HOST'S SOUNDTRACK RUNS FROM RICHARD MARX TO 'YOU GOT MAIL'; RETRO DESK CHECKS THE TRACKLIST

This week's episode of On The Air, "Echoes in the Soundtrack: A Journey of Feeling," collects three posts from one October week: the mixtape on the 19th, improv on the 21st and the early internet on the 23rd. It plays like a compilation album.

Track one opens with a disclaimer. "There was a time in my life when I believed in something called The Force," the host writes. "Not the Star Wars kind." His version: if he thought about a girl he had seen once hard enough, "she'd feel it." He had not spoken to her. "But I had Richard Marx." Kahn Sole of the Retro Desk approved the disclaimer. "Making someone feel something from across a room is a Jedi mind trick," he said. "It works on stormtroopers. It has never once worked on a Toydarian."

By 1989 it was Bon Jovi, live from Moscow on TV, watched with his parents, and "that ridiculous three-neck guitar." Years later, during his "heartbreak meltdown," came a new mixtape, ending with "Richard Marx… again." His own review: "As if grief had a genre, and mine was stuck somewhere in the 80s and early 90s." This desk calls that tracklist a cry for help with excellent production.

Track two is improv. He finished every Second City programme he could take, then kept telling people in Saudi, "Improv is the future." They laughed it off. His breakthrough in class was one line: "I need to find a job." The room laughed, he writes, "not because it was clever, but because it was real." In 2021 he was pulled onstage at his first Saudi improv show; afterwards someone asked, "That was planned, right?" It was not.

Track three is the internet. "You got mail" once made him feel "the future was talking directly to me." So, he writes, "naturally, I did the logical thing: I majored in Accounting." Computer Information Systems lasted one semester. Two more majors later came Political Science, then a first internship in web development.

His closing line: "Sometimes, the side quest becomes the story." Recommended. Headphones advised.