Glance through the most popular podcasts and there are a handful of very successful podcast concepts: true crime, political talk, celebrities gabbing about stuff.
Atlanta creative Kacie Willis decided to take podcasting in a different direction with “You Heard Me Write.” In each episode, she offers up a theme, usually one or two words, and feeds it to three artists, one a writer, another a musician and a third a sound design expert. They then create pieces based on said theme.
She then brings them together to discuss what they created and whatever else they feel like talking about.
“It’s an anonymous art-making project with a salon-style roundtable with the three artists,” said Willis, who has spent years as an audio engineer and sound designer.
In season one Willis used mostly her friends in Atlanta and shot everything outdoors because it was during the pandemic. The reaction from listeners, Willis said, was heartening. “People were very receptive and very surprised in a lot of ways,” she said. “People enjoyed the outdoor nature sounds while we had the conversations.”
For the 10-episode season two, she widened her pool of talent by having people apply to join the podcast. She taped multiple episodes in New York and Los Angeles as well as Atlanta.
Willis said she made sure the three people had no direct connection to each other.
“It’s a little different vibe this year,” said Willis. “We had people ranging from PhD students at Georgia State, someone working at the Department of Defense, teachers, essential workers. We went for diversity of thought and perspective.”
Season two opened this week with a one-word theme: “waffle.” How did that come up? Willis said her ideas are relatively random. “I might have just been hungry,” she said on the podcast.
She did this episode out of New York City. The chosen writer Robin Hopkins read a piece called “One Lady, Three Waffles” describing the different meanings of the waffles that went far beyond the breakfast staple.
She was joined by Adrian Bridges, a guitarist and composer and sound designer, and Kia Shavon, audio engineer, who each created sound pieces that try to capture her words.
Hopkins said she got very emotional listening to their pieces for the first time. “Am I in therapy?” she said. “Both pieces were so beautiful. I’m without words. That’s rare... They get me! I didn’t see it coming!”
Bridges wanted to capture the joy of making waffles including the sound of actually doing so. “It came to me pretty quickly,” he said. “It was just the matter of executing it.”
Shavon said Hopkins’ piece was deeper than she had anticipated. “I had to really compose a piece and go through all these different emotions,” she said, such as the angst and anxiety of “waffling” as well as the happy aura of the food item itself. “I followed what was written,” she said.
Willis has lived in Atlanta nine years and currently resides in the Old Fourth Ward. She said she was able to build her artistic network here in a way she said she might have felt too scared to do in New York or Los Angeles. “Southern hospitality,” she said.
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