Sea Hags Podcast

Hoo boy. No guest this week, as we get well into our cups in a sweltering room. We talk the simple pleasures in life, drinking habits, settling beef, putting pebbles in the trust bucket, and our resistence to becoming regulars anywhere.

The Sea Hags pride themselves on the ability to forge deep connections wherever they may be, and with that in mind, this week, we welcome the lovely Calvin Scott, a sweet American gent that Chris met in 2013, singing in a park in Edinburgh. Calvin is over six and a half feet of beautiful harp-playing charm, and we are so fortunate to sit surrounded by his good vibes, talking into your ears. In this episode, we discuss the ups and downs of unlimited recording space and high-quality portable recorders (the memories! the shame!), fighting geese, eating ducks, world travel, with every conversation transition marked with an incredibly unnecessary harp glissado (thanks, Katie).

We're keeping it in the family this week as we are joined by Katie's sister-in-law (and world class violist!) Katya Woloshyn. Katya regales us with tales of her life as a self-confessed “strong-willed child” with a competitive streak as long as the prairie horizon. Chris and Katya celebrate their Capricorn-y independence and bond over the struggles of trying to get a) paid and b) basic human consideration as independent musical contractors. Katya's career as a classical musician has her living full time in the Netherlands, and she's toured all over the world with her big violin, but the land of ketchup chips and Kraft Dinner will always feel like coming home.

We’re back in the shack and on the horn(blower) with Rachel, a passionate creator and a champion of the delicate art of fan fiction! We examine the dialogic relationship between a piece of media and its audience, and how the line between fan and creator is growing increasingly blurred. Rachel tells us all of the unexpected side benefits that come along with fanfic writing (friends all over the world and an encyclopaedic knowledge of boats, thanks to her time in the Horatio Hornblower community), Katie reads a fine vintage (March 2000) from her own fanfiction archive, Chris teaches a young man about the value of a white wine spritzer, and we all put Ernest Hemingway on blast.

Just a short one today, a part two from last week’s Sea Hag’s Slumber Party. In this ep, Katie and Chris return from a trip out for cocktails and get to the fun stuff, determining their future with paper fortune tellers and rousing games of MASH.

Our podcast’s world is torn asunder this week as we go guest-less and temporarily depart the shack for Katie’s New Westminster apartment. That’s right, it’s an old-school sleepover! Katie anticipates Chris’s wine needs and gushes about/mocks her recent trip to Portland; Chris basks in the warmth of being lovingly babied. We both complain about the requirements of a North American Protestant work ethic and advocate for the longest vacations possible. Part two of the sleepovercast series (ha!) will be released next week.

We chose one of the hottest June days on record to bring Cat, an intrepid LIBRARY SCIENTIST (does she wear one of those science jackets?) to our extremely well-insulated recording studio. What followed was a conversation about group dynamics, Guiding/Scouting, classification systems, and geek identity--punctuated by the occasional whine and re-application of our rapidly melting ice packs.

We get a dose of Southern charm when Deneece Berg, a recent Austin, TX transplant, talks about growing up in a small town, moving to the big city to chase her dreams (NYC and SNL, oh my!), and having to go back and start all over, serving caramel macchiatos to her high school bullies. Setbacks be damned, Deneece tells the tale of turning her intense disappointment into clean burning spite fuel and making her way back to writing/comedy.

The shack heats up and we get the vapours when local comic Justin O’Hearn stops by to share his expertise–he’s a PhD candidate in Victorian Pornography! We learn that there are many different ways to have an orgy (one of them wrong, the weak-stomached may want to start selectively fast-forwarding around the 48 minute mark). Justin flips the script on everything we think we know about the “stuffy” Victorians. We talk about our first experiences with porn; Katie gets the shame sweats. NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR PARENTS!

Comedian Steve Venegas joins us to talk Juggalos, brushes with internet fame, lessons learned in comedy so far and looming new parenthood. Katie and Chris reminisce fondly about being only children.

Renee returns to join Chris in the studio for a little Joanna Newsom workshop! We discover just how many words are packed in to each deceptively simple song, how many takes are really needed for 2 tracks (MANY) and how far a $7 bottle of wine goes when you're holed up in a hot recording studio. Chris works some post-production Reverb Magic to make us sound like haunted troubadours on a ship out to sea.

Our friend Renee (writer and editor at The Elephant Journal) joins us to delve deep into writing, vulnerability, friendship, boundaries, badass women and inflicting art on people. Chris harnesses the power of Hamilton to rant about boundaries, Katie apologizes for hating apologies, we scheme up a Friendship Collective Agreement.

In which Katie unloads and sifts through some thoughts and feelings about the experience of being new to a scene (in this case, comedy) in which toughness and a competitive spirit is prized--because she possesses neither. Some weeks ago, she opened up a discussion on a local stand-up forum about transphobia in comedy and she's been periodically wading through the fallout since. She wants to live in the opposite of a reality show--coming here not to win, but to make friends. Chris lets her pour it all out in the safety of the Shack.

Sketch comic and amateur astrologist Lauren Martin (Taurus) swings by this week for hangover spritzers, laughs, and a bit of fortune telling. Chris (Capricorn) and Katie (Pisces) want to believe, just so long as the future is flattering. We look at fate, identify our issues and learn to mitigate them. Kind of. Chris vents about vaping, and Katie gets bested in puns.

After his interview, we cleared away the table and chairs to have an intimate acoustic session with Dom. As much as we bemoan working for free towards the end of the episode, he gave us (and by extension, you) these tunes for the price of a wink and a smile. Please enjoy!

This week we welcome Dominique Fricot, one of Vancity’s indie rock darlings—and Chris’s former Spark that Screams bandmate—to the Shack. Will we succumb to his buttery voice, handsome features, and frontman energy? Almost certainly, and we suspect you will too. Dom talks personal and musical evolutions, the amazing/horrible nature of touring, and the unique challenges of being a Canadian recording artist.

Hoo boy. This episode is airing way out of order, due to SOMEONE’S (spoiler alert, katie's) bright idea to avoid having two musically-themed episodes back to back. Of course, we failed to remember quite how much we mentioned Book Club in subsequent recordings. So here it is, thrown out of time like so many of our favourite literary heroes/heroines. We discuss the books that shaped the various eras in our lives, and the ones we keep coming back to. While we don’t believe in “guilty pleasures”, we are mostly talking about the sorts of books we read for pleasure rather than intellectual cachet.

Since so many of the visitors to the Sea Hags shack are musically inclined, we’ve decided to start recording bonus content we’re calling the Siren Song Sessions. The first of these is with the lovely Orit Shimoni. There is, first up, an original song by our own Chris Rzepa, and then two from Orit’s catalogue. We hope you enjoy!

This week’s guest is Orit Shimoni (aka Little Birdie), a tremendously talented and endlessly resourceful musician and songwriter. Having traded in an apartment and a stable job for the unpredictable life of a perpetually travelling performer, Orit has much to say about the challenge of asking for and wholeheartedly accepting the generosity of others. In a culture that devalues art and enforces a very narrow range of acceptable ways of living, Orit’s quiet courage and zeal ring loud.

A whirlwind of bubbly energy, Jeanie is our guest on this episode, and she has a decade and a half of stories about being a dedicated raver and festival-goer. We get into the value of purposeful impermanence and temporary community, and what that looks like for different people. While we’re the first ones to roll our eyes at a rambling party story (despite having a few of our own), the tales this week are CORKERS – naked fugitives, trust fund hippies, butt surgery in the middle of a desert… We expect this episode will make folks long for Burning Man and run screaming from it in equal numbers. There’s drug talk, and we’re exceptionally giggly, so if that’s not your thing, do be advised!