Preface To Daggers: Wait, Daggers?

Look, I know most of Self Help Radio makes no sense.  Around 2006, a KOOP volunteer named Abigail reviewed my show for the station's peer review process & correctly asked, "Why does the show pick the topics it picks?  What is the point?"  It was a completely valid question & the answer is for the most part, "It just does."

Something has happened, however, since Self Help Radio has expanded to three hours.  I am the first to say that I never imagined the show to be three hours long.  Two hours is to me the appropriate length.  & I know that was the length of the show on Freeform, but KBOO has more listeners, & I suppose I am a glutton for punishment, I want the show to be rejected & disdained by as many listeners as possible.  But moving the show to KBOO meant I had to do the show for three hours.  & so.

Two options present themselves.  One, pick very broad topics - like "spring" or "cars" or "colors" - which will give you so many fucking choices you'll be listening to songs for days & days.  Almost certainly this would be "the easy way out" - since there are so many songs to fit that general theme - but it would also mean more time spent listening to music.  Which isn't itself bad.  There are just so many hours in the day.

What I have gravitated toward, actually, is narrower themes.  Themes that just might not fill three hours.  Because, & I want to make this clear, I don't just happily play songs that fit the show's themes.  I play songs that I like which fit the show's theme.  I have a folder which has hours & hours of songs about birthdays, which I might play on the annual birthday show I do for my wife.  But so many of those songs I just find execrable.  I don't like them.  Why would I play them on my show?  I would not.  I do not.

That becomes the challenge.  Can I fill three hours with songs about a theme which happen to be songs I like?  So far, so good.  I think I have enough entertaining & catchy dagger songs for this week's show.  But I want to stress: only just enough.  This was not an easy theme.

There were some (in my opinion) pretty awful dagger songs I couldn't play.  I won't play.  In case you think I am literally throwing everything out there.  No.  No.  If I were a more dickish person, I might list them.  But no.