Emma Straub

I cannot believe it because I have listened to every episode.

I am your number one fan.

And so it is very surreal for me to be here and I am honored and thank you.

So I was a sophomore in college at Oberlin in 1999.

And more than I remember actually hearing them for the first time, I remember hearing their name.

Like, you couldn't walk six steps in Oberlin, Ohio in 1999 and not have someone talk about the magnetic fields.

That they were amazing.

They were incredible.

Stephen Merritt is a genius, etc., etc.,

Yes.

I mean, particularly at the time, I think now I'm 45, and I think if all my friends think something is terrific, now I'm more likely to be like, well, I should check that out.

But yeah, at the time, I was quite contrary, and I particularly didn't like how sort of cool and hip I

every single person was at Oberlin.

But yeah, I think I thought I put them in a category sort of like Derrida.

You know, it was like, oh, something smart that I probably can't understand.

So when I was an intern at Simon & Schuster, I spent every evening at a bar called Siberia, which was this dank, dark, sticky space in the 50th Street, 1-9 subway station.

It no longer exists, but they had an incredible jukebox, and they had all three of the CDs in the jukebox.

What I found most exciting was that Stephen's lyrics, they are brilliant.

And there are so many jokes, punctuation jokes, English language jokes.

Word nerd jokes.