, The Third Wave, however, published in 1980, and also cited as an influence by techno artists, Toffler had abandoned this cautionary note and committed more forcefully to a breathless techno-optimism, peppering each chapter with passages like: 'the emergent civilization can be made more sane, sensible, and sustainable, more decent and more democratic than any we have ever known ... it could ... turn out to be the first truly humane civilization in recorded history.'

At the time of Atkins’ first record, he was DJing and producing music in a loose collaboration with two younger producers he had met at high school, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, who, as one half of Inner City, would go on to produce tracks including 'Big Fun' and 'Good Life'. Their school was in a small town called Belleville, about 30 miles from Detroit. The Belleville Three, as they came to be known, are credited with originating and developing the first wave of Detroit Techno. The story of their working relationship is now the stuff of electronic music legend - May and Saunderson's friendship apparently started after Saunderson had beaten May in a fight after school one day - but the circumstances of their meeting offers another clue to the meaning of the music they would make: unlike Detroit itself, Belleville was a predominantly white, rural community; May, Atkins and Saunderson were among the only Black students in the high school. Of Detroit, but half a step removed, the group privileged difference and independent thinking; May recalls the early events they put on: ‘We had amazing flyers back then, [which contained] these subliminal messages of an alternative way of thinking. We were trying to attract people that wanted to be alternative and wanted to be different’. There’s a deep love for Detroit that comes across in their recollections of that period, though always inflected by a note of regret or frustration at what they saw as the wasted potential trapped in the city; Atkins recalls what he could see from his house during that time: ‘I was smack in the middle of downtown, on Griswold. I was looking at this building and I see the faded imprint of American Airlines, the shadow after they took the sign down. It just brought home to me the thing about Detroit - in any other city you have a buzzing, thriving downtown.’

We begin to understand the appeal of Toffler’s hopeful vision of a world transformed by the inevitable advance of modern technology to young black Detroiters in the late 1970s and 80s such as Atkins, when we consider the situation of the city at the time, for it was not just deindustrialization and economic stagnation that defined the city in this period, but also the long legacy of segregation and other racist legislation, which meant that when the centres of car production which had generated the city’s great wealth in the first half of the century - the vast factories of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler - started to relocate to cheaper, less thoroughly unionised regions as early as the 1950s, the social impacts differed along racial lines. De facto housing segregation had been established via the practice of ‘redlining’, in which financial institutions, including those backed by federal housing agencies, refused to insure mortgages in predominantly African-American areas, intensifying the phenomenon of ‘white flight’, when white families moved to suburban areas inaccessible to African-Americans. Employment discrimination and years of brutal policing of African-American Detroiters prompted a series of riots in 1967 - sometimes called the Detroit Rebellion - which left 43 dead, making it one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history. And finally, in 1974, when the Belleville Three would have been at middle school, the Supreme Court reversed the ​​Milliken v. Bradley ruling, effectively putting a stop to the process of desegregation in Detroit schools, ‘maintaining’, as Justice Douglas put it in his dissenting opinion, ‘black ghettos’. All these contributed to a city sharply split by race and class, reflected in the proliferation of a phrase, heard over and over on television news, which signalled, without saying so explicitly, the racial nature of America’s urban divides; it was, of course, the ‘inner city’. For many white suburban viewers, ‘inner city’ conjured an image of the violence, drugs and social blight they had done well to escape, and they fought hard - via legal and other means - to resist non-white arrivals into their neighbourhoods. 

Dan Sicko, in Techno Rebels, still the definitive history of the genre, argues that this sort of TV news cliché served to solidify a crude image of Detroit: ‘It was as if violence was all that defined Detroit;’ he writes, ‘the city’s notoriety as the “murder capital” still lingers, even though it is no longer statistically accurate. Detroit became a national symbol for all that was wrong with America’s cities, suffering more from the negligence of the media than from any specific criminal acts.’ By naming his band ‘Inner City’, Saunderson was surely poking at the same sort of lazy characterisation: but the provocation goes further than just exposing the phrase’s racist embedded assumptions, and to understand what is really being communicated by a techno band called Inner City producing an album called Paradise, on which a song called ‘Good Life’ is found, we need to go back to the origins of techno and the preoccupations of the artists who would influence the likes of Atkins, May and Saunderson.

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Easily the most well-known comment on the origins of Detroit techno was made by Derrick May who explained it was ‘just like Detroit - a complete mistake … like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator.’ George Clinton, leader of the pioneering funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, in this context, represents the experimental, progressive element in the American soul tradition, and German electro-pop group Kraftwerk the essential foreign ingredient which produced something altogether new and distinct from what had come before; one of the subtexts of this comment, for instance, is the implication that techno was a determined break from the previous generation of Detroit-based music production: Motown. Certainly, the Kraftwerk influence is absolutely clear on the early Juan Atkins records: several, like the brilliant ‘Clear’ he made as Cybotron, feature samples from Kraftwerk records, and Atkins’ use of deadpan, processed spoken vocals in place of melodies recall tracks like Kraftwerk’s ‘The Robots’. 

When discussing his love of Kraftwerk - something he shared with May and Saunderson - Atkins has linked them with another electro-pop pioneer of the late 70s, Gary Numan, and in particular his album The Pleasure Principle, appreciating what he called its ‘cold, European make-up’ and ‘robotic imagery’. In the case of Numan, this coldness was derived from the dystopian science fiction of Philip K Dick and JG Ballard, and manifested in his music’s perennial focus on the alienated human subject in a modern, technologically complex society: in fact, you could draw a fairly direct line from the theme of the unsettling blurring of the human with technology - specifically the uncanny eroticism of cars - which Ballard explored in his 1973 novel, Crash, to Numan’s iconic 1979 hit, ‘Cars’, to Juan Atkins’s 1982 singles as Cybotron such as ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Night Drive’. And there was something discomfiting in early Detroit techno: its popular perception was initially its so-called ‘icy’ quality, due in large part to Atkins’ singles as Cybotron and then under another pseudonym, Model 500. In these records Atkins was playing directly on that late 1970s atmosphere of technology anxiety by consistently deploying minor chords and dissonance, denaturalised vocals, wilfully sterile-sounding drum sounds, metronomic rhythmic patterns and a lyric preoccupation with paranoia, isolation and darkness. 

And yet the attitude towards technology found in Kraftwerk - the most important influence on the early techno producers in this respect - was more ambiguous than this. They did make an album called Radio-Activity, during a period of high-profile anti-nuclear energy protests in Germany, which opens with a slow, thudding kick pattern on a track called ‘Geiger Counter’, but this apparent concern with the dangers of technology was more than offset with expressions of optimism around what it was providing in the modern world, and most of all a provocative demonstration of adaptation to it: the man-machine. Even the title ‘Radio-Activity’ is one of their trademark terrible puns: it’s also about the joy of listening to the radio. Ralf Hutter, one of the founder members of the group along with Florian Schneider, was always the most explicit about the band’s ideology, describing him and his bandmates not as musicians but as ‘music workers’, referring to their creative process as akin to a factory’s production line, and repeatedly extolling the goal of a ‘unity’ between humans and technology. 

This included a defiance of the craft values close to the hearts of writers - like Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century, who we heard at the start of this episode, all the way to German contemporaries of Kraftwerk like Theodor Adorno - horrified by the domination of mass manufacturing techniques. The band name itself is a deliberate provocation in this respect - translating as ‘power plant’, the name ‘Kraftwerk’ is clearly also a play on the English word ‘craftwork’, challenging us either to accept that what they produced qualifies as ‘craft’ or to conclude that the notion of craft itself is obsolete and ridiculous: either, you suspect, would be fine with Hutter and Schneider, but why would it be important for them to take aim at traditional craft values and assert in their place the ostentatiously technical, the manufactured and, above all, the new? 

In the excellent 2009 BBC documentary about the development of German electronic music in the 1970s, Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, the ideas and social atmosphere of post-war Germany are traced via interviews with members of the avant-garde music scenes in Munich, Berlin and Dusseldorf: all of them, including members of Tangerine Dream, Faust and Can, would have been young German citizens growing up amidst the rubble of the Third Reich, and, almost without exception, they allude to this spectre in their memories of that period, and in particular, the sense that it had not simply disappeared overnight in 1945, that much of it was still palpably present. Michael Rother, who was an early member of Kraftwerk, leaving to form the band Neu!, explains that ‘at that time it was still a period of leaving the German history behind. That was also part of the story. The conservative remains of post-war Germany, Nazi-times, was still to be found everywhere.’ Others mention the widespread belief that Nazis were still in powerful positions in society and the infrastructure of their oppressive state was still in operation. This manifested in their art and music as an overwhelming imperative to break decisively with the past; seen from this perspective, the craft values of traditional music-making were inherently suspect: tokens of the past and a degraded social order. 

The fascination with German electronic music, and especially with Kraftwerk, by African American artists such as the Belleville Three, and Afrika Bambaataa, who sampled Kraftwerk in his seminal, pioneering, 1982 rap hit, ‘Planet Rock’, is usually referred to simply as a funny quirk of music history, as May put it in his famous phrase - ‘a complete mistake’ - or possibly as a result of the common industrial heritage of cities such as Detroit and Dusseldorf. Rarely, if ever, is a link made between the situation of young musicians living under the state-sanctioned violence of segregated America and those growing up in the wake of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, although something like that connection had been made by observers such as James Baldwin as early as 1962, when he wrote that ‘White people were, and are, astounded by the Holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But, I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much.’ 

There are differences, of course: Detroit techno artists were reacting to discrimination they themselves were suffering, the music Kraftwerk and other members of the German avant-garde made was more like a response to the widespread denialism and corruption they saw in the post-war German state. But there’s a clear affinity between the compulsion Kraftwerk had to make music in an entirely new way, and to deliberately defy traditional ideas of artistic value, with the intentions of the Detroit artists who took inspiration from them: their desire to make a clear break with the past, to transcend the seemingly intractable pessimism of the present and to embrace the hope that new technology could be the force to disrupt historic patterns of ignorance and division. By giving himself the pseudonym ‘Model 500’, Atkins was building on Kraftwerk’s rhetoric of the man-machine and extending it into his situation and that of Detroit in general; explaining the idea in an interview, he said, ‘Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system of Ford … Today the plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the cars'. There’s a racial twist to this gesture of inhabiting the persona of a robot; the black techno artist responds to the racist ideology of the subhuman by rejecting the category of the human altogether, presenting themselves instead, as posthuman, thus beyond racial stereotyping and, indeed, beyond racial categorisation itself.

It also brings techno into contact with the collection of ideas - more conventionally applied to film and literature - known as afrofuturism, a term coined in 1993 by Mark Dery in an essay on African American science fiction but retrospectively applied to artists as diverse as Ralph Ellison and Sun Ra. Atkins struck an afrofuturist note in the epigraph to the Cybotron album, Techno City: ‘We dedicate this album to the people of the Detroit Metroplex. To survive we must technofy and save the biosphere’. 

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Of the Belleville Three, Atkins is sometimes nicknamed the ‘Initiator’, for creating the records which defined the original sound, while Derrick May has been called the genre’s ‘Innovator’ for his imagination and playfulness, which brought Detroit techno out of the orbit of European electronic music into something wholly itself. Kevin Saunderson, the producer of ‘Good Life’, is called the ‘Elevator’, to credit the fact that it was his music which drew international attention to the Detroit scene. But the label ‘Elevator’ is more than just a nod to his records’ commercial success, for it’s in his music that the latent techno-optimism of the genre is wholeheartedly made manifest. His music, quite openly, seeks to elevate its listeners and the whole social scene of which they are a part.

There’s a moment, in the 2001 documentary Techno City, when Carl Craig, a producer from the second wave of Detroit techno, is standing by the magnificent neoclassical facade of Michigan Central Station. It’s disused, behind steel fencing, with half its windows broken and grass sprouting across the forecourt. Craig says, ‘Every time I’d pass by this building I’d think one day this could be mine. I’d renovate it, I’d make it into something amazing’, and suddenly he launches into a description of his creative process: ‘I use this building as inspiration. It comes into my mind when I’m at the keyboards, at the drum machines … the lines might be basslines and the curves might be string lines and the columns may have more to do with drum beats, the intricacy of the grooves that’s within the music.’ Craig’s beautiful description of the connection between his production style and this ruined Detroit landmark is a particularly lyrical rendering of what is now a commonly-held view on Detroit techno: that it is a reflection of the city’s decline, that ‘techno’ is not the sound of industrialism so much as post-industrialism, as if the reverberant sonic spaces and angular melodies of techno were just the musical equivalent of a mournful black-and-white photograph of an abandoned warehouse. The key, though, is in Craig’s initial feelings about the station: he wishes not to preserve it as a record of historic glories, or to gaze at it as an emblem of urban decay, but to renovate it, literally to make it new again, to make it into ‘something amazing’. 

With this, we begin to arrive at what’s really going on in the music of Detroit techno, and in the work of Inner City in particular, as it was with singles such as ‘Good Life’ that the sense of music as an action in the world, as something that was intended to impact on the lives and environments of its listeners, is made explicit. ‘I was attracted to the way I could unite people through playing music on the dance floor’, Saunderson says in an interview about his early experiences of DJing in Chicago and Detroit. He goes on: ‘My inspiration was a little different [to Juan and Derrick]. I was into vocals. I was into Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, McFadden and Whitehead, Chaka Khan. Those were anthems to me, so it was natural for me to have that inspiration when I created my music. So when I’m making music I’m thinking about melody, I’m thinking about song, I’m thinking about uplifting tunes.’ The names he picks out - McFadden and Whitehead, Chaka Khan, and so on - are all important figures from the American soul tradition, seen across disco, R&B and funk, but always centred around a powerful vocal line and clear melody, a form of singing and musical arrangement which has its origins in gospel music, in which the idea of elevation and uplift has both a religious and a political resonance, as I discussed in the episode on Curtis Mayfield in the previous series. 

So when Saunderson decided he wanted to add vocals to his techno production template, Paris Grey, the singer on the Inner City recordings from that era, was a natural collaborator. She had started singing in church, a fact she herself has linked to the writing of ‘Good Life’: it meant, she said, that ‘lyrics about positive thinking and good vibes came naturally’. The opening line, ‘Let me take you to a place I know you wanna go’, situates the song squarely in the gospel-saturated soul tradition which would include a song like the 1972 Staple Singers hit, ‘I’ll Take You There’, which repeats, as a refrain, ‘I know a place, ain’t nobody cryin’, I’ll take you there’. Overlaying gospel and techno isn’t as unlikely a combination as it might seem: Chicago and Detroit, the two midwestern cities chiefly responsible for the development of electronic dance music in America, were also two of the most important cities for gospel: the Staple Singers hailed from Chicago, and Aretha Franklin herself grew up in Detroit, making her first recordings at her father’s New Bethel Baptist church. Still, it was a fresh innovation when Inner City did it, and it’s in that combination that we can start to understand the full meaning of the song, partly for what carries over from gospel, and partly for what the combination does to modify the gospel vision it borrows from. 

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Part of the song’s gospel inheritance is in the richness of meaning it can achieve through apparently simple phrases. When Paris Grey sings in this song ‘I have got a feeling that you’re gonna like it - what I’m doing to you … I want you to want the good life all night’, it might suggest that the ‘good life’ is just a sexual innuendo; in fact a similar charge had been levelled at ‘I’ll Take You There’ by pious listeners who thought the ‘there’ Mavis Staples wanted to take you was a sexual rather than a spiritual climax, although she always insisted otherwise, saying in a 1997 interview, ‘What other place could you take a person but heaven?’ The fallacy here is in the assumption that physicality and spirituality are mutually exclusive. To me, the way both songs, different as they are, collapse the body/spirit binary is part of their wider refusal to recognise the incompatibility of individual freedom and a flourishing, well-ordered society, as classical theories of the ‘good life’ had suggested; instead, in both cases, they are reliant on each other, because of the implied context of their reception. Whether it’s the church or the dancefloor, these songs embody a rich expression of the individual’s desire for fulfilment, yet it’s an expression which can only properly exist in their particular social contexts. Derrick May, Saunderson’s collaborator and the ‘Innovator’ of the Belleville Three, describes seeing the producer and pioneer of Chicago house Frankie Knuckles DJing: ‘Frankie was really a turning point in my life … When I heard him play, and I saw the way people reacted, danced, and sang to the song - and fall in love with each other - I knew this was something special. Not just being a DJ and playing music and being on a mission, but playing music with love. This vision of making a moment this euphoric … it changed me.’

And yet ‘Good Life’ is wholly a techno song, far removed from the Staple Singers sound. Saunderson uses the Roland TR-909 and 707 drum machines to create the beat, which gives the track the trademark ‘punch’ associated with the 909, and of course they make the rhythms metronomically accurate in a way no human would be capable of. He uses an Akai S900 sampler to extract a single chord from the very end of an early house track by Nitro Deluxe, ‘This Brutal House’. The S900 then pitches that sample on every note of the keyboard, essentially constructing a new instrument based on that sound. Consequently, when Saunderson plays a sequence using the sampler, the chords produced are all minor triads and it creates a dissonance: between the first pair (Bm->F#m) and the second (Am->Em). The central riff of the song - a thicket of minor chords and harmonic dissonance - is partly a product of the technology being used and we’re meant to perceive it as such, in the same way that we’re meant to feel the artificiality of the synthesised ‘vocal’ sound playing the riffs in the intro and interludes. We’re meant to hear the distance between that sound and ‘naturalness’. It’s in the arrangement’s palpably artificial sounds and dissonant note choices, which result from the technology being used, that we can hear a residue of that icy, ‘dark’ atmosphere of early techno, a legacy of dystopian ideas about society and technology which manifested in the gloom and angularity of Gary Numan and Cybotron. 

Listening back to ‘Good Life’, and Inner City’s other hit single from the era, ‘Big Fun’, it’s striking how downcast much of the core musical material really is: both songs are built on more or less exclusively minor chord sequences. The melody of ‘Good Life’ is essentially in B minor, and that opening synth riff, heard in off-kilter rhythmic patterns, through a number of reverb and delay effects, sounds disoriented. But when Grey’s vocal enters, suddenly a different sonic quality is introduced - clear, rich and full, on the beat - and the song is then bound together by the full rhythmic arrangement at the drop. [demonstrate]. This suspension of resolution building to a euphoric synchrony is part of what we conventionally expect from techno, so much so that it’s typical only to think of songs like this simply as feel-good dance anthems, but what is embodied in those chiming, displaced minor chords carries through the whole track, so when Grey sings ‘no more bad times, only glad times … no more sorrow, nothing borrowed in the good life’, it feels more convincing. In a darker harmonic setting, and one audibly ‘technologised’, it feels as if it’s being sung from within the bad times, and within the real, built environment, not beyond it. This is something which distinguishes it from gospel visions of the Good Life: in ‘I’ll Take You There’, the better place has been glimpsed (‘I know a place’) but it is not on Earth, and is consequently set in a wholly major-key, wholly uplifting musical context, inviting us to vicariously inhabit the delight and joy of ‘there’ for the duration of the song. ‘Good Life’ remains (sonically) in the difficult present, simultaneously asking us to aim for the better place - it embodies that same optimism as gospel that a better world is possible - but comes to a very different, very secular conclusion. The Staple Singers ultimately believed that heaven was the place where everything would be better. Techno’s concern with the ugly side of both technology and the city in modernity means it’s grounded in the world: the good life is possible, but it isn’t in heaven, and still less in some utopian, bucolic retreat, but within the dilapidated, divided city itself. 

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Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be talking about Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’. It’s a song partly about futility - the deal she wants with God is one she knows she can’t make - but, according to its writer, it’s also about the meaning and significance of gender. ‘I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can't understand each other’, she has said of it, ‘because we are a man and a woman.' Is this really true? And what does the song as she wrote it have to say?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.