This Mike West cover was performed by Walt McClement on banjo and Mary Go Round (the one time holder of the world record for spinning the most hoola hoops at once: 76 if my memory serves me correctly) on accordion and vocals.

The song All the Pretty Horses is about the Great Mississippi flood of 1927 and the Army Corps of Engineers decision to dynamite the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana to save New Orleans. The breach caused a flood that displaced thousands and was later deemed unnecessary. Check out the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America 

I recorded this late one evening in the upstairs of Mimi’s in the Marigny in New Orleans.

I was walking my dog the other night when I came across Larry Boutan sitting on a concrete wall drinking a beer. I bought some beers and joined him. This is the story of Larry’s very first beer.

Wilbert Rawlins Jr. is the band director at O Perry Walker High school in New Orleans. He runs one of the best marching bands in the state along with a concert band and a Jazz ensemble. Rawlins doesn’t just teach kids to play an instrument though, he provides discipline for a lot of kids who live in a chaotic environment. He teaches them about commitment and the benefits of hard work and education. He puts in a tremendous amount of work at O Perry Walker. When you ask him what the reward is for the countless hours he puts into teaching he says it’s a single moment that lasts for one maybe two seconds.

This is an excerpt form a story I did a few years ago which you can listen to here. Wilburt Rawlins Jr. is also featured in the book Nine Lives by Dan Baum.

Photo by: Susan Poag / The Times-Picayune

The Sound of Suffocation.

James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Narrative. He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. Charms Against Lightning, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. During 2012 he will be in residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Photo by: Sean Hill

I came across this piece of found tape today. I know nothing about it.

A deleted scene from a story I produced for Marketplace Morning Report.

They get fucked up in strange ways in Sweden.

A recording of a tornado siren in a park in St. Louis, MO.