Sneak Peek: Revisiting Nick Spitzer

Nick Spitzer: These days I refer to American Routes format as a Gulf South by Southwest with sojourns to the Caribbean and all points across the country. I feel like in New Orleans, there's a lot of pride that we're inclusive of something as eclectic as what we do. Something that many program directors said, “Oh, you can't do something when it's mixed like that.” Well, we've done it and we keep doing it and we're not the biggest show. We're not a news show, but we kind of commingled information in a newsy kind of way with culture and performance What we try to do is find concordances in words, in mood in sonic things, contrasts and continuities that we can do segues, which is sort of the art form of radio flow of sound and maybe every third sound, every third song will be very familiar to somebody, but it might be a familiar artist with a song they've never heard him sing or a song that is quite familiar by a familiar artist, but not the one they might've expected to hear it sung by and so you're always messing with things that work together. And so the eclecticism is not a barrier. It's an invitation.