The first season of Ray’s podcast provides unexpected insight into the lives of artists.
When it comes to Madison-centric podcasts, there are woefully few options. Sure, we have all the wonderful audio generated by Wisconsin Public Radio and other nationally focused organizations, but when it comes to our own neighbors grabbing the relatively easy-to-procure means of podcast production and churning out fascinating content about our shared backyards, there’s a surprising dearth of shows.
Thankfully, one of the few local examples of the form, American Bandito, stands toe to toe with practically any other show in your regular rotation. Hosted by local musician/animator Tom Ray, the show is built on the simple premise of interviews with Madison artists from wide-ranging disciplines.
Interview shows have been a dime a dozen since the dawn of podcasting. Successful chat-based shows require some sort of hook to survive in such a crowded marketplace. Each episode of Doughboys, for instance, is framed around a fast-food franchise. Death, Sex & Money is about touching on those titular taboo topics. Guests on Crybabies talk through the things that trigger their tears. With American Bandito, the conceit is more conceptual, but it has an unexpectedly outsized effect on how the first season unspooled. Instead of hand-selecting his guests from a pool of acquaintances, Ray booked his show entirely from the results of a Facebook post announcing that he was looking for artists to talk to. He ended up with a dozen locals whom he otherwise might never have met. This somewhat chancy approach extends to the show’s title, which jumped out at Ray last year when he was looking at lists of defunct web domains.
This format could have backfired or attracted shameless self-promoters, but remarkably there’s not a dud in the bunch. Every episode offers some new and unexpected insight into the lives of these working artists, due largely to Ray’s boundless enthusiasm and earnest curiosity. These individual stories function as added texture on top of the comparatively subtle but equally arresting narrative that runs underneath each of the interview segments.
While talking with artists, Ray is also attempting to reacquaint himself with the artist he aspired to be before, as he tells it, “life and kids happened.” He plays in a couple of bands, Lorenzo’s Music and Rom-Comm (both of which are the source for the music heard throughout the show), leaving visual art as the glaring hole that needed filling in his arsenal of self-expression. Thus was born Then This Happened... A Comic Journal, a simple two-by-two panel cartoon strip that often ties back to subjects of the podcast. Ray also draws from his life experience: being a live model in a painting class, eating sushi for the first time, or being interviewed for this very article — they all end up doodled into his online sketchbook.
Occasional strips reveal something else that’s happening in Ray’s life: his wife’s ongoing treatment for breast cancer. These moments play out with humor as often as they convey the moments of heaviness. None of this ever overwhelms the podcast itself, but Ray includes enough bits of his personal life in the intros and outros to give the listener a sense of the parallel journeys happening in his life.
American Bandito succeeds as a well-produced and conceptually compelling show about creatives in Madison. And it also works as a fascinating document of someone getting his artistic groove back amid the chaos of life. The 12th episode, the final one in this first season, was released on Oct. 22, which gives you just enough time to catch up before the inevitable second season.
