Interview:Paul McCusker (March 2011)
I was wondering why the Odyssey team decide to do something so out of the ordinary with Album 53, y'know, releasing the album way before the first episode aired, giving away the first episode for free, and then the fact that the episodes are not stand-alone stories; it's almost more like a Radio Theatre Production in that all twelve of them complete one full story.
There's several answers to that, and I'll take a stab at them, but some of it has to do with the kind of soft relaunch that we did, with exploring new characters, exploring new plot situations, sort of feeling our way through all of the newness, going alongside the traditional show, and how we were experimenting and playing with new ideas, and actually Album 53 and 54 were supposed to be produced almost concurrently, so we could sort of get ahead of our schedule. Originally, the episodes that were in Album 54 were supposed to come ahead of Album 53, in other words, flip-flop 'em. So those episodes were supposed to be Album 53 and the Green Ring Conspiracy was gonna be Album 54, but I think after we had finished Album 52, Dave Arnold and I were talking, and I was outlining this, I had said from the start, almost as a tribute to Sam Spade, the writings of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Humphrey Bogart films and that sort of thing, I had wanted to do a mystery that wouldn't be a story arc like Novacom, or even like Blackgaard, but a whole different sense and style. So I began to outline, and said from the very beginning, "I think we have twelve parts here, that would be fun to be interconnected", cause I think our fans like those, the serialization of ongoing plot lines and character situations. I think our fans tend to respond to really well. After we finished 52, you know Album 51 and 52 were sort of Hodge-Podge, in the sense of individual episodes, not really many main story arcs that we were pursuing. And we did that on purpose too, I think we’d had so many main story arcs that we were working through and we thought, you know, when we sort of relaunched this thing with Album 51, "let's just back off of any really intense story arcs for a bit”, but after 52, Dave Arnold and I talked about it and we thought, "We think at this point it would actually be a little more fun to go ahead and do the Green Ring Conspiracy, and then do the episodes for Album 54 sort of concurrently,” so we nudged that one ahead. So I went ahead and I outlined it; I then went ahead and wrote them; and then we went into the studio and began to record them, and we did them in two parts, I’d had sort of the whole thing outlined, and then we went in and did the first six episodes, and then there were certain dynamics in the studio that were so fascinating to us that I wound up rewriting the second half of the outline to accommodate some things that we thought we oughtta change, in terms of some of the characters, and how they wind up; just a handful of things like that. Now, sorry to be so long-winded about this, but that’s about the writing of it. And then part of the reason for releasing it the way we did is that we finally got our act together on the downloads, and realized that we were in a position now where we could release the downloads, and figure out how to time that with the release of the physical package, and basically to experiment with how we release every thing to the radio and through the web and through the hard package, (the retail side,) and use this as a chance to experiment a little bit to see how this works; how the fans responded to our doing it that way, how we do getting it out that way, so the whole thing proved to be an enormous experiment on a lot of fronts, and I guess the fans are gonna have to tell us what they think about our releasing the one episode free, and then having the downloads available, but then the physical copies, you can get in March, I believe, sometime. You guys would have to tell us what you think about that release schedule. We were concerned, too, that people might think that we were being a bit sneaky to release the first episode for free, fully knowing that it was the kick-off to the twelve episodes, that it wasn’t a one-off episode, that you would listen to the first one and hopefully be compelled to want to hear the rest.
I have a question about how you feel as a writer when you’re writing this type of suspense stories. There were several moments in Album 53 that were suspense-filled for, to quote a cliché, do you get the same kind of thrill as a writer as the listeners do, or is it different a little bit?
Well, the funny thing about the writing side of it is that it’s all based on some vain hope that whatever is being written is going to have the impact of the effect or better than what you’d hoped before you finally get it produced. So, yeah, I think as I was going through Green Ring I had moments when there were ideas that suddenly struck me as being particularly fun or cool or a nice twist where I was sort of hoping “Well, I hope they don’t see this coming,” and then of course on the flip side of it there are times when I’m actually writing in a way thinking “I don’t actually care if they see it coming as long as it’s fun when it actually arrives”. And some of that dynamic is always playing, even apart from suspense, whether you’re writing comedy or you’re writing strait drama or something that’s emotional or poignant or whatever it is that you’re after. You always hope to be as surprised as the listeners when you’re listening to it and it happens. And I think in our playback, when we did the playback of Green Ring episodes, there were those kinds of moments where I was particularly pleased or thrilled at how it was produced or that the impact was there, whatever the emotional impact was, it happened to be there. ‘Cause otherwise, if it’s not, if I’m sitting there kind of picking the lint of my trousers, that’s not a good sign, but yeah, I think, as I’m writing it’s always fun to almost become like the listener even while going through and saying, “Okay, I think this is gonna work,” or “This is a cool idea”, and the only problem, by the way, and you’ve seen this happen, I’m sure it’s happened in Odyssey, but it also happens in a lot of certain shows where the danger is that you paint yourself into a corner, you know, you come up with an idea that’s really clever, but you haven’t quite thought through how you’re gonna play it out, and before you know it you’re really stuck for a plausible, hopefully good answer to the situation you’ve created for yourself, and by the way, I will confess, only to you guys, I’ve never actually said this anywhere else, in a way we pretty much did this with Album 50. The ending of Album 50 caused me, as the one who was writing then the next episodes for Album 51, that caused me no end of consternation. You’d think that with a year and a half to think about it we could have been a bit more clever, but the fact is, we ended it at 50 with what was kind of an impulsive idea, which was ending it with Connie pushing the button with absolutely no clue—we had no idea what we were gonna do, and when we said “Okay, here’s 51 and we now need to pick up from 50” and, y’know, I had written the scene, but suddenly I thought “Well, what am I gonna do now? The expectations are gonna be pretty high for whatever is going to happen next, and I either need to sort of do an Imagination Station and surpass that somehow which seems impossible, or I have to do something else” which is what I opted to do, which was sort of go into a completely different direction and in that way, it sort of deflects the potential of huge disappointment, if that make any sense.
Regarding Album 54, besides the album title, is there anything you can tell us about it?
Well, I think it’d be unfair, you know we’re very cagy about talking about what’s coming, but I will say this: Album 54, and I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not, but as of right now, Album 54 does not address anything specific to Album 53. In fact, it’s almost like the microphone or the camera has shifted and so some of the characters in Album 53, even our main characters are not represented thoroughly in 54; it’s like we’re kind of looking at Odyssey from another direction for Album 54, and then an Album 55 we’ll pick up with certain themes and characters and ideas that we started with in Album 53.
Are we going to be hearing from the Inspiration Station anytime soon?
Well, I keep toying with ideas and things that I’d like to do. In fact, in one of my early outlines for the Green Ring Conspiracy, the Inspiration Station actually played a role in the outcome of some of what happens there, and then as I got into the writing, things shifted and changed, and I ultimately abandoned the idea, but our intention is, if not in 55, then certainly in 56, we really do wanna come back to the inventions. I really miss a lot of the inventions that Whit has created, you realize that each invention could have a series of its own, whether Imagination Station, Inspiration Station, the Talking Portraits, that kind of thing. There are a number of things that Whit has created that we could really spend a lot of time on, but obviously we have only so much time to spend on anything. If we ever got back to the days when we were doing 42 or 48 episodes a year, we might be able to do more, but at 24 episodes a year, we have to be very careful.
Were the episode titles that were mentioned in that last episode of the official AIO podcast real, or was that just a joke?
I have not heard that podcast, so I suddenly realized I am at a disadvantage. I’ve heard of the podcast, but I didn’t know that was one of the things they did. So to be honest, I don’t know whether he was yelling out real titles or not. I can give you a clue about something which might nudge it one way or the other. Very often the titles are not determined until right before we go into the studio. It’s one of the last things that we decide, unless we start with a title that we go “Wow, okay, that’s it.” In fact, sometimes we write a show around a title because we like the title so much, but for the most part, we have working titles, and then right before we go in and record Chris, ‘cause we don’t really have to lock it down until Chris says what it is. So he may have thrown out either some titles that are real, or titles that have been working titles, or it might just be gibberish.