Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - October 26, 2025


Sunday Nice Things： Heart Trouble

Topics
Heart Trouble podcast country music tapes
Want to Feel Human Again？ Break Your Phone Addiction How to Find an Agent and Sell a Book

Episode Stats


Length

30 minutes

Words per minute

120.33

Word count

3,624

Sentence count

255

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.820 Hey y'all, Jo here and welcome to Sunday Nice Things. All of you know that I believe two
00:00:06.960 things are true. One, there's too much content in the world, generally. And two, I think
00:00:14.320 that more really good podcasts should be produced, and I think it's really hard for that to happen.
00:00:20.080 My friends over at Tink Media are doing something very cool right now with a show called Pitch
00:00:24.320 Party. It's from Resonate Podcast Festival and Tink, and each episode of Pitch Party actually
00:00:30.540 features a different podcast pilot from an independent producer. I love this. I love it so
00:00:35.840 much. It gives exposure to independent producers and also lets listeners hear new voices,
00:00:41.920 which I think is really freaking important. Today's episode is from a show called Heart
00:00:46.800 Trouble, and here's the description. Country radio DJ Sid Wood died of a sudden heart attack in July
00:00:53.380 of 1987 as he was about to go on air. Years later, his daughter Caitlin accidentally stumbles
00:00:59.540 upon his unfamiliar voice in a box of old cassette tapes. The sound of Sid's ghost spurs Caitlin on
00:01:06.480 a cross-country journey through the Midwest and American South, from small-town honky-tonk bars
00:01:11.860 to the Grand Ole Opry. She talks to musicians, country music historians, and Sid's former
00:01:17.460 colleagues to explore the meaning of culture, family, and loss. It sounds so good, right?
00:01:24.600 And I love the idea of Pitch Party. So give this a listen. Let me know what you think. Hope you enjoy it.
00:01:33.100 Hey there, I'm Chioki. If you listen to podcasts, it's possible that you've heard my voice.
00:01:39.720 Here's a supercut. Support for this podcast and the following message.
00:01:42.860 This is Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and I am a grain of sand.
00:01:47.660 When I'm off mic, I run a podcast festival called Resonate.
00:01:52.280 I also serve on podcast award juries.
00:01:55.580 I talk to podcast producers all the time, and I love podcasts.
00:02:01.220 To me, the best shows are the ones that tell you a story or investigate a big question.
00:02:07.540 A good show might help overturn a conviction, or help you empathize with people you've never met, or just make you want to call your dad.
00:02:17.480 Trouble is, shows like this are getting harder to make.
00:02:22.420 There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is just that it's often hard to get a pitch in front of the right people at the right time.
00:02:32.600 The team at Resonate and Tank Media want to do something about this.
00:02:37.540 We want to help developing shows find supportive fans and potential distribution,
00:02:43.160 and we figure the best way to do this is to make the pilot drafts of a select few shows available to the public.
00:02:51.900 We're calling it Pitch Party.
00:02:55.900 We have a party of five.
00:02:58.660 Five pilots from veteran and emerging producers.
00:03:02.280 These are mostly finished drafts.
00:03:04.600 Demo tapes, basically.
00:03:05.740 developed by their creators without compensation, but with plenty of love and commitment.
00:03:12.440 We've got a show about country music, a pilot about a religion that, ironically, has been
00:03:18.220 demonized. We've got a new form of audio autobiography, a look at a forgotten time
00:03:24.840 in a country's history, and one of the shows is British. The pilot episodes of lots of shows
00:03:33.600 that you know and love
00:03:35.020 were unheard by the public for years.
00:03:38.400 We're bringing these shows to you now,
00:03:41.620 basically before they really exist.
00:03:44.760 If you connect with a show,
00:03:46.840 maybe you can support it.
00:03:48.480 If you're a podcast executive,
00:03:51.120 maybe you can send me an email
00:03:52.560 at pitchparty at tinkmedia.co.
00:03:57.380 Pitch Party is available
00:03:59.240 wherever you get your podcasts.
00:04:00.920 From Tink Media, Resonate Podcast Festival, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
00:04:30.920 It's potential empty, it don't do me, no.
00:04:36.940 Where does the past go?
00:04:38.820 Oh, can you make me?
00:04:45.620 How long till I heal you?
00:04:52.000 Can we hear it?
00:04:54.560 Tell this Sid Wood on country 105 WFMB.
00:04:57.520 Like, radio waves floating in the ether.
00:05:12.520 Boy, it's hard to go home, isn't it?
00:05:22.520 Okay, hang tight here.
00:05:27.520 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, you're on.
00:05:37.320 It's on the radio now.
00:05:42.500 It's 2001.
00:05:43.680 I am 16 and sitting on my bedroom floor in front of my ancient clunky stereo, listening to my CD of the original Broadway cast recording of the 1990s hip musical Rent.
00:06:01.280 I'm always listening to Rent.
00:06:04.480 Broadway stars fill my ears with lyrics of Bohemia.
00:06:07.880 I want to get out of the suburbs and make art and be a lesbian and not wear clothes from Kohl's.
00:06:17.040 I decide that I must record this CD onto a tape so I can listen to it in my mom's minivan on the way to school
00:06:24.200 because we don't have a CD player in the car.
00:06:27.880 So I take a blank tape I find in the living room.
00:06:31.940 I put the cassette in my tape deck.
00:06:34.740 I sync it with the start of the CD, and I press record.
00:06:51.540 The next morning, I am running late, as usual.
00:06:55.920 My mom is annoyed, as usual.
00:06:58.420 I hop in the passenger seat, I put the tape in the cassette player,
00:07:01.980 and I'm singing along and it's all bouncy
00:07:04.620 and rent, rent, rent, rent, rent, rent.
00:07:07.420 Then, without warning, the tape skips to the other side,
00:07:11.860 the B-side, and a man's voice comes on.
00:07:15.420 Good morning, 609 with Sid Wood.
00:07:17.320 It's going to be a lovely day.
00:07:18.760 And my mother says, where did you get this tape?
00:07:20.720 And I say, what is this tape?
00:07:22.500 And she says, did you get this tape from the box in the living room?
00:07:25.220 Who is this man on this tape?
00:07:26.700 This tape is not a blank tape.
00:07:28.820 This tape is your father.
00:07:32.980 I'd never heard this voice before, or if I had, I couldn't remember.
00:07:40.700 On the morning of July 18th, 1987, Sid went to work at the country radio station where he was a DJ and then did not come home.
00:07:52.280 I was two. He was 40.
00:07:56.060 It was a heart attack.
00:07:59.500 But here he was.
00:08:01.980 Sid Wood on Country 105 WFMB, like he'd been hiding in this tape all along.
00:08:19.640 Cassette tapes, nearly extinct in 2001, save for ancient clunky stereos and old clunky minivans,
00:08:28.620 they're just plastic rectangles.
00:08:31.280 This one, though, even though it looked like any other cassette,
00:08:34.660 four inches wide, two and a half inches tall,
00:08:37.520 with two tiny spools and reels wound up all shiny and delicately thin,
00:08:43.800 this was a portal.
00:08:47.560 There you are.
00:08:50.600 Here I am.
00:08:52.800 At this sonic axis of space and time.
00:09:00.500 I may have asked you this before.
00:09:03.420 What would you want to do if you were not to abuse me?
00:09:06.320 We're going to talk about marriage and things like that.
00:09:12.660 But I am only 16, and this portal, this ghost I can't remember,
00:09:20.700 is terrifying in its intimacy.
00:09:25.300 Where did you get this tape?
00:09:27.300 Who is this man?
00:09:28.320 This tape is not a blank tape.
00:09:30.500 I hit the eject button.
00:09:32.620 We never talk about this again.
00:09:40.640 Here's what I knew at the time of the rent incident.
00:09:45.040 For the first two years of my life, my dad, Sid,
00:09:48.580 my mom, my twin sister, and me lived in Springfield, Illinois,
00:09:53.140 in a house that I can only sort of remember
00:09:55.760 with an avocado green refrigerator
00:09:58.860 and pink snapdragons in the backyard.
00:10:02.440 Oh, yeah, this is home now.
00:10:04.260 It's easy to get involved in this town
00:10:07.320 because I love this city.
00:10:08.860 And people said that Sid was pretty funny.
00:10:12.200 And the only thing that he loved more
00:10:15.100 than being a born-and-raised Texan
00:10:17.500 and a country radio DJ
00:10:19.500 was being a dad.
00:10:22.960 He was a story to me.
00:10:24.580 a sad country song and to tell you the truth I didn't really get country music
00:10:33.500 after Sid died we moved from Springfield to the Chicago suburbs across the street from my
00:10:43.440 maternal grandparents there wasn't a lot of music in my house and everyone at school listened to
00:10:49.540 pop or rap. And in the very natural adolescent desire to fit in, I kind of avoided any claim
00:10:56.880 to Sid or my half-Texan heritage or curiosity about country music. A slide guitar, I mean,
00:11:05.720 not that I even knew that that's what it was called, made me cringe. 0.74
00:11:11.380 Really though, I suspect that I was trying to escape the capital T tragedy I imagined was
00:11:18.280 taped to my forehead. If you're someone who's lost a parent at a young age, you get this.
00:11:24.860 Lots of kids had divorced parents or shitty parents or absent parents, but I didn't know
00:11:30.660 anyone with a dead parent. I couldn't take the look on people's faces when I had to tell them. 0.55
00:11:37.820 Like my second grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, welled up with tears and I short-circuited at the sight
00:11:44.520 of an adult crying, I patted her hand and I told her, it's fine. Well into young adulthood,
00:11:53.460 friends had had so little loss in their lives up to that point that their eyes would bug out in
00:11:58.560 this mix of horror and fear over what to say next. I got pretty good at changing the subject.
00:12:07.000 6.37, 23 away from seven with Sid. I don't want to cry. Cut that out. Let's change the subject.
00:12:14.520 it's 2010 I'm 25 I have moved to Sid's home state the great state of Texas
00:12:31.340 I live in Austin and I'm in graduate school my obsession for rent has faded and even though I
00:12:40.260 hear country music all the time now, I still don't quite get it. But Texas? Texas? I get.
00:12:52.980 Even the blazing heat that lasts through October. I never want to leave if I don't have to.
00:13:01.020 At the time, I would have told you that I moved to Austin to go to a good school and
00:13:06.560 to get out of the Midwest and to find some queer community, 1.00
00:13:09.740 but I think there was also an inexplicable force
00:13:14.140 ever so gently tapping me on the shoulder,
00:13:17.880 telling me there were bigger,
00:13:20.680 perhaps genetic reasons, I want to be here.
00:13:23.960 It's 7.17, 17 minutes after 7 o'clock,
00:13:27.540 we sit Wednesday morning with David Frizzell and Shelley West.
00:13:32.400 In Texas, it's a state of mind.
00:13:36.560 state of mind I'm in a Texas state of mind
00:13:45.880 every ride down I-35 every big sky sunrise every honky-tonk bar I visit I wonder quietly
00:14:00.220 Had Sid been here too?
00:14:03.720 Felt the same feelings of home?
00:14:07.440 And even more quietly, barely even a formed thought in my head.
00:14:13.940 Are there any more tapes that could answer these questions?
00:14:19.520 I keep these feelings to myself for a while, but they nag until I cannot ignore them any longer. 0.97
00:14:30.220 I only know about the one cassette tape from the rent incident.
00:14:38.720 Avoiding all discussion of Sid was second nature to me,
00:14:42.680 so it took a lot of guts to call my mom and ask if there were any more tapes
00:14:47.780 besides that one from that one time in the car.
00:14:51.940 Graciously and without any questions,
00:14:55.620 she sends a package in the mail that arrives on my doorstep a few days later.
00:15:00.220 I stare at the tapes, some loose, some in clear plastic containers, some labeled with
00:15:10.300 a date, some blank.
00:15:12.700 I pick each cassette up and hold it in my palm, nearly weightless, this precious, priceless
00:15:21.440 archive in a cardboard box.
00:15:30.220 I get into my trusty old Honda CR-V, whose only stereo feature, in fact, is a tape deck.
00:15:39.140 It's February, maybe early March, already springtime in central Texas.
00:15:45.360 The sun is bright, and the mountain laurels in bloom make the air smell like fruity pebble cereal.
00:15:52.500 I head west, where the city makes way to winding side streets and fancy houses by the lake,
00:15:58.840 and then to the back roads of hill country.
00:16:05.560 I roll the windows down, hoping the air will steady the pounding in my chest,
00:16:10.860 gulping in deep breaths to calm my anxious stomach.
00:16:14.980 The stakes of this moment feel so high.
00:16:18.180 One hand on the wheel, and in the other I hold an opaque, creamy white tape labeled Air Check.
00:16:25.880 It's hard plastic, sturdy in my shaky palm.
00:16:30.300 I place it at the edge of the deck
00:16:32.340 and gently push and watch it get sucked in.
00:16:39.020 At Wagoner Mazda, take your choice of free vacations, golf clubs, water...
00:16:43.460 A commercial comes on, and somehow I know it's not Sid.
00:16:47.400 Wagoner Mazda, 1709 South Dixon.
00:16:49.920 And then...
00:16:50.640 Be sure to join Jerry, the Hammer, Tillman, and B-Bear.
00:16:55.180 They're going to be there at Wagner Monster Saturday afternoon
00:16:57.860 from 1 until 5 o'clock.
00:17:01.860 Saturday's going to be fun at Wagner's.
00:17:03.740 It's 8.42, 18 away from 9 o'clock.
00:17:06.920 Give me heart trouble, Steve Warner, on Country 105 WFMB.
00:17:10.400 You're giving me heart trouble.
00:17:13.880 Steve Warner, Heart Trouble
00:17:22.200 This song's cheesy melody alongside its haunting refrain
00:17:28.980 leaves me slack-jawed in the driver's seat
00:17:31.920 Heart Trouble
00:17:34.300 It'd be poetic if it wasn't so obvious
00:17:38.340 sid's heart trouble a massive heart attack that took his life at 40
00:17:45.800 was the reason i was in my crv trying to find him
00:17:50.020 his congenial voice blaring through the speakers
00:17:55.020 yeah boy we're gonna be honky-tonkin all weekend long made me forget i was listening to a dead man
00:18:00.600 a portal a sonic axis of space and time
00:18:08.000 Radio waves don't need a medium through which to pass
00:18:20.840 They're all around us
00:18:22.900 They move through us
00:18:24.600 We are swimming in them
00:18:26.480 Astronomers discovered in the 1930s
00:18:29.820 that radio emissions exist even in outer space
00:18:33.440 The Milky Way gives them off
00:18:36.140 Millions of miles away, celestial orbs and nebulous clouds of matter radiate the very same energetic force that would cast CID, introducing Steve Warner's heart trouble sometime in the 1980s, out to the good people of Springfield, Illinois and surrounding Menard and Sangamon counties.
00:19:06.140 And that same day, at Country 105 WFMB,
00:19:11.520 a recording device cradled a cassette tape
00:19:14.380 and captured Sid introducing Steve Warner's heart trouble
00:19:18.480 sometime in the 1980s
00:19:20.880 out to the good people of Springfield, Illinois
00:19:23.560 and surrounding Menard and Sangamon counties
00:19:26.660 on this thing.
00:19:32.340 Many, many, many, many days later,
00:19:34.780 about 900 miles away from WFMB headquarters,
00:19:38.940 that sound moved from my car's tape player into my ears.
00:19:44.700 And I hear Sid introducing Steve Warner's heart trouble
00:19:49.060 sometime in the 1980s
00:19:51.240 out to the good people of Springfield, Illinois
00:19:53.700 and surrounding Menard and Sangamon counties.
00:19:58.540 But because I am alone in my car
00:20:00.960 and because his voice feels new,
00:20:04.780 but also utterly familiar,
00:20:09.080 he's talking to me.
00:20:17.000 This listening,
00:20:19.400 it's touch.
00:20:28.100 I want to tell you that
00:20:30.680 after I drove through Hill Country
00:20:33.460 listening to my dad
00:20:34.880 that I did write by Sid
00:20:36.420 I want to tell you that I played
00:20:39.140 each and every one of those
00:20:41.340 tapes. I want to tell you
00:20:43.420 that I laughed and I
00:20:45.380 cried and I learned to love
00:20:47.240 country music. That I organized
00:20:49.420 each tape with the care and
00:20:51.220 consideration of a professional archivist
00:20:53.600 that I paid to have them
00:20:55.280 professionally digitized and then I
00:20:57.320 backed them up several times over
00:20:59.380 in a Google folder and external
00:21:01.280 hard drives. That's
00:21:03.380 not what happened. I put the tapes in a shoebox. It's 2023. I am 38. I live in Charlottesville,
00:21:29.860 Virginia. I am a lesbian. I do not wear clothes from Kohl's. I've spent the past 12 years
00:21:38.300 waking up at 3 a.m. a few times a week, sweaty and my heart pounding with this jolt of fear
00:21:45.700 that the house will catch fire or flood or implode and the box of tapes will be gone forever
00:21:52.120 if they weren't already busted from age and about four different moves.
00:21:59.860 The writer Arendt Oribe wrote this really beautiful essay about the aftermath of his father's death, which happened when Oribe was a toddler.
00:22:11.040 He writes that his father's absence was as fundamental and unknowable as my own birth.
00:22:20.480 My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down.
00:22:25.360 I'd never read a better articulation of what I experienced with Sid.
00:22:29.860 There's no five stages when there's no inciting incident to recall.
00:22:35.280 And then, where does a kid put their clumsy grief?
00:22:41.780 For me, it was in vivid dreams.
00:22:46.320 I had this one where my parents were divorced,
00:22:49.200 and I was waiting for Sid to pick me up,
00:22:52.580 my nose pressed to the glass of my front door.
00:22:55.200 or this eerily detailed one where he was discovered buried alive on a snowy mountain
00:23:02.200 and I watched him get rescued on the evening news.
00:23:06.380 From the TV I could see that he was pretty banged up
00:23:09.040 but otherwise in fine shape as EMTs carried him away on a stretcher.
00:23:16.960 I dreamt once that we were treading water in a dark gray ocean.
00:23:21.900 Fog and clouds were hanging low
00:23:25.220 It felt vast and otherworldly
00:23:28.760 And we were close but also far apart
00:23:32.040 I was desperate to know mundane things
00:23:35.360 I kept shouting questions across the water
00:23:38.060 Like, how are you? What's your favorite sandwich?
00:23:42.540 But I couldn't hear anything with the ocean
00:23:44.940 Eventually a giant wave swept us apart
00:23:49.440 I woke up with my face drenched
00:23:54.640 my chest sore from sobbing
00:23:58.340 Here is the particular uncanniness
00:24:05.020 of missing someone you don't know
00:24:07.640 wanting someone
00:24:09.800 when it feels like they never existed
00:24:12.320 I'm sitting here on the radio
00:24:17.200 Wait a minute
00:24:19.100 Because of the tapes, though?
00:24:20.740 It's just a tape recorder.
00:24:23.240 I knew he was real.
00:24:25.560 I just wasn't sure I wanted to know him.
00:24:31.900 It's a unique, if not unsettling, offer to be able to choose one's grief.
00:24:38.220 I mean, most of the time we don't get that privilege,
00:24:40.120 and I wanted to keep life easier, lighter.
00:24:45.160 So I kept Sid at bay.
00:24:49.200 I don't know, if I had to explain it in not very eloquent terms, it was like, yikes, I don't know if I can handle this.
00:24:58.060 Or, I have a job, I really don't have time to be crying.
00:25:05.560 Even my 3am panic attacks couldn't get me to open the box in the light of day.
00:25:10.540 I thought that really listening, that touching the past, could undo me.
00:25:25.980 But it's 2023 now, and I am, through other circumstances, actually a bit undone.
00:25:34.140 A friend has died suddenly.
00:25:36.640 And ten days after that, there's a shooting at the university where I teach.
00:25:41.240 I'm also estranged from a few of my family members.
00:25:45.420 Grief doesn't feel like a clumsy hand-me-down sweater.
00:25:48.740 It feels like a weighted blanket.
00:25:51.820 Stifling, but settling.
00:25:55.420 I lie under it.
00:25:57.840 And when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of the tapes,
00:26:02.160 For once, I don't forget them by morning.
00:26:10.500 How do you feel about that?
00:26:14.020 Okay, go ahead.
00:26:21.820 I buy a cassette digitizer, as ancient and clunky-looking as my old high school stereo.
00:26:28.000 I walk up the hill to my office.
00:26:30.020 I peek into the shoebox
00:26:32.060 and I grab a tape
00:26:34.180 What are you doing up this morning, kiddo?
00:26:40.000 And another tape
00:26:40.920 T.G. Shepard will be there Saturday night
00:26:43.140 for two shows, 6.30 and 9.30
00:26:45.680 It's 7.40, let's check in with me
00:26:47.420 And another
00:26:48.220 Reba McIntyre, the CMA female vocalist of the year
00:26:52.440 And another
00:26:55.020 Yeah, boy, we're going to be honky-talking all weekend long
00:26:58.280 Hours of tapes
00:26:59.680 Live broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry
00:27:03.560 and the Country Music Awards.
00:27:05.140 The Opryland Hotel in Nashville, how are you?
00:27:07.840 Sports, news, weather, cheesy but catchy country songs,
00:27:13.120 banter with fellow DJs.
00:27:14.760 Well, turn the record over, Sid.
00:27:16.260 Okay, don't be so pushy, this is a technical...
00:27:18.540 It swept me up, and despite my fears
00:27:21.420 that they'd rotted in a humid, musty box,
00:27:24.800 every single tape survived.
00:27:28.320 Just waiting to be heard again.
00:27:31.940 Okay, okay, okay.
00:27:34.420 Y'all gonna stick around for a little longer or what?
00:27:46.260 Hi y'all, my name is Caitlin Hale-Wood and this is Heart Trouble.
00:27:51.440 A story about how these tapes of my country radio DJ dad led me on a deep dive into country music history and American identity, grief and family secrets, the medium of radio and the DJ, Texas, Nashville, Springfield, Illinois, and finding our past through sound.
00:28:12.720 We're headed to small towns, big stages, and the Lone Star State to ask, how do we connect across space and time?
00:28:21.440 Where do we find home, belonging, and what's so great about country music, anyhow?
00:28:29.420 If you love Honky Tonk or hate it, have struggled to understand yourself and your family, loved, lost, left, or tried to find a place called home, come along.
00:28:46.720 Here's what's ahead on Heart Trouble.
00:28:48.900 What is this all about, girl?
00:28:50.720 I have these tapes. Do you want to talk about them?
00:28:53.660 How did we get to God and Guns from, like, Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline?
00:28:59.900 I don't get it. Like, I don't get country music.
00:29:02.800 Country music has this kind of special stereotype of being so simple and so uncritical.
00:29:10.000 But sometimes country isn't about the music, right?
00:29:13.220 And I'm proud to be an American.
00:29:16.380 It makes you just stick your chest out
00:29:19.680 and say, by God, I'm glad to be an American 1.00
00:29:21.460 and go to hell the rest of you. 0.99
00:29:23.080 Radio History, live from the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. 0.99
00:29:26.580 Country 105, WFMB.
00:29:29.000 If you're going to play in the great states, 1.00
00:29:30.420 you better have a Finland band.
00:29:32.620 But I do feel like this is not a space for me at the moment.
00:29:36.760 Where's my life gone?
00:29:38.740 Right here, spinning records.
00:29:41.140 I said the broadcast is over.
00:29:44.300 We have a very serious incident with Sid
00:29:46.180 and we will not be going back on the air.
00:29:50.040 What a gift it must have been to get that box of tapes.
00:29:55.900 And at the same time, it must be the heaviest box of tapes in history.
00:30:02.020 In my history, at least.
00:30:03.480 Well, that's going to be interesting.
00:30:06.180 It really is.