Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tina Jackson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Tina, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

We started the Midtown Coffee Radio Hour during the first COVID winter, motivated by boredom, a need for a creative outlet, and craving connection. All our normal ways of celebrating and marking the holiday season were essentially limited to what we could do in our own homes. On top of that, I was (am) a big NPR fan and grew up listening to the live NPR Saturday shows, like “Live From Here with Chris Thile”, which was the next iteration of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Since these were usually live recorded shows, COVID shut them down, along with everything else. I started listening to reruns of these shows, which was not nearly as comforting as it should have been. This was my “Will Smith watching Today show reruns in post-zombie apocalypse New York City in I Am Legend” moment. So, Nick, my husband and co-Founder of Midtown, and I decided to try to do something. We thought, “Let’s create a Christmas radio-hour style show in a safe, socially-distanced way and try to do it with our oh-so-talented friends.” Everyone was in the same head space as we were and had equally empty calendars, so we were able to gather our group and create a little piece of Christmas cheer to share with others through a podcast.

The origins of Midtown are still very much alive today. Life is so different now, but the show still is an antidote to new challenges that come with living in 2023, like mindless busyness, lack of meaningful connection, and a strange kind of boredom. It still gives us an avenue to be creative, make music, laugh, pretend with friends, and share it with others.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Midtown Coffee Radio Hour, a Sioux Falls performing arts group that does live recordings of a radio-hour style show including live music and made-for-radio skits that center around a theme and is narrated by a host. Each show is written with original skits and narration, and we choose 6-7 cover songs to sing as well. We release the show as a podcast exclusively on Spotify Premium (Midtown Coffee Radio Hour: The Podcast) and the songs are released as tracks on Spotify as well (artist: Midtown Coffee Radio Hour). Initially, we solved my problem of missing the live radio-hour style shows that used to be on NPR, but now I think we provide an hour of high-quality entertainment for all ages that feels fresh and specific to Sioux Falls. We are different from other groups because of the structure of our show and, I think, the talent and chemistry of our performers is really special. Midtown is committed to creating a “hygge” space where we can connect over music and laughter and the bittersweet things in life.

If you are in Sioux Falls (or the greater Keloland area) and want to check out a live recording, i.e. a show, then check our show schedule on our social media pages (Facebook and Instagram) or search for us on Eventbrite. We announce dates for the next 2-3 shows at a time and usually perform 6-8 times per year. We currently perform at the ICON Events Hall in downtown Sioux Falls but have performed in many different indoor and outdoor venues over the years. If you want to check us out online, our Spotify and social media pages are a great place to start. I’ve been saying I’m going to make a website for about 2 years now, and while it would be great for our group and make a lot of sense, I make no promises.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We have had to make many pivots in the life of Midtown Coffee Radio Hour. Our guiding principle is the stress/joy ratio. If something is making Midtown more stressful than joyful, then we do something to fix it or we stop doing it. We have jobs and kids, so if we are going to put time into this, it’s got to be fun! Thankfully, every time we’ve run into issues, we have been able to solve them and make things even better.

We started the show during COVID, so it had to be recorded without an audience. While it was still satisfying and fun to make the show this way, we were missing the audience element in performing that creates that electric energy. Also, we started to drive ourselves crazy to get studio/professional quality takes of the songs whilst recording on old church equipment! Not exactly set up for success. We did the absolute best we could, but we were trying to be too perfect. So, when it was starting to be safe to gather in public outside again, we had our first show in our backyard and ended up recording it on an iPhone. Not ideal, but the show and the feel was so much better for us.

We also used to try to make a show per month, but that was way too much, so we’ve settled on a nice schedule of 6-8 performances per year with big breaks over the holidays and summer to make this a sustainable and long-term project.
Finally, finding all the right people was critical to making this group work. We all have to trust each other and be able to deliver our parts to make the show work, with very little rehearsal time. We went through a handful of shows without a consistent drummer and did not have the sound set-up we needed to be successful for about a year. The folks that helped us during that time were really amazing and generous, but it wasn’t a great fit. So, that was frustrating, but we were able to find the right people to join the group and that’s made all the difference.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Ah, social media. I ended up in charge of that because I do all the behind-the-scenes work… but I was very reluctant to do so. I was not super active online myself, so doing it for Midtown felt like it was going to be a big energy drain. Where was I to get enough content to make this remotely interesting? Initially, I tried to do a bunch of stuff on Canva, which is only really good for putting out our schedule and show details. And I’m not a graphic designer so it looked pretty bad.

So, I started to film more from our rehearsals, more of our interactions behind-the-scenes, and it became a lot more fun. I think everyone in this group is hilarious, and we try to poke fun at ourselves in general, so we are able to do that on social media as well. I think John Meyer, a Sioux Falls entrepreneur, said it best – just document, don’t “create content.”

So, at some point, I started to put stuff up that I thought was funny or sweet or just great music – documenting the whole experience as honestly as I could. I don’t post on a schedule. Usually, it ramps up before a show or if we have something to share, but I don’t follow any rules. In the summer we may not post for weeks or months and it’s fine. The stress/joy principle applies here too!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @midtowncoffeeradiohour
• Facebook: Midtown Coffee Radio Hour
• Other: TikTok: @midtowncoffeeradiohour Eventbite: Midtown Coffee Radio Hour Questions or to join the Email list – contact [email protected]

Image Credits
Logo by Andrew Brynjulson – https://www.brennifresh.com/