City Cast Madison: Why Wisconsin Loves to Polka

City Cast Madison is a new podcast about the culture and current events in our capital city. It was fun to be interviewed by the folks behind this project!

Producers Molly Stentz and Dylan Brogan have both made significant contributions to journalism in Madison and across Wisconsin. Before City Cast, Molly produced news programming statewide for Wisconsin Public Radio. She spent many years as the news director at WORT-FM, the community radio station where I volunteer to read the Local News once a week. Dylan also worked in radio news before working for many years as a reporter for Isthmus. I get to see him at WORT as he produces the Local News as an engineer. After studying broadcast journalism, Bianca Martin worked for Washington DC’s public radio station WAMU as a producer for the nationally distributed news talk show, 1A. She now brings her talent and positive energy to City Cast as the host.

We had a lively conversation about why polka is such happy music. They generously edited out the times when I was unsure of myself - like when I expressed doubts about where Frankie Yankovic was from (was he born in Cleveland? or somewhere else?). The result was a great discussion about this thing I’m trying to create, one polka record at a time.