About XO

The short description of XO is that it’s a podcast by Keith McNally, in the same general style as This American Life.

But if you’ve got time to kill, here’s the much longer version:

Around 2007 I started getting inter­ested in video editing. It was a field where my perceived faults became a benefit. Nerds have an annoying habit of thinking that the things they like are the only things that are good, while every­thing else is just flotsam. While that’s annoying in life, it’s a valuable skill as an editor. Editing is basi­cally edito­ri­al­izing: Taking raw material and deciding which parts of it are worth presenting, and which parts to throw away.

My generally intro­verted nature also led me to spend a lot of time focused on tiny details. It meant spending many extra hours on projects for results that might not have been imme­di­ately obvious. That’s an important skill in this internet-coated world. Everyone has access to software and equipment, and everyone has a platform for presenting what they make. The only way to stand out is to spend that extra 90% of time to achieve that extra 10% of polish.

Of course, to spend that kind of time you have to be mentally unwell, or be working on some­thing that you really love. I realized after a couple of years that I didn’t love video enough. My results were good, but were basi­cally util­i­tarian. My videos got the message across, but nothing about them espe­cially stood out. Being a one-man audio/video crew was also pretty tough. To get to the next level, I would have had to learn to collab­orate, which I wasn’t very inter­ested in doing. I’d also have to drop some cash on better equipment, and while costs have come way down, equipment is still expensive.

Most of the video work I did was for my friends Keith & Chemda, who host the podcast Keith and The Girl. They had bought an expensive audio recorder called a Zoom H4, which was about $400 at the time. They ended up not using it much, and even­tually I inherited it. I exper­i­mented with making podcasts of my own, prin­ci­pally I Have A Ham Radio, where I walked around outside talking about my life and playing songs, like a roaming DJ.

Since I was hitting a wall with my video projects, I wanted to move further into audio, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I wasn’t very inspired by any of the shows I was hearing. I would go through phases of listening to This American Life, but would always burn out. Their editing isn’t very compli­cated, and some of the stories people tell on that show are super fucking boring. So boring that I wanted to punch a million babies in the face. I could have fucking killed myself, listening to some of the This American Life stories. Your grandma’s house has a lot of layers of wall­paper, I get it. Ooh, look at what the wall­paper looked like during World War II! I don’t give a shit! No one gives a shit! Stop talking! I will kill you! I will phys­i­cally kill you!

Another obvious antecedent would be Radiolab. It’s a much more tech­ni­cally complex show than This American Life. But if I was stuck on a desert island, I’d pick This American Life every time. I love Radiolab, in theory. In practice, I almost never listen to it. The topics are fasci­nating, but the dynamic between the hosts makes me wanna stab a knitting needle in my ear. They’re always tittering like little kids having a sleep-over, hiding under the covers, thrown into giggling fits because they said the word “poop”. I don’t know how no one else notices this. Everyone loves Radiolab, but those hosts are such jerkoffs that, again, I could kill myself and others.

So now that I’ve alienated everyone, let’s continue.

As far as audio editing was concerned, I didn’t know how to proceed. I have a hard time making my own art without first drawing inspi­ration from others. I have to see someone else doing some­thing well before it’s clear to me how it should be done. That inspi­ration finally arrived with A Life Well Wasted, a show by Robert Ashley. It’s about video game culture, and is metic­u­lously edited. Not only does he put Radiolab levels of complexity into his shows, but his band also records the music. Almost every­thing you hear in A Life Well Wasted is an original composition.

A Life Well Wasted was the perfect combi­nation of a likeable host, a clear attention to detail, and subject matter that I was inter­ested in. I knew that I wanted to do a show like Robert’s, though not about video games. I wanted it to be about life expe­ri­ences, so in that sense, more like This American Life. The major difference would be that instead of composing my own music, I was going to use pop songs. The movie Trainspotting was a big inspi­ration. Struc­turally, that movie is like a series of music videos, and I wanted to achieve that same kind of flow. I wanted my show to be easy to re-listen to, like a mix tape.

I finally settled on the name “XO”, sometime before the release of the second episode. I used XO as an abstract way to say that this show was going to be a love letter to people’s lives. Since these shows are largely pieced together from audio made by other people, and in fact the entire idea was based on someone else’s podcast, I didn’t have any qualms about also stealing my title. I took it from Elliott Smith’s album, and initially even used the logo from that album as my own logo. The XO podcast is defi­nitely about the art of re-appropriation.

By the second episode things were really gelling, and by episode three I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I felt like this podcast had already outclassed any of my video work. Initially I thought I was taking a step backward, moving to a lesser medium out of artistic fatigue. What I didn’t expect is that audio turned out to be much stronger. The way these shows could paint a picture in my own head was far greater than what video could do. I’ve heard it said that the only point of art is to emotionally unbalance the audience, and only the very best movies in the whole world can affect me the way a well made audio program can. Lying in bed in the dark with head­phones on, listening to a show, a person can really be trans­ported. In the case of this podcast, trans­ported to a story about a divorce, or about a dead kid. I do seem to have settled into a certain emotional slant.

But the power of that end result is what makes all the time put into XO worth­while. I go over every moment with a fine toothed comb, trying to make sure each moment flows into the next, and that nothing is going to pull someone out of the story. I think I’m really good at it, if I may say so. Right now, my download numbers might not be knocking anyone’s socks off, but nothing comes easy. More and more people are finding the show all the time, and I’m very confident that once they do, they’ll find some­thing worth­while inside.

Did you really just read all of that? Thank you! If we ever meet, I’ll buy you a beer. Not really, I’ll graciously let you buy me one. I don’t want you to feel like an asshole.