Creator Spotlight: Jake Brennan on single-voice narrative storytelling and being a podcast front man

Jake Brennan is the creator and host of Disgraceland, a music and true crime podcast about musicians and their transgressions. The show launched in February 2018 and has been downloaded millions of times in over 150 countries. Jake’s book, DISGRACELAND: Musicians Getting Away with Murder and Behaving Very Badly, was released in October 2019. His new show, 27 Club, premieres January 27, 2020 and Disgraceland Season 5 premieres March 10, 2020.

What’s the origin story of Disgraceland?

I grew up in the music industry, and my dad is a musician. I’ve been hearing a lot of these stories — some well before they became common knowledge — secondhand, backstage, and in vans with dirty, plugged-in band dudes. I became obsessed with music history and also, for whatever reason, true crime. Reading Helter Skelter at 15 kicked off the true crime obsession. I really wanted to listen to a podcast that combined two of my favorite interests: music and true crime. It didn’t exist so I created it.

Where do you find your inspiration? How do you know an artist or story will make for a good episode?

There are plenty of salacious stories about musicians but with Disgraceland there needs to be an actual crime. A murder, a suicide, drug trafficking, something criminal that we can use to tell the story of the artist, otherwise it’s just Behind The Music.

I know in advance which musicians have a crime connected to them before I start any research. I’d love to tell the story of Bruce Springsteen but there is no crime there. Conversely, I want to tell the story of Jay-Z and I can do so through the stabbing event he pled guilty to (among other things).

What’s your end-to-end process for creating a new episode? Do you write out the entire script beforehand, or do you leave space for improvisation? How many rounds of editing do you do before recording? Do you edit yourself or do you have someone you trust to give you feedback?

It’s a single voice narrative show so improvising isn’t an option — plus I’m just not that good at it. Everything is scripted. The back and forth revision process happens in the writing and in the mixing of the final product.

I research the subject along with my writing assistant. I draft each story’s five story blocks, one block per day, every day for a week. As I’m drafting, my writing assistant is doing what we call “gap writing”; filling in gaps — dates, names, etc. — basic stuff that I don’t want to have to go back into my research to look up (an act that will potentially pull me out of the creative headspace I’m in while writing).

While this is happening I’ve already decided with my musical collaborator and “composer” — he’s a dude in a home studio who records this stuff while he watches Celtics games so the word “composer” is probably a stretch, which isn’t to say that he isn’t immensely talented because he is but I digress — on what I want the music in the episode will sound like. He’s at home writing and recording as I work on the script.

At the end of the week I hand the draft off to a story editor (a different writer than my writing assistant) who edits for copy and tone.

On Monday morning I come in with the following plan:

6:00 AM - read through the edited script and accept/reject editor’s changes.

7:00 AM - record the vocal.

8:00 AM - score the episode — again, another overuse of a word… “score” implies reading and writing music, which I don’t do. I’m listening to the music we’ve created for this episode and mapping out where I want to apply it to the vocal, how I want it to play out in certain scenes, etc. I also identify exactly what sound design we’ll need to round out the episode. I then hand the score, the sound design plan, and the vocal off to my lead mix engineer who puts it all together for me to review.

Throughout the course of the rest of the week the two of us will go back as many as 10 times until we get the mix right. Sometimes it happens in 2 or 3 rounds, sometimes as many as 10 but more likely around mix 4 or 5 we’ve nailed it.

So all in all, it’s a two-week process for each episode minus research, which I am literally always doing: sometimes with dedicated afternoons and almost always on the fly and in my spare time.

It hasn’t always been this way. It took me over a year before launching anything to figure this process out. The first six months was me getting dirty with writing and production and trying to figure out how to create a model that was self-sustaining, one where I didn’t have to rely on anyone but myself. I was writing scripts, and writing and recording the scores as well, doing everything. I realized that in order to become more productive and frankly, to get better, I needed someone to mix the episodes, so Sean Cahalin, my lead mix engineer, was brought on first. Over the next six months we locked in the pilot episode and it took about a month each to finish the next two episodes. I launched with three in the can. In season 1 I brought on a story/copy editor, and in season 2 I brought on someone to help me with the music to create an original song per episode. Right around season 3 was when I brought on an assistant writer and at that point, we nailed down the two week process that it is now.

You’ve mentioned that even though you describe historical events, Disgraceland is about storytelling, not journalism. Where do you draw the line between the two? How does that approach inform your research processes?

Journalists source news first hand. They go out and talk to people with experience or direct insight into the subjects they’re writing about and though I have done this in the past, it’s the exception and not the rule and usually the result of one of these folks contacting me looking to talk. I identify the story I want to tell while researching: reviewing documentaries, biographies, autobiographies, essays, biopics, etc. Once I know what I want to say I draft a story based on my research in thirty minute podcast form.

The limitation of the podcast is in part what makes this unique. It’s as important as whatever my original point of view on any subject might be. The unique medium allows for me to tell the story in a way that it hasn’t been told before. Journalists tend to tell stories using audio in the same way: a mix of narration, interviews, field audio, etc. As journalists they also have to play it pretty straight. I don’t. I take my cues not from journalists but from filmmakers and authors. I can play in this space and have more fun.

My responsibility is to be entertaining and not just informative so I can dramatize a bit as a television writer adapting someone’s life story might in order to suit the story for the screen. Based on my research, I can get into the heads of my subjects and make dramatic assumptions. Journalists aren’t allowed to do that, and for good reason, and the result is an entirely different product.

How does your experience as a musician influence the story selection, writing, and sound design of the show?

As a musician I wrote songs. Songs are just stories and you have the same challenges you have in long form audio storytelling or podcasting. You have to rope the listener in quick. You need a hook to keep them listening, etc. Like Tom Petty said, “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” I think about this often when I’m writing. What is going to excite the listener? What tidbit did I pick up in my research that I can blow out into a big chorus — or in this case a big piece of the narrative, that is going to keep the listener listening.

You’ve also written a book, inspired by the podcast. How was the process of writing the book different from creating the podcast?

The podcast is strictly anthology, as is the book, but each story in the book has a throughline from chapter to chapter. That was a lot of fun and something I low-key did in season four after releasing the book. There are four stories from this season featuring Detroit artists as well as a heavy 1969 theme that starts with the Iggy Pop episode and plays itself out with the final three episodes on the Rolling Stones at Altamont and the Beach Boys and Charles Manson.

Given that you are the only voice in the podcast and you sometimes reference personal anecdotes, it can feel like you are as much a subject of the podcast as the famous figures within it. How do you decide how much of your own personality or history gets woven into the narrative? Is the narrator of Disgraceland meant to be you, Jake Brennan, or an alternate Jake “character”?

Haha… what a question! The personal anecdotes are certainly true but there is definitely a “Jake character” that developed organically and that I think is natural to any subjective creative process. In a scripted show, I don’t think you can help but build a character. Plus, the character provides a bit of armor to hide behind. And it’s also more interesting I would think than the real me.

The first time I did this was in the first Rolling Stones episode where I discuss that they are one of my favorite bands and from there I was kind of like, “fuck it… being me is fun.” My editorializing bums a lot of people out. Believe me, I hear it. The Eminem fans won’t shut up about it. But I think that if someone doesn’t agree with me, they’ll continue to listen to the show provided my point of view is honest. Playing it safe, down the middle, doesn’t interest me. There are plenty of podcasts that do that and like I said in the beginning, I wanted to create a show that I wanted to listen to. Thank god other people want to listen to it too — even when they disagree. If I’m doing my job right people are going to love the show and hate the show.