Sound Crew

On a recent evening, a group of editors, writers, and audio producers gathered on Zoom to talk about Erin Brockovich’s bra. They were workshopping an audio essay for Signal Hill, an audio magazine that debuted early this year. The piece—by Zoe Kurland, who works in public radio in Marfa, Texas—was about her dad, Jeffrey, who was a costume designer on the Brockovich movie from 2000, responsible for dressing Julia Roberts, and about Kurland’s own coming into womanhood. The real-life Brockovich was, in Jeffrey’s words, “quite buxom”; Roberts was not. So he’d patched together prosthetic silicone cutlets, gel pads, and cotton to create an effect. Kurland asked her colleagues, “Is it weird to make a story about your dad and boobs?”

“No, not weird,” someone typed into the chat. All agreed. Besides, Signal Hill welcomes the weird. A pair of audio producers in Chicago—Liza Yeager, who is thirty-one, and Jackson Roach, thirty—started the project because they were tired of making the same old grist for the narrative-podcast-industrial complex: “specific, small, and grabby,” as Yeager characterized it. Her favorite stories tend to be about the “squishy,” “everyday stuff,” she said—less conventional, more “some guy walked around.”