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Director's Notes – Episode 130

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Joseph and I have talked a lot about the notions of faith and veracity. For millennia, humanity has devised gods to explain what it couldn't comprehend. Long before existentialism existed as a literary/philosophical movement, it...

Director's Notes – Episode 129

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Well, here I am. Doing my best to write to you in my sixth day of illness. During those days I have gone to Chicago to do the first ever live show for I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, and to New York City to do events at Boo...

Director's Notes – Episode 128

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

These director’s notes are a few days late, and the reason is that I made a mistake and just didn’t write them. So apologies for that. I’m writing them now from my upstate home, here in the woods. Yesterday I saw a fat lit...

Director's Notes – Episode 127

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

The idea for this episode came about during a live stream. Over on the Alice Isn’t Dead Patreon, we have occasional live streams for donors, and in this ...

Director's Notes – Episode 126

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

There was a guided meditation track I listened to once in the bathtub. You're standing in a calm ocean, near the shore. You visualize each of the things that are bothering you, one at a time, as a small wave. You watch the wave ...

Director's Notes – Episode 125

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Whenever we write about Madeleine LaFleur and the Tourism Board, I get to thinking about what tourists in Night Vale are like. 

My wife and I returned last month from a week in Hawaii, and it was - to no one's surpris...

Director's Notes – Episode 124

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

This new episode reminded me to talk to you about pancakes.

I love pancakes. Everyone loves pancakes. Everyone, except the following types of people:

1. assholes

Obviously, there are people with strict diets an...

Director's Notes – Episode 123

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We shifted to this new format of multi-part stories, rather than year long slow building arcs, for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that this is our sixth year doing this show and it seemed good to shake ourselves up cr...

Director's Notes – Episode 122

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello from a jetlagged writer. I flew home from Sydney, Australia yesterday. We existed within February 15 for 43 hours, which is a disquieting number of hours for a day to last. My wife and I looked at each other with shell sho...

Director's Notes – Episode 121

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

I’m a firm believer in the use of limitations and random constraints in the making of art.

When I first moved to New York City, almost a decade ago (!!!), I encountered the work of the New York Neo-Futurists. They made t...

Director's Notes – Episode 120

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Religions are scary. Lots of tales of people getting eaten by whales, or laughed at by God, or getting murdered by relatives, or trading body parts for other body parts as a form of punishment. 

Of course religions ar...

Director's Notes – Episode 119

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

I am a fan of outtakes, first drafts and ideas that were floated but went nowhere (I gasp when thinking of Billy Wilder's 1961 plan to direct “At the UN” starring the Marx Brothers).  But in listening to the Night Vale ...

Director's Notes – Episode 118

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

New Zealand cares deeply about good coffee. Not iced coffee. They give no shits about iced coffee, which I learned when my friends ordered iced coffees and they brought them milk shakes. 

I'm fine with this. I don't l...

Director's Notes – Episode 117

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Joseph and I first met in 2009, shortly after he had moved to New York. I was writing and performing in a theater collective called The New York Neo-Futurists. Joseph volunteered often with our tiny little company, and he and I ...

Director's Notes – Episode 116

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

One of the awful things about being in high school band is you have to go to pep rallies. This is, of course, more than balanced out by the extreme popularity you earn by playing, say, the euphonium while wearing a ruffly jacket...

Director's Notes – Episode 115

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Since you're obviously a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, I'm pretty sure you'd like to hear about gravel.

I live in a rural area of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Our address is technically on a main road, but our ho...

Director's Notes – Episode 114

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Not everyone in Night Vale ages normally. 

Jackie Fierro was 19 years old for many many years. Earl Harlan and Cecil Palmer also experienced some kind of delay in aging during their youths. Time doesn't work in Night ...

Director's Notes – Episode 113

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Dessa wrote this episode, and I'd love to talk to you here about what an incredible writer she is, but you can experience that for yourself - not only in this episode but in her music.

I want to talk to you about Dessa as ...

Director's Notes – Episode 112

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

In high school, my friends and I invented a game where we would sit in the town park and compete to identify each person that drove by. Whoever yelled the person's name first was awarded the point. We sat in the park for hours s...

Director's Notes – Episode 111

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We are entering Night Vale’s sixth year. So it seemed as good a time as any to look back to the start and see how much has changed.

I wrote the first lines of what would be Night Vale in March of 2012, when I was 25 year...

Director's Notes – Episode 110

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Often, listeners of Welcome to Night Vale call our show "Lovecraftian." Often, I bristle at that because I don't love H.P. Lovecraft as a writer or a person. Always, I take it as a compliment, though.

The flipside of this ...

Director's Notes – Episode 109

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

We have a running joke that Jeffrey knows every person through his time working with the Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas. The biggest example of this is St. Vincent, who, before she was collaborating with David Byrne, was Jeffrey�...

Director's Notes – Episode 108

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Like Cal in episode 108, my mother had a 1980 Mercury Monarch, brick red, four doors. She and my dad bought it brand new. I was five. That car was one of my earliest memories, and I hated it, was borderline scared of it.

F...

Director's Notes – Episode 107

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

This is an episode I’ve wanted to do for a long time, switching between two parallel versions of the same town. In my original conception for this episode, the other version of Night Vale would be a kind of “normcore” Nigh...

Director's Notes – Episode 106

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

When we wrote the first Welcome to Night Vale novel, we got to tell the story of this town from the points of view of characters who were not Cecil. It was great getting to actually go inside the library and see the extent of da...

Director's Notes – Episode 105

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

People ask about the visuals of Night Vale all of the time. What does Cecil really look like? What color is this or that character’s hair? What pattern apron were they wearing?

The answer to all of these things is: I hav...

Director's Notes – Episode 104

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Fictional deaths are dramatic. The hero's best friend dies in a massive choreographed fight sequence. Or a symbol of innocence, like a child or a dog, is shockingly struck down by a villain. Or a spouse ultimately succumbs to a ...

Director's Notes – Episode 103

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Growing up in the 80s, it was pretty common to spoof the clean-cut suburban culture of the 1950s. 80s music celebrated the digital to the 1950s analog and manual instruments. 80s hair was tall, teased, bright and wild, compared ...

Director's Notes – Episode 102

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

It’s my fault you’re getting this a day late. Sorry! I’m on the road right now, in a super secret location doing some research for Alice Isn’t Dead (the super secret location is Imperial County, CA). 

Well ano...