I’m Daniel Lelchuk…

I have been in music my entire life, and I have had the great fortune of being able to play concerts on my cello all over the world, in the great halls in the the big music capitals, and in some pretty out of the way places, too. I have played for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, I have shared the stage with Helen Mirren, John Goodman, and many others, and I have played the National Anthem for solo cello at NBA games.

But I have always loved talking to people, asking them the important questions, and yes, even holding their feet to the fire when need be. I started this podcast because I felt there was a hunger out there for substantive, long-form conversation that wasn't built around a 30-second “gotcha" sound byte driven by political ideology. Who does that really serve? Certainly not the listener.

You may not always agree with the guests and the viewpoints you hear on this show. But I promise you this: I will always bring you real opinions and real, unvarnished conversation that hasn’t been filtered through the corporate media apparatus. Individuality. Diverse views. Freedom of thought. The time for those things is now. Welcome— I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m Doug Christian…

I’ve been the producer of this show since the beginning. I was born into a Baptist minister's family in the Canadian province of Alberta. I experienced small town life there and in the southern part of North Dakota where the Ice Age Glacier left truncated hills as it made its departure. We moved again to the metropolis of Minneapolis were I spent my “difficult years” and that left me educated through three years of college. We all, to some extent, have those years in our early life when we attempt, through a process of discovery, to find out how we will feed ourselves, spend an inordinate amount of time honing skills, seeking mates and other activities attached to the human condition that occupy our days on our way to our final reward. My life has been no different. At my first quarter century, I found the first major branch in life road. One way lead to the life of a musician and the other lead to a career in radio broadcasting. Neither required a suit and tie which was just fine with me. One night while playing a field hand’s bar in the middle of a field in the southeast corner of Alabama, all of us plugged into one socket, facing a setup bar of 2X6 planks on saw horses and booze provided by the local bootlegger out of the trunk of his Cadillac, I decided to become an amateur musician and a professional broadcaster. I did the radio gig in Mobile, Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and then back down to New Orleans while developing Rock and Roll ears, a prophecy in the fine art of audio production, writing commercial copy that sometimes got produced, sitting in with friends doing music, doing a few studio gigs that actually paid (screwing up my preferred amateur status) and learning everything I could about computers, teaching myself programming and the ways of IT. Radio got boring which got me fired and it was on to a career in Information Technology. Fifteen years later, I’m back in the audio world, producing talk radio, producing a daily new music blog called Creole Radio 1, and helping Daniel Lelchuk with his ancillary career on Talking Beats. I have lived the Chinese curse enjoying interesting times. Normal is something I never have to contend with.

More Hard Sayin's From Creole Radio 1:
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car you’re still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
– Ellen Goodman (an American journalist and syndicated columnist)