November 2018 Est. 1985 Your Community Newspaper
The Northside Chronicle
Volume 34 Issue 11 - FREE -
Photo by Ashlee Green
Brian Howe, creator and host of the podcast START THE BEAT with Sikes, holds his painting, “Mona Rexa,” in his home studio in Troy Hill. Howe started his podcast in 2014 as a “personal experiment” to get better at navigating conversation and has now recorded and produced close to 200 episodes.
Podcast ponders nitty-gritty of life as a working artist By Ashlee Green Brian Howe, creator of START THE BEAT with Sikes, a podcast for and about Pittsburgh artists, creatives and the people they inspire, has figured out an effective formula for making friends in his 30s: Inviting people on his podcast. “It’s funny. I guess there’s a part of me that judges how good of a friend I could be with somebody by how unavailable they are,” he says. “I try to surround myself with people that are working hard on things.” Howe noticed an empty space in the conversations creative people
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were having with one another and hoped his podcast could fill it. “Nobody’s really talking about what they’re doing outside of their art, or why they do it, or what it’s like juggling full-time jobs, juggling school, juggling children, family, with all of this art that they’re putting out,” he says. The podcast, which he started in 2014 and now has close to 200 episodes, began with no standard platform. It was just conversations between Howe and his close friends, like Ashley Corts of Black Forge Coffee House and Mike Hitt of MCM Studios. Once it became more regular, Howe began
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to receive requests from people he didn’t know asking to be a guest on his show. At some point, he says, the number of requests was so great that he “lost control of who was on the show.” The one-on-one dialogues became soapboxes for people promoting their new albums. “I started to feel like I was being taken advantage of,” he says. “I wasn’t saying ‘no.’” Howe began to ask himself, “How can I make this fun again?,” and came up with the concept of panel discussions. “A lot of people have the same struggles in the city, a lot of people excel in the same ways. We’re
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talking about a lot of the same venues, same social circles,” he explains. He took these common conversation threads and created specialized, multi-person panels around each of them. There’s an episode in the works right now, for example, that features Diana “Dingo” Ngo and Brooks Criswell from the heavy metal-themed vegan restaurant Onion Maiden and John Huxley from hard rock band Jakethehawk examining the interactions between music and the food industry. The panelists discuss how writing a song can be similar to See Sikes, Page 9
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