Weather that never was: Erin McKeown (Patreon)

Hey, Joseph Fink here. After all these years, I thought it might be fun to share with our patrons some of the weather songs that never were. These are songs that I wanted to feature on the show, but the artist never responded, or said no, or I just never asked because the artist seemed too big to try to contact.

"But Joseph!" you say. "Erin has been the weather multiple times on the podcast, and has also toured with the live show. In fact, isn't she the weather for your upcoming tour of the west coast and south west, starting on April 30th with a sold out show in Portland?" And yes, all of that is true, thank you for remembering. 

But there was a time before. Before we knew Erin and before we had traveled the world with her, in which I was just some podcaster emailing her about a song, and Erin politely declined.

I first encountered Erin's music through my sister, who brought home from college one day a cd called Monday Morning Cold by a young singer-songwriter from Virginia. Because I first encountered her when I was a teenager, I always thought of Erin as much older than me, but she was only in her early 20s at the time.

Erin has since pulled all trace of Monday Morning Cold from the internet, so I won't try to share any of the songs here. But I loved that album, and have been listening to Erin ever since.

The song I originally tried to get for the weather was "Slung-Lo" which had been my go to song for introducing Erin to my friends. It is unbelievably catchy, the kind of song that just makes you instantly say "wait, who is this?"

We did not get to use Slung-Lo as the weather, but I'd say things have worked out well between Welcome to Night Vale and Erin McKeown anyway.

-Joseph Fink