Kurt Andersen discusses reaching your audience. He talks about trying to give the audience the unexpected.

Kurt Andersen: I remember, it wasn’t even an interview I was doing. It was a run on the show. And it was about the connections between heavy metal music and German music of the 19th Century. And so of course we talked about Wagner. And so there was this moment; the way the piece was cut it, it was cut directly from a piece of Wagner to a German heavy metal band called Lonstein. And I just loved the idea of hundreds of thousands of public radio listeners all over America suddenly jumping out of their chairs when Wagner became heavy metal. I like to think that the tens of thousands of people who are reading this novel that I’ve written about the middle of the 19th Century will actually have their brains permanently re-wired to think about the middle of the 19th Century in a different way as a result of having read this book. So, to the degree that that’s true, that’s a hugely gratifying, albeit small, impact.

Recorded On: July 5, 2007