Ira Glass gives behind-the-scenes glimpse at radio in talk at Goshen College

GOSHEN — It's fitting that a show about reinventing radio would begin in the dark.

A packed crowd in Goshen College's Sauder Concert Hall was treated to a delightful evening Saturday with "This American Life" host Ira Glass, who gave a behind-the-scenes peek at how he and his team assemble the popular radio show each week. Around 2.2 million people listen via radio, while the same, perhaps even a little more, tune in via podcasts.

He started the program with no lights on, the only illumination coming from the glow of the iPad in his hands.

"Seeing is overrated when it comes to storytelling," Glass said. "There's an intimacy in just hearing someone's voice."

He demonstrated, playing a brief clip from a man, who you'd probably imagine as middle-aged, talking about how his life is a monotonous pattern of waking, working, drinking and sleeping. In the next clip, a young woman talked about how she had a gun pulled on her when she was in a gang as a 14-year-old. Do you need to see their faces to grasp their stories? Does seeing their faces perhaps hinder their tales, giving your preconceived opinions before they open their mouths?

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And with that, the house lights came up, and Glass came to Goshen's living room for a refreshingly honest evening about what it's like to work in a unique form of broadcast journalism — the radio. He was funny, candid, well-spoken and entertaining — something you'd expect from the guy who created "This American Life" 20 years ago.

"How do you make stories about normal people that you can't turn off?" he asked the audience. That was what he wanted out of his show, and it's what he gets. He played a story about a shark attack they no longer rerun because it caused people to faint and even caused a minor car accident. You know it's good radio when you can't turn it off, despite physical danger.

Radio straddles a weird line right now. It's an old format that predates television and the Internet by decades, bested only by print. Still, it's moving online in cool ways through podcasts and Internet radio stations, bringing in a whole new generation of listeners, with the "This American Life" production "Serial" setting an all-time record for podcast downloads with more than 10 million people having listened to the first season. The audience reflected that, a nice mix of retirees and recent college graduates filling in the space.

(Let me take a moment to say if you haven't listened to "Serial," you're doing yourself a disservice. Get thee to a computer, or to a smart phone, and listen. It's free, and it's phenomenal serialized storytelling that binges just as well as the latest Netflix release. More information, including episodes for both Season One and Season Two, are available at serialpodcast.org.)

Glass was originally scheduled to appear at the college in March, but had to postpone his performance at the last minute. He had a good excuse, he told the audience. He had a one-time possibility to travel to Europe to interview five guys who were being targeted by ISIS. The meeting was so secret he couldn't mention what country he traveled to.

Glass spent some time reflecting on the journalistic nature of it — something phenomenal for any journalist in the house. If you weren't a journalist, perhaps you didn't find the narrative structure or interview tactics, such as asking the tough questions or fact-checking to a source's face, as interesting as some.

But armed with only an iPad, he kept the room seemingly captivated. Perhaps it was his flourishes while mixing live on the stage, layering interview clips with music and other sounds to create stories in front of the audience's eyes. Perhaps it was the physical presence of a voice they hear only from a speaker. Perhaps it was his awkward yet endearing dance moves when explaining how he picks music for clips.

Perhaps, it was Glass' pure enjoyment of the minutiae of life, "restoring the world to its proper size," as he put it, through a focus on the humanity in everything.

agray@sbtinfo.com

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@AmandaGraySBT