I had a great time at Divaville this afternoon. Christa and I co-hosted, as we will do for the next two weeks. Just to help her listeners get used to the idea of a new host coming in. I had never done that before (two DJs at one time) and I wasn't sure how it was going to work, but it turned out to be easy and fun.
We did a special "Happy Birthday America" show. All songs about states, cities, a few songs about freedom and one about apple pie. The title of this entry is a line from the wonderful Blossom Dearie song "Rhode Island Is Famous For You." Here's the playlist if you're interested. The listeners seemed to really dig the theme. We got tons of calls. The best part was getting requests for songs we had already decided to play. Including once we got a request for a song we had already cued up! That has only happened to me once before. It feels great, like you're really in sync with the listeners. (One of them, at least.)
With all the calls, plus the band setting up for the next show, it was a little chaotic! Christa taught me the excellent trick of using allmusic.com to look up songs. Way more efficient than flipping through page after page in the binder trying to find a request. It may sound silly, but the Divaville library has over 20 albums of several artists (over 50 Sinatra!). Finding a particular song can take way too long if you don't know what album it's on. I'm definitely going to start using allmusic.com.
My only disappointment about the show is that we never played a song about hot dogs! We kept talking about it but didn't get around to it. Two hours really is not enough for a show like this. I'm subbing the Latin music show on Wednesday at 6 pm, and I think I may jettison the regular Latin theme (sorry, Santa Salsera) and do more "Happy Birthday America." It was just so much fun, and I have a list of tons of songs we didn't get to.
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