Bonus: Soup dumplings, hidden trails, enemies-to-lovers and a viral clip — reflections from The Finest

Bonus Episode: The Finest Team Talk 2 Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Hi, Finest listeners. So we are 20 episodes into The Finest. This right here is the 20th episode, and I'm here with producer Anthony. Say hi.

Anthony Wallace: Hello.

Evans: And we wanted to reflect on some of the work that we've done and go a little bit behind the scenes into some of the stories we've shared so far. We're going to revisit our most viral clip. That one came out of one of our earliest episodes, and we're going to check in with the musician featured in it, Julianna Zachariou. And we'll also look back at some of the episodes that stuck with both Anthony and I long after we hit publish.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: So first we called up Julianna Zachariou, who's a local indie musician from Episode 4. We had talked to her about the economic realities of streaming and the complicated relationship that she has with Spotify. And after the episode launched, a KPBS reel went viral — like a million people saw it — and we wanted to ask Julianna about that.

Julianna Zachariou: Hey guys!

Wallace: What's up?

Zachariou: My friends.

Evans: Thanks for joining us again. It's really good to see you and to hear your voice. So we're going to be just reflecting back on the season, and we wanted to bring you in because you're our best friend.

Zachariou: My skills.

Wallace: Yeah, you're our podcast's best friend.

Zachariou: I better be.

Wallace: We have a list like ranked like on MySpace.

Zachariou: OK, I'm kidding.

Evans: It's on our whiteboard.

Wallace: You're number one right now.

Zachariou: Damn, that's huge. That's huge.

Evans: OK, we had this viral clip of your podcast of you talking about how much money you made on your song, "Subway Song," with 5-something million streams. How were you feeling when that clip went viral?

Zachariou: I had never had anything with that much reach. It felt necessary and helpful, and a lot of people found it to be helpful. I also wish that the thing that had taken off was something I had made and not how much I had made off of a thing that I had made.

It felt very vulnerable. I mean, doing the podcast was a little vulnerable, which I was totally down for, but I felt nervous and I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I think it was the thing that I mainly felt got a lot of people being like, wow, I really, I heard your podcast. I'm so sorry. And I was like, damn. But you know, it's empathy, which is good.

Evans: So when an artist has like 5 million plays on something, you expect, OK, they've made it. That's a successful artist. And so I think people were sharing it. People were commenting, you and I were texting back and forth as this was happening. I know that your wife, Becca, was involved. Becca did some like…

Zachariou: She did some defense, offense.

Evans: And there was at one point, I think I was like, tap out if you need to. There are so many people in here defending you because there were people who were like, what were you expecting? Get another job.

Zachariou: Write a better song. That was a big one.

Wallace: Like really most of the comments were positive.

Zachariou: Totally. But obviously I zeroed in on the negative ones.

Evans: Anthony, can you read a couple of the positive ones?

Wallace: Yeah, let's get the positive ones: This interview is awesome, way to go. Crying heart emoji — just that.

Zachariou: Got a lot of those.

Wallace: Thank you for the education and profoundly important message for working musicians. Quote, sick of being savvy, quote — felt that.

Zachariou: My homie.

Wallace: It really tells us something about social media, where it's like, it seems like in order to go really viral, it helps to be a little bit controversial.

Zachariou: Something has to be wrong. Yeah, totally.

Wallace: Yeah, it has to spark like debate or anger.

Zachariou: I hate it.

Wallace: And I mean, this is arguably one of the worst problems in our society today. But I assume that must have a lot to do with why this took off.

Zachariou: Oh, totally.

Wallace: I just wanted to talk about a couple of the negative things that people said.

Zachariou: Sure. Hit me.

Wallace: The fun part.

Zachariou: Probably know'em word for word what you're about to tell me. Go on.

Wallace: The negative responses were, there was a couple of common themes among them. I can read one. OK, this is an excerpt from one: She had to do crowdfunding and direct fan support, question mark, the tragedy. Most people will have to work 10-hour construction jobs to fund their art.

Zachariou: This one was crazy.

Wallace: Oh, interestingly though, this guy kind of shifts gears there and says, it'll be OK. Her music is so good. It's only a matter of time until everyone will stream.

It's kind of a roller coaster, but there were a few like this that reminded me of the expert that we talked to for Shua's episode, was this guy David Hesmondhalgh. He talked about how there's this archetype of the struggling artist that people think is important or something, where it's like, if you're an artist, you should suffer, basically.

Evans: Like we glamorize it. We glorify the poverty of it.

Zachariou: The struggle. It's very strange, struggling artist archetype. I don't like it. I don't like being in it. I think within the industry, people are less inclined to give a leg up because it's like, if I worked this hard to get here, I'm not going to just make it easy for you. Like you've got to do the same thing. I think that's shifting though. I do think that there is a bigger sense of leaning on one another and like community just within artists themselves of being really willing to help each other get stuff done or whatever, but yeah, it's very strange.

Evans: I mean, you recently posted a video which I feel like we should just play it on The Finest. Shua was singing backup to…

Wallace: "Dreamer, Dreamer."

Zachariou: Jordy Searcy. 

Evans: Yeah, Jordy Searcy were singing the harmony on "Dreamer, Dreamer" the way that artists support each other. It's pretty magical.

Zachariou: I do find that I lean on my friends a lot to help me feel like we can all level up together and play on each other's stuff. That's also really fun to do. We do do that a lot.

I think one of the benefits and maybe challenges from that clip being so visible and pervasive in my little corner of the internet, I feel like people have seen me be a public critic of Spotify. And though I don't feel it's necessary for me to take my catalog off at the moment, just because I'm interested in people having access to it, I'm now as a consumer trying to shift away from that and see how sustainable it is to just buy records that I love. There's CDs everywhere, and I have a little thing I can burn it onto my computer and obviously still advocating for policy shifts and stuff, but it's a particularly tough moment, and it seems to have gotten tougher since that interview came out.

I don't know if you guys saw the artist agreement — Spotify's blanket artist agreement basically allows for them to create derivative works from your entire catalog. It's really weird. It's like a twofold policy — they're protecting you from data scraping from external sources, but what they're really trying to do is get third parties out, and instead, they want to data scrape themselves and then own all of it and be able to train their own AI machines to do stuff. So it's just gotten even scarier, and I don't know how dangerous it is. We just don't really know, but it's such a crazy blanket freedom with our intellectual property. It's incredibly alarming. You know, and I don't feel like taking my stuff off is going to — I don't know what that's going to do besides lessen my reach, and I'm trying to grow. It's just such a, I'm in such a corner.

Evans: Yeah, you have a new single, "Dreamer, Dreamer." You've been doing this incredible social media push about it. How has that been? How is bringing a single out into the world right now feeling?

Zachariou: Yeah, I'm giving a full-on offensive. I'm feeling sort of hopeful about social media at the moment, even though it's working me real hard. It's been fun. It's fun to figure out what this record feels like, what it looks like. I'm dropping it this Friday, actually.

Evans: OK, so…

Wallace: And this is "Dreamer, Dreamer."

Zachariou: "Dreamer, Dreamer" — title track.

Wallace: Can we say that "Dreamer, Dreamer" technically premiered on The Finest 'cause we did a clip of the recording?

Zachariou: Oh, it totally did. Yeah, it did.

Evans: Yes!

Zachariou: It did. It premiered. Yeah.

Evans: How do you like that little mix that Anthony did?

Zachariou: Yeah, it sounded great. Honestly, made me cry. I haven't told you about listening. Have I told you about listening back to the podcast?

Wallace: No.

Evans: Tell us.

Zachariou: I'm going to cry right now.

Evans: Me too.

Zachariou: I've just never had a long-form picture of what my career has been and who I am as an artist, and I felt so moved and inspired by my own story. It's really hard to stop and take stock and feel proud of yourself and feel like you have a view of what the last decade of working has done, 'cause you're just so — it's just one day after the next after the next, and I'm really in that right now. But if everybody could just hear these 30 minutes, they would understand where I'm coming from and what I'm trying to do. It was just really moving, and really that transition from me playing "Dreamer" into the track really did it — that brought it home, and I was just crying so hard in the car. It was amazing. So thank you. I struggle to feel legitimate when you're outside of the traditional ladder and you don't have that cool label or whatever, you feel like you're sort of the baby the whole time, and it made me feel like this is my real job, and I really appreciated it. And I'm crying again.

Evans: And I think the beauty of your story, Julianna, is that as much as we were able to go so granular on your career, it was still really relatable for people, even if they weren't artists. And I have always, with writing, I've always told myself that if you reach one person — if there's one person standing in the back of the room at a reading, or one person picks up your book and they relate to something you've said or they walk home feeling like, hey, I feel the same — like that's success. Over a million people have had a moment where they said, yeah, this matters, or I get that, or I feel seen, or I now understand another human being. Thank you for that.

[Music]

Evans: We'll come back to Juliana in a minute because we also asked her to give a few local recommendations, so stay tuned for that. But next, we're going to reflect on some impactful episodes, and I want to start with the one that I got the most texts from friends and coworkers about. It was the Romantasy episode.

Wallace: So what did these texts say?

Evans: A lot of people said that this is a genre that's important to them that they love, and it's nice to see it get the treatment. And I also think that we saw some pretty interesting chatter in our comments and people responding to the episode as well.

Wallace: Yeah, we got a few negative comments about this episode on YouTube.

Evans: All right, are you going to read for us?

Wallace: I'll read it. They said, who cares if it's a powerhouse if it's like a 90 percent disposable slop.

Evans: OK, what jumped out to you about that one? What is your response?

Wallace: Well, I think that's the prevailing stereotype of it, and that's what our whole episode was about. So I can only assume that this person didn't really listen to the whole thing.

Evans: Right. Most of my responses to comments is, did you listen?

Wallace: And usually I think the answer is no, but I think that's what made us want to do the episode. We were just looking into how huge this phenomenon was, and it was really mindblowing when you actually look at the statistics. This genre is literally carrying book sales right now.

Evans: Right.

Wallace: So it's like whenever there's something that big, even if there's some skepticism about it, there's got to be something to it.

Evans: Yep. Why this is so big, why this is so big at Comic-Con even, famous for things being big.

Wallace: And it was bigger than we even thought. I tried to go to that panel about Romantasy, and the line was so long when I got to where I thought it was, I was like, what is this the line for? I was like, is there a Marvel thing happening that I don't know about? And it was the Romantasy panel, and we were literally the last people allowed in.

Evans: And this is also an episode where we talked a lot about fan fiction, and we've had some updates in the fan fiction world recently. What have you learned?

Wallace: An upcoming book series by an author named SenLinYu. It started in the Harry Potter fan fiction subsect known as Dramione, which is the forbidden love between Hermione and Draco. Wait, did you know about Dramione before?

Evans: I mean, I haven't read any Dramione, but those pairings they always do the little portmanteau thing.

Wallace: Oh, OK. That's like a big fan fiction thing? Portmanteaus?

Evans: Yeah.

Wallace: Anyway, it's a book series based on a fan fiction about Dramione, and it just received one of the biggest movie deals for a book ever — $3 million.

Evans: Amazing.

Wallace: Yeah, definitely speaks to the power of Romantasy right now because this is for sure a Romantasy series, so they're just throwing a lot of money at this thing.

Evans: So what about you, Anthony? What is an episode that has stuck with you?

Wallace: Well, for the episodes that have stuck with me, I wanted to talk about those ones that have Catholic stuff involved. That's because I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic schools, and so Our Lady of Guadalupe — I was very drawn to that one from the beginning because Our Lady of Guadalupe is this thing that I've heard about so much through my life, especially being in the Southwest, being a Southwest Catholic.

Evans: I feel like I learned so much just from the work that we did. Yeah, it went so much deeper than I thought it would.

Wallace: I gained a whole new way of seeing Our Lady of Guadalupe from it because going into it, I was really curious about and fixated on the actual painting tilma, specifically this idea that it's supernatural. Because I've heard about it my whole life that, oh it's been studied by scientists and there's all these things they can explain about it. It's been proven to be a miracle, and I've always just been like, what's going on there? That didn't end up being a huge part of our episode.

Evans: But it was something that we asked Jeannette.

Wallace: Yeah, yeah, we did. Jeannette Rodriguez is the theologian and Our Lady of Guadalupe expert that we interviewed. Jeannette was telling us about some of the evidence that the scientists have found. I think this is the main thing I've heard in my life, but they say that it should not have lasted that long, it should have eroded by now, the thing should have fallen apart, but it's still in perfect condition, which is an indication that it's a supernatural object.

However, there are other scientists that dispute that and can see that there have been multiple touch-ups made to it. The anecdote I found most interesting did not make it into the episode: In the '90s, the head priest of the basilica down in Mexico was quoted saying that it's a symbol, it's not a real miraculous thing. This was a big scandal in Mexico, and he resigned from his job as being in charge of the basilica after that.

Evans: Interesting.

Wallace: But this is part of our interview that we did not include, and it was when we were getting very in the weeds of whether this really was a miracle or not.

Jeannette Rodriguez: Well, they discovered 22 images across her eyes. There is even a Black or African woman in there. Now, people who have faith, they don't care about this. People who don't have faith you're not going to convince them, but I think it's interesting that in a way she captured in her eyes what I like to think church should be about, which is inclusive, including everyone — all the diversity that existed at that time.

Wallace: This quote ended up guiding us in how we handled and concluded the episode: whether or not it was literally made by God, it's still a miracle because it's a piece of art that's had this incredible influence over centuries and it's meant different things and it's had a real impact on the world. So, yeah, I think that gave me a whole new way of seeing Our Lady of Guadalupe.

So what about you? What are you still thinking about?

Evans: OK, I think I want to talk about the birding episode. This one originated when I read Amy Tan's latest book. It was her memoir, "The Backyard Bird Chronicles." I interviewed her. It was such a fun interview. She was literally wearing binoculars during the interview.

Amy Tan: Sorry, I wear my binoculars all day long in the house because I have a house full of windows, and you never know when you're going to see a bird that's doing something really interesting. I just saw a red-shouldered hawk outside my window, and it was screaming.

Evans: And I think what I loved about talking to Amy Tan, which we didn't use at all in the episode, but revisiting it after we finished that episode, which ended up following you on this 100 birds or more field trip — speed birding, basically. And thinking about Amy Tan's approach to birding has been — like I love it. She is a sketcher. She will draw birds in a sketchbook as she sees them, and that is her log. That is how she tracks. So it's really different. It's like the antidote to eBird, Merlin tracking.

Wallace: Furious competition style.

Evans: Yes, something that happens really fast. The idea of birding is the meditative approach. And I think this is what I personally see. I am a trail runner. I'm in these beautiful places. I see a lot of birders who are our and they are just standing still, and occasionally we'll stop and be like, you see anything? What did you see? And they'll tell us. But they've been standing there a long time. Birding involves so much stillness — not just physical stillness but finding a sense of stillness.

Wallace: I downloaded the birding app after and have been using it, and it is very cool because there's a Shazam for birds thing on there.

Evans: Which I use all the time.

Wallace: Which is amazing. It's really cool. But my friend was telling me that she specifically does not use the phone while birding and just birds with books, has a fat book of birds of the region. And tries to find it. Total disconnection from technology.

Evans: And I really like that. We maybe do a follow-up to birding where we're talking with the slow bird movement or something spend a little more…

Wallace: The opposite of the 100 or more field trip-style.

Evans: Yes, exactly. But speaking of that, Anthony, we do have some updates and I want to start with Rick, our bird guide.

Evans: My bird master.

Evans: Who, as of the episode, was in third place in San Diego. Can you tell me what his count is now? It's been months.

Wallace: OK, we're going to go on the eBrid website and see where he's at now.

Evans: I'm nervous for him. Drumroll.

Wallace: Species leaders… OK, Rick Grove is in fourth. Nancy Christensen is above him.

Evans: Oh, Nancy. When we published the episode, he had 339 birds on his year list.

Wallace: Yes and now he has 355.

Evans: Wow.

Wallace: So that shows how much it slows down as the year goes on. He's in fourth place, 355. He said that his real, ultimate goal is to get to 400 — so he's got 45 to go.

Evans: I wonder if they hang out.

Wallace: Oh, for sure.

Evans: All four of them.

Evans: OK, before we go, we're going to do a quick round of what we're loving in San Diego right now, and we promised that we'd bring Julianna back for this part, so here's Julianna's favorite things in San Diego right now.

Zachariou: My friends have a shop called Best Bud / Home Ec. It's in Kensington. It's a flower shop slash home goods shop. Female-owned. And it's the best place to be. It celebrates a bunch of ceramicists and bread makers and people in the community who are doing incredible, beautiful stuff for home and also has incredible flower arrangements, and I just love hanging out with them. They do stained glass workshops and pottery stuff and they do cookbook clubs. It feels so woman, too. There's something about it that feels so, it's like domestic with like teeth — so go there, definitely.

I've also been really enjoying the Bud Kearns Memorial Pool at Morley Field, which is where I go to swim and when I'm overwhelmed with album stuff, I go there and swim laps in the sunshine. And it is the best and it's only $3 to swim.

Evans: Amazing. Hit me up, I have a punch card.

Zachariou: Do you? Oh my God, we gotta go.

Wallace: Is it an outdoor pool?

Evans: Yeah, it's a public pool.

Zachariou: It's a public pool. It's perfect. It feels so '90s: old ladies showering in the locker room and we're all just out getting some physical fitness and some sunshine. Yeah, it's the best. Yeah, I love it here. I love it here.

Evans: So, Anthony?

Wallace: An's Electronics Repair. They opened a new location in Ocean Beach, which is where I live. It's following their theme of naming their store, that thing that has nothing to do with ice cream.It's amazing though. That ice cream is so good. It's in my top 5 all-time ice cream places. I have a list of those. It's definitely in there, but it's just really fun. They have a lot of cool old electronics in the way that it's all arranged.

Evans: How was the line? How long did you have to wait?

Wallace: I went on a Saturday night at like 10:50 p.m., which is the last 10 minutes before they close.

Evans: Is that your pro tip?

Wallace: Yeah, yeah, because I've seen at almost every other time I see a very long line out the door, it's mindblowing to me how long people will wait for that ice cream. Although it is a testament to how good it is, so go at 10:50 p.m. if you can, that's my advice.

Evans: Nice.

Wallace: I love going to Convoy. It's one of my favorite things about San Diego so far. And, our editor, Chrissy, has given me many great recommendations for there and elsewhere, but I just love Tasty Noodle House. I just can't stop going to Tasty Noodle House. Every time I go to Convoy, there's so many choices, but I want to return to Tasty Noodle House. The noodles are amazing. The soup dumplings are amazing. I just love when I go to a restaurant and I get something that's weird, I guess, something that I've never seen before, but I love it. That's my favorite kind of experience, and I got this thing that was like pork belly, but then there is also like, I do not know how to describe it, but these like clumps of tofu skin. It's very strange, but it was good. Yeah, those are mine.

Evans: All right, mine are kind of born from necessity. I guess right now I've just had a lot, it feels like I've had a lot less time to myself and so the first thing to go is these long luxurious trail runs in the mountains. I'm just not doing that hour-long drive on the weekends, but I've been going almost every single weekend to Peñasquitos Canyon, which is probably the closest long trail that I can find. There is this single track trail, no mountain bikers are allowed on it. There's even like a little curb blocking them, and it's kind of hidden, but it's all shady. It's beautiful and I love a good single track. So I've been spending a lot of time there.

And food and drink wise, I've been making coffee at home a lot more lately, and we usually get Dark Horse or Bird Rock beans, make espresso. But I recently went to Yipao Coffee. It's in University Heights. It's attached to Kairoa Brewing Company. They're this Colombian couple roasting Colombian coffee, and it was so good. Like it's not often that I will even notice that we've changed the bag of beans, right?

Wallace: So it's like all Colombian because they're from Colombia. All right, I need to get some of that.

Evans: So, before we go. I think everybody should know that if people leave us a comment somewhere, we screenshot it and read it out loud to each other at our desk.

Wallace: Yeah, we like them.

Evans: We love comments.

Wallace: Give them to us, please.

Evans: And here is one that we got, I don't know, I really appreciated this because it felt really validating. Sometimes I think a lot about the bigger themes that we have in, the threads that connect the episodes, and it was just great to see that somebody had recognized that. This is from Nicholas: As much as I delight in learning about San Diego's creative scene, what resonates most with me is the themes of living a purposeful life present in the last two episodes. It's been a minute since I've been inspired by a podcast. Excited for the future episodes.

Thanks, Nicholas.

[Music]

Evans: Special thanks to Julianna Zachariou for being interviewed, again, for this episode and to all of our guests and experts that we've spoken to in these first 20 episodes of The Finest, and thank you to our listeners for following along with us. Anthony, thanks for doing this.

Wallace: You're welcome. It's my job.

Evans: As always, if you want to find more information, be sure to check out our episode pages, our show notes, where you can get so many photos and links and even some videos.

And if you want your own comments to be read out loud by us at our desks or maybe even in a future episode, you know what to do.

We're off next week, but we'll be back in two weeks with the story of a San Diegan who has achieved an astonishing feat, visiting every single country in the world, becoming the youngest person ever to do it.

I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.