Last year, I started putting a little credits spiel at the end of every episode of Strong Songs. It always begins the same way: “Strong Songs is recorded at The Caldera, in Portland, Oregon.” I’ve stuck with that opening line because, yes, I like the name we came up with for my studio. And I like how it sounds like an old-fashioned radio show signoff. But I also like how it situates the show in the real world, making it subtly more tangible.

“An independent station, WJAZ. With jazz and conversation, from the foot of Mt. Belzoni.” I heard those lyrics in the title track of Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly just after recording the outro to the latest episode of Strong Songs, and it occurred to me that few other podcasts do that sort of thing. In fact, I can’t even tell you the city where most of my favorite podcasts or most-watched YouTube videos are made. Emily and I put our heads together and most of the podcasts we could easily locate from memory are old enough to have started out as radio shows, e.g., “From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this is Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”

If I listen to a podcast for long enough, I do tend to form a picture in my mind of the hosts, and of the space(s) in which they record. Hosts will casually allude to their location, and over time, it gets easier to nail things down. But I rarely know for sure. These hosts sound like they’re together in a studio, and I think it’s somewhere in New York? These folks sound like they’re on a video call, so maybe they’re each in different states? One guy sounds English… I wonder if he’s overseas?

The same thing goes for most of the videos I watch, on YouTube or elsewhere. I’ll see a person sitting in a studio, or a living room, or walking down the street somewhere, but I’ll have no real idea where that is. Part of my brain will try to place accents, or notice wall art, door frames, appliances, all in a subconscious attempt to work out which part of the world I’m peering into. Mostly, it all blurs together in that way the internet does. He’s in a room. She’s in a park. They’re in their living room. Another park. A bookcase. A beach. In the feed, all places become one place.

In terms of sheer numbers, generative AI is in the process of overwhelming human-made art online. We’re drowning in a sea of counterfeits, with no end in sight. To fend off the onslaught, human artists are making a point to clearly identify their work as human-made. The hope—and it’s a good one, I think—is that our audiences will care enough to seek us out, rather than thoughtlessly embrace the countless empty knockoffs that are or will soon be available. “Is this any good?” has been joined by another relevant question: “Was this made by an actual person?”

Many artists have begun establishing their organic bona-fides by emphasizing the how of their work: documenting and broadcasting the creative process, embracing mistakes, and sharing rough drafts, all to help people see the hours of messy effort that go into a shiny finished product. It occurs to me that, in addition to the how, it might also be good to emphasize the where of it all; to make it a practice to regularly share a sense of the surroundings that shape the things we make.

I don’t mean to suggest people should start putting their home address at the end of every post, or anything like that. I understand why people avoid sharing too much information about their location online, and know firsthand how that information can be weaponized. And I detest how tech companies track and share location information without their users’ knowledge or consent.

What I’m picturing is more of a subtle but purposeful shift in how artists situate their own creative work. A change where, when possible, people emphasize the where of their process, even when the place isn’t directly relevant to the product. I’d love to know that your instructional guitar videos were recorded outside Copenhagen, or that your history podcast was edited in rural Saskatchewan, with one host calling in from Minneapolis. I’d love for more podcasts to end with a radio-style location callout, perhaps just listing a town name, or a notable landmark a few miles away.

Art is inextricably tied to the place in which it was created, because it was made by actual people who physically occupied that space. Monet painted water lilies because he lived in Northern France, and those flowers grew in his garden. The Cotton Club of 1920s Harlem shaped Duke Ellington just as surely as he shaped it. Dolly Parton learned to strum a homemade guitar while looking out on the hills of East Tennessee. Richard Linklater took a camera and set off down the streets of Austin, TX.

The internet’s placelessness is one of its defining attributes. It is everywhere, and so it is nowhere. That can be an amazing thing, because anyone, anywhere, can share their work with anyone else. But the creative culture of the web has perhaps overly embraced that placelessness, leaving blank an important chapter in many a creative story.

As human artists look for ways to differentiate ourselves from the ceaseless, placeless AI blob, we might remind our audience that in addition to being made by someone, our work was made somewhere. That we create—and exist—alongside them in the real world.

That’ll do it for now. I’ll leave you with this pic of my sister’s dog Phoebe, who likes to wedge herself in there whenever you’re making something at the kitchen counter. It’s not a bad strategy.

The new episode on Queen and Bowie’s “Under Pressure” is now available in the main feed, and I hope you’ll listen. I also hope you get your tickets for Strong Songs Live while you can! There really is a chance they’ll sell out.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
2/20/2026 - Portland, OR