Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad experiments with music and storytelling

At this point in his career, Radiolab host Jad Abumrad could rest on his laurels. In 2011, Abumrad received a MacArthur Fellowship and Radiolab — the public-radio program he co-hosts with Robert Krulwich — won Peabody Awards in 2010 and 2014.

However, Abumrad’s inquisitive mind, which is one of the defining features of his work, has led to a new project — Radiolab’s first spinoff podcast, More Perfect. The new show applies the Radiolab model to exploring the importance of the Supreme Court.

The ways in which Radiolab and More Perfect look to ask and answer questions make Abumrad the perfect cap to a week of ideas at Lawrence’s Free State Fest. I spoke with Abumrad by phone about the nature of questioning and storytelling.

The Pitch: Your background is in film composition. Is it that idea of telling a story through sound that attracted you to radio?

Jad Abumrad: Maybe I saw a connection early on, but they felt like two very separate endeavors for a long time. I had actually done two things at once for most of my life. I loved music, and I was a musician, first and foremost. But I got interested in writing and storytelling right around college, and I was trying to do them both in isolation, and it wasn’t really working out for me.

Then, I had a post-college, flailing existential-crisis moment of a kind that I guess we all have, and I was like, “I’m not really good at any of these things, so what do I do?” My then-girlfriend, now-wife suggested radio because in her mind, at that moment, it was kind of a blend between the writing I was doing and the music I was interested in.

I remember being struck really early on that it really was like music, in a way. You’re playing with words, and you’re moving them around, and you’re looking for just the right inflection, and just the right landing, and in the words are all of the musical elements that I had studied: pitch, cadence and contour and meter. I wouldn’t say that it’s what brought me into it, but I realized early on that it’s this common thing, and that’s why I wake up in the morning: to take the words that people give us and somehow turn them into music in some way.

One of the things I appreciate about Radiolab is that the rhythm of the show is more than just the standard back-and-forth of an interview.

It’s funny: When Robert and I first started — not even the show, because I was already doing the show when we first met — but we started having breakfast a lot, and we would sit at this table in the back of this diner at 66th and Broadway, and we would just talk about stuff. It would get very animated. In my mind, as I edit the show now, I’m trying to make a musical version of that conversation. Like, if this conversation could somehow turn into music, and include all these other voices, that’s somehow what I’m up to.

When Radiolab ran a birthday special on Krulwich, I noticed that the early pieces of his you included seemed to have an embryonic version of the show — this very left-of-center take on stories.

Yeah, totally. People don’t realize the extent to which he’s defined the show in the way that we use theater and these hyper-cartoonish theatrical scenarios. I don’t think I would have ever done any of that, had I not met Robert, because he was doing stadiums filled with mice and very strange things years before I got into radio. He was acting and doing these little news pieces about whatever economic thing he was trying to explain, where he would play 12 different characters. He would take this extremely theatrical, extremely playful and — in its way — musical approach to storytelling. So, when he and I met, it brought that out in me, and we just met in the middle very quickly.

Is that theatrical element what led to Radiolab’s live shows, which seem to take the concepts introduced in the show, and makes them bigger and visual?

To an extent, yeah, in terms of how it felt up there. Robert did a lot of TV. When I make radio, it begins as pictures. It begins as a visual idea that you want to translate into sound, like music, so it felt really natural to try and make something visual. I feel like this is a deeply visual show that we’re doing. The question is, “How do you put images on the stage and not fuck up the images that are in people’s heads?” [laughs] That became sort of the key question.

How does your speaking engagement that you do, Gut Churn, connect to that?

It’s very similar. It moves and feels like an episode of Radiolab, with a lot of animation and video and images and sounds all layered on top of it. I really built this to feel like a one-man show, rather than a talk. It’s sort of a hybrid — definitely way, way, way beyond PowerPoint.

Now Radiolab has spun off itself, with More Perfect. It was a bit of a surprise in that it was less of a rollout and more like, “Here, we have something for you!”

Yeah, it was. [laughs] It was more unintentional than anything. I mean, if we had gotten our shit together, we probably could’ve made a bigger stink about it, but I’m glad it feels that way to you, because what I’m trying to do with More Perfect is personally remind myself and our team and the people that might listen that there are no boxes, right?

This project can be anything that we want to wake up and think about, and I’ve been waking up and thinking about the Supreme Court a lot. I just think it’s a really interesting place where, by definition, you have these people inside these cases who are just living out their lives and then they bump into some drama, and that drama becomes hugely important for all of America. Every Supreme Court case is that, by definition, and as a storyteller, you’re like, “Cool. That’s what I want.”

Jad Abumrad: Gut Churn
7 p.m. Saturday, June 25
Liberty Hall
freestatefestival.org