Episode 194: Animal Songs, with Meredith Michael

Episode 194: Animal Songs, with Meredith Michael

Author: SpectreVision Radio July 23, 2025 Duration: 1:23:02
In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God Created the Great Whales, and Björk’s “Human Behavior”—the hosts discuss the roles animals play in human music, mythology, and mind. Along the way, they touch on Pink Floyd, the Beatles' trip to India, heroin addiction, the indeterminacy of singing and screaming, the messiness of inter-species communication, the discovery of whale song, the problem of (not) projecting humanness onto animals, the Book of Genesis, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. All that (and more) for two of the songs! Phil’s pick will be explored in a forthcoming episode. Meredith Michael is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She is working on a dissertation about musical mythologies of outer space in the twentieth century. In her spare time she loves making art of all kinds, going for long walks, making friends with cats, and watching cartoons. Meredith hosts the Cosmophonia podcast with Gabriel Lubell. References Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” Pink Floyd, Animals Neko Case, "People Got a Lotta Nerve" The Beatles, "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey" Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"   Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time Weird Studies, Episode 181 on “The X Files” Kate Altizer, Piano Dogs and Whale Theaters: Paranoid Relations and Affect with Nowhere to Go in the Study of Nonhuman Animals and Music  David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Songs Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug King James Bible  Herman Melville, Moby Dick Leonard Nimoy (dir.), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home RILM Abstracts of Music Literature George Crumb, Vox Balaenae   Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life Image by Navin75, via Wikimedia Commons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of Weird Studies, a podcast from SpectreVision Radio, you’ll find long-form conversations between Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel. Their discussions aren’t simple reviews or straightforward analyses; instead, they wander through the tangled undergrowth where art and philosophy meet, giving generous time to concepts that resist easy understanding and to creative works that fracture our ordinary sense of the world. This podcast deliberately lingers in that ambiguous space, treating the “weird” not as a genre but as a particular mode of experience-one that reveals the cracks in what we comfortably assume is real. Each episode feels like joining a deep, meandering dialogue between two friends who are both deeply knowledgeable and endlessly curious, covering a vast terrain that includes literature, film, music, and esoteric thought. It’s a show for anyone who suspects that the most profound truths are often found in the shadows, the anomalies, and the strangely beautiful. As part of the SpectreVision Radio network, which specializes in content that explores the uncanny edges of creativity, Weird Studies builds a unique community of listeners who are eager to think differently. You won’t find pat answers here, but you will encounter compelling questions and a shared sense of exploration that makes each installment a distinctive journey.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 230

Weird Studies
Podcast Episodes
Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:53
In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of the great Swiss psycholog…
Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:42
This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung m…
Episode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:14:28
For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The p…
Episode 71: The Medium is the Message [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:25:35
On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important…
Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:17:19
James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. Recently, Curcio edited…
Episode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:38
What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV and social media and countless Zoom chats ... what can we say that yo…
Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:44
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nigh…
Episode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:23:34
On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they watched the final episo…