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Date: 1/17/2022
BELCHERTOWN- After three years of podcasting, “Sawtooth Frank” also known as Brad Turner and his wife “Stomping” Jen Turner, who is also the chair of the Belchertown Select Board, sat down with Reminder Publishing to discuss their podcast, The Soft Serve Podcast.
Brad said he has always wanted to have his own talk show after years of listening to talk radio and other podcasts.
“I have been a fan of talk radio, kind of in a lot of its different formats over the years. I listened to Howard Stern pre-pandemic for like 20 years, I started getting into podcasts about seven or eight years ago and I always wanted to do my own kind of show, it has always been an aspirational goal of mine,” he said.
Because podcasting became a more accessible medium to do shows, Brad said he wanted to try it out for himself with some of his gaming friends.
“I had this idea of initially doing this with a group of my friends who I play video games with every week. As with every group of people who sits around and talks, you think you’re funny, you think you are entertaining and you think it is a great idea of a podcast. I tried to corral that group of people into doing this show with me but it did not work,” he said.
Brad said the name, “Soft Serve Podcast,” comes from the name of his gaming group.
“My friends will tell you I stole it from them, we have a gaming group and it is quite a remarkable thing in my mind, I have known three of these people since elementary school. We just wanted to come up with a name for our gaming group, we were considering going to PAX East one year and we wanted to make up jackets, so we wanted to come up with a name for the group so we picked that,” he said. “Because I wanted them to be part of this podcast, I decided to name it ‘The Soft Serve Podcast.’”
Brad said their podcasting names, Sawtooth Frank and Stomping Jen, come from their Appalachian Hiking trail names and each comes from a personal story.
“Sawtooth comes from the fact that when I was a child, I had an ice-skating accident and I fell face first into the ice and shattered one of my teeth,” Brad said.
Jen said, “I was bequeathed Stomping Jen along with the hikes way back in our college days, so it has been the name that I use for things and I think Sawtooth has just used that as a thing to use and they just turned into our names on the podcast.” Brad added, “Stomping Jen’s name comes from the fact that when she is angry, she stomps her foot, it is the funniest thing you have ever seen.”
Initially Brad said the podcast followed format where each conversation was set around a list derived from Moorea Seal’s “52 lists for Happiness” journal.
“As a young podcaster I found myself needing some framing and some purpose. A friend of mine had this Instagram account where every week they did one of these lists so I thought this would be a great idea and we could center the show around one of these lists to give us something to talk about and we did that for a year,” he said.
Brad said they were able to slowly shift away from the list framework until COVID-19 hit and Jen said the idea for the podcast pivoted to more interviews.
“We really centered it around the pandemic and how it was affecting people at that point in time because everybody knew about Zoom at that point, so it was a perfect medium to get anybody to come on and talk to us for an hour or so about different ways they were navigating the pandemic and how it was affecting them,” she said.
After receiving feedback from listeners who wanted to hear Jen and Brad talk with less interviews, Brad said they pivoted back to the two of them with some guests as well.
“We are kind of back to the old format with just the two of us and we mix that in with interviews with people from the community. We try to focus on Western Massachusetts and New England, but we have had people from outside Massachusetts as guests, we had the actor Greg Sestero from the cult hit “The Room” on here,” he said.
Alongside Sestero, Brad said the podcast have had several guests from the film industry including actors, directors, producers and filmmakers.
While Jen said she works mostly on setting up interviews with people, she said Brad works on the technical side of the things for the show along with leading the brainstorming for questions during the interviews.
“As an interviewer I do try to spend a lot of time thinking about that person, what they are doing and why we are talking to them. I put a lot of work into these interviews, it is my hobby. I think like any passion you quickly learn if you want to do it well and evolve, you have to put the work in,” Brad said.
Jen said some of her favorite conversations revolve around economic development and culture.
“I find topics that are interesting to me and my biggest focus which ties to me being on the Select Board is I am extremely interested in economic development and using the power of culture through art, artists, musicians and all of that kind of energy to revitalize areas in towns and help bring things to them,” she said. “Those conversations are most exciting for me personally because I am truly interested in those topics and I want to learn from those people and apply it here in Belchertown.”
While he said he would love to see the podcast continue to grow, Brad said it is first and foremost about having fun and conversations with people to learn more about them and what they do.
“I would love for us to be recognized as the go to podcast in Western Massachusetts and more broadly New England, but I am not chasing that – if it comes to us it comes to us. I would like our listenership to continue to grow, but for me the that is not the purpose,” he said. “We are not doing this for notoriety, it is a passion project, it is about loving this area we live in, it is about giving back to the community and the region and trying to bring some interesting local content and entertainment to the area.”
Jen added that for her she wants to learn what people are doing in the Pioneer Valley and try to bring that energy back to Belchertown. She said her favorite part about the podcast is being able to sit down with her husband in a different context.
“Besides talking to the amazing people we end up talking to, I also get to have this thing I do with my husband, that we sit down for an hour or two weekly almost. It gives us something else to do besides watching TV, hanging out with the kids and doing that kind of life stuff,” she said.
Brad said one of his favorite parts about the podcast is having conversations with different people.
“My favorite part of doing this is when you really connect with somebody you did not know and there is that magical energy in the conversation and you can see them get something out of it that maybe they were not expecting, it is almost like a drug, that connection and that conversation,” he said. “We record usually around 8 [p.m.] to 10 [p.m.] and sometimes I will have trouble sleeping because my adrenaline is so high after a really good conversation.”
The Soft Serve Podcast is available everywhere podcasts are found and more information about the podcast can be found online at https://www.softservepodcast.com/. They can also be found on Facebook and Instagram.