BEHIND THE SCENES with Jaye Kranz
How did you meet Warren, and learn about this story - 26 years in the past? Why did you want to tell it?
A few days after moving into my neighbourhood - Yarraville, in Melbourne - I went to the local coffee shop and this guy walked in and started talking loudly to the barista about all this music I knew well. It was all the stuff I was listening to at the time. He said he hated a record that I really loved - it could have been a Ray LaMontagne album but I'm not certain of that. So I had to pipe up! We hit it off straight away and we've been sharing and arguing about music ever since.
He told me the escort anecdote when I was interviewing him for another piece I was doing. He mentioned Jacqui in passing at some point in the interview, and it was one of those moments when you feel someone just skimmed over a whale and acted like it was a goldfish. I knew there was a story in it, but it wasn't until the folks at ABC RN's Long Story Short said they wanted a story on the theme of "crash" that I remembered the interview and the idea of bringing the two parts of the story came together. In a way, the escort tale is a crash of sorts too.
Warren is a one-of-a-kind man. At once surprisingly open and guarded. He sees a kind of complex beauty in things tinged with sadness and nostalgia and a kind of muddling humanness which I relate to and which I wanted to share.
I think Warren's story holds these beautiful contradictions that so many of us carry but feel maybe we have to reconcile. The fantasies we foster alongside the true and sometimes disappointing things that take their stead; our bravado alongside our performance anxiety; the way we often try so hard to expunge the very things we're also trying to hold on to. The way we are all, at once, young and old. And the way our wounds can be both open and closed at the same time. When someone is open enough to express those things, and express them as well as he does, it's a gift to us all.
Starting Easy Love with the escort anecdote was a bold choice. How did you come to this decision?
I couldn't imagine it working any other way. I wanted the listener to experience that moment freely - as the awkward, very human story it was. Because it provides its own window into Warren. But also because I wanted the listener to experience Warren's story in layers. First, without the burden of what comes next in the piece, without knowing why the call to the escort service happened in the first place. To just witness this revealing moment in someone's life. Then, to experience it again in retrospect when the story circles back to an earlier time. If I'd placed it chronologically it would have explained away too much and lost its power. I think that's the beauty, the spooky power - but also the responsibility - of some radio. To place the order of things in a way that gives the anecdotes and the subject of the stories the most girth possible, to let the light hit things from a few sides, and, ideally, to allow room for the listener to open up that space for themselves.
You chose to include naturally occurring sounds from your afternoon with Warren (the CD playing in the car, the dog whimpering) that other producers might have discarded. Tell me about the process of using sound in this piece?
One of the things I love best about making radio is being led by the tape and the moment. Planning, but having the act of making a piece throw those plans asunder. I had no idea what was going to happen when we got in the car to visit the scene of the accident. But I rolled tape because I wanted to capture the movement physically and emotionally towards that place. The song Easy Love literally began playing when the engine started. It had obviously been on the car stereo when he'd driven to the interview. Knowing Warren is so passionate about music, the idea of recording ambient sounds outside the interview made perfect sense. And his car stereo did it for me, in the most uncanny way. The two songs we heard on the way to the crash site couldn't have been more fitting. Another big part of Warren‘s life is also about ‘found objects.' Old things. The idea of using naturally occurring sounds seemed to echo that. A shiny, squeaky-clean soundtrack would have clashed with the essence of who he is.
The ideal sound-design for me - and this can happen in infinite ways of course - is when the story and the sound design, on some level, can't be separated. It's an obvious thing, but exploring ways to push that idea is one of my passions.
In addition to producing radio, you're a musician and a songwriter. Why did you choose to tell Warren's story through radio, versus song?
That choice never occurred to me to be honest. There are things I can do with radio I can never begin to do with music. And very much vice versa. I like that they overlap somewhere but exist in very different realms for me personally. Warren tells it so beautifully and it's his story. If I'd tried, it would have been an awful song.
What stories are you most excited about telling next?
I've just started producing this year's The Radio Hour - a collaboration between ABC Radio National's 360 Documentaries and The Melbourne Writer's Festival - which I'm pretty excited about. It's a night of live documentary radio performed in a theatre with musicians scoring the pieces live, all recorded for broadcast. The theme this year is "WHEN WORDS FAIL" and writers and radio producers from all over will present stories on that theme. This Radio Hour will include appearances by a US-based podcaster I'm not yet allowed to mention (Festival rules, not mine!), Emily Richmond, a radio producer who is sailing around the world solo on a boat (and is currently docked in Borneo I believe), writer, documentarian and radio host John Safran, and 360 Documentaries ' own powerhouse (and executive producer) Claudia Taranto. So there's a good many stories I'll be busy with in one capacity or another over the coming months.