| todd@wttsfm.com What You Need to Know on the WTTS Morning Show - weekdays, 6-9am
Host Late Mornings with Todd - weekdays, 9am-noon
Host WTTS OverEasy- Sundays 7-11am
Performing a number of different jobs in nearly a decade with WTTS, Todd has settled into the position of jack-of-many-trades and resident eccentric (for example, why does he wear those sunglasses? We don't know, but he claims it's that he's a huge fan of the drummer Jim Keltner...could be true, actually, since it's Todd we're talking about here). He's now primarily known for hosting WTTS OverEasy (more on that below), providing the Morning Music Mindbender at 7:35 weekdays, and doing the morning show news. With a varied and eclectic taste in music, it's not uncommon to find Todd hidden underneath a pile of albums, listening for the next great 'TTS track.
Now, about WTTS OverEasy: from 7-11am on Sunday mornings, Todd explores and expands the other sides of World Class Rock with laid-back and acoustic music, deep tracks, B-sides, reissues and those "hard-to-find" cuts. It's a very consciously assembled Sunday morning mixtape to help you start your week, all on WTTS OverEasy! Vital stats: Where are you from -
Born in Columbus, Indiana, with extended family south and east. Aside from spending two years around Traverse City, Michigan (home of the Cherry Festival, anyone?) and another two in Colorado Springs (DEFCON 1, anyone?), most of my time I've lived in several places in Indiana. Graduated from Eastern High School and Indiana State University.
Favorite albums - what, you mean this week? 
Appetizers (various artists)
As Falls Witchita, So Falls Witchita Falls (Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays) The Band (The Band)
Bless You and Hearts (The Court and Spark) Double Nickels On The Dime (Minutemen) Grace (Jeff Buckley) How We Operate (Gomez)
Slider: Ambient Excursions for Pedal Steel Guitar (Bruce Kaphan)...fans of WTTS OverEasy will recognize songs from this album as the occasional background music for Todd on the show.
Most memorable concerts -
 Levon Helm and the Barnburners at the Bluebird, 2001 (got to meet him, too...Levon is probably my all-time favorite drummer - hell, musician - in rock)
Phish in Louisville, 1995 (although the show at large may not have been their best, to this day I think it had the most transcendent, out-of-body-experience-inducing version of "Split Open & Melt" ever) Steely Dan at the former Deer Creek, 1993 (the reunion tour...drummer Peter Erskine was the band's secret weapon that night)
Wilco at the former Mars in Bloomington, 1997 (highlighted by Jeff Tweedy and band taking a stab at "Pecan Pie," the song he did as part of Golden Smog)
John Scofield at the Jazz Kitchen, 1998 (the set I saw had four songs, but ran over eighty minutes...an astonishing player to see up close) A list of musicians whose albums I'd almost always buy without hearing them first -
 The Court & Spark
NRBQ
Richard Thompson
XTC Favorite authors/books -  Chita Divakaruni, The Mistress Of Spices - for sheer force of language and powerful imagery, there aren't many books that compete. The title says it all: imagine a woman with the power to make seasonings sing in her hands, and what could result from that power.
David Ansel, The Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups - the story of what happens when a computer programmer leaves the rat race and opts to deliver homemade soup via bicycle for a living instead. You can read more about Ansel by going to souppeddler.com.
Thurston Moore, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture - a love story, 90 minutes at a time.
Jim Crace, Quarantine - what would happen if a mostly serious Monty Python retold the story of Jesus' 40 days of fasting in the desert with the human side brought much more into focus.
Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour and Kitchen Confidential - probably my favorite chef of the modern era, for his no-nonsense straight-arrow attitude about a life in the kitchen and a life in food. He gives pleasant and unpleasant details alike, but the writing is always top-notch funny and shoots from the hip.
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days and WLT: A Radio Romance - you can't be a DJ and not read WLT as a rite of passage...and Lake Wobegon Days similarly serves growing up in a small town, like Peyton Place with the scandal soft-pedaled and the quirkiness that emerges in that environment played up more.
Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag, This Book Will Change Your Life (and its sequels and variants) - Benrik's stuff is wonderful, off-kilter and probably in dire need of psychiatric evaluation, but also laugh-out-loud funny...check out their website here. Hobbies -
 MiniDisc recording, when opportunity allows...even after all this time in radio, I've never shaken that desire to make a mixtape, and this format has made it even easier to get things the way I really want them. Any recording platform that allows you to second-guess yourself is alright in my book...I mean, you can move songs around! You can delete them and replace them with others! (Not to mention that with the portable units, it's also a fine way to correspond with someone, especially if the person is overseas - you can walk around and record a letter and take out the sound of the guy honking his car horn, if you really want to.) Plus, the most recent permutation, Hi-MD, totally geeks me out...almost eight hours of high-quality audio on a single disc (shrieks like a third-grader, giggles, swoons, thuds to floor)!
Recent projects completed on Hi-MD included a couple of fantasy jukebox things, the first called 2 for a Quarter, 5 for 50 Cents, 11 for a Dollar, or 2FAQ for short, a collection of A- and B-sides of singles, so titled because that was the going rate when I first started playing songs on jukeboxes in my formative years. The idea is that if I shuffle the player, it will bring up the songs in the same way a jukebox in real life would have, back in the day. To honor the memory of favorite jukeboxes in my formative years, I even included a few albums in their entirety, not breaking up the tracks but leaving the album sides intact. (You could get a whole album side for two quarters back then...and you'd be amazed how few consistently great album sides there really are.)
The other project, just finished, calls back the memory of a jukebox at a favorite restaurant, but filled with some modern favorites and album tracks. It's called New Millenium Old-Fashioned Pizza Parlor Blues, or NMOFPPB for short...
As of this writing (April 2008), I'm trying to start another one, currently without a title, but it can be very draining work: it took me almost a year to do the 2FAQ collection and about 15 months to complete NMOFPPB. I assure you, after that long working on a labor of love, trimming intros and outros, titling songs and the like, it takes a while for me to work up interest in hearing that music again...but eventually the desire comes, and when it happens, life is very, very good indeed.
This goes hand-in-hand with record collecting...78, 45, 33, all speeds welcome. I don't collect for money, only for the sheer pIeaure of listening. It finds me acquiring records at yard sales, thrift stores, you name it...sometimes a windfall will drop right in my lap. For me, a good day's work is going through a big box full of albums or singles that someone held dear and looking for surprises - and you can count on it: there's always at least one thing I haven't heard, or hadn't previously been aware of, or a long-lost favorite, every time I do it.
Favorite movies -  Akira Kurosawa's Madadayo - his last film and quite possibly one of his best. Close second is his adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear plotline in Ran...although the latter is a bit too much of a downer to watch repeatedly.
Hopscotch - a spy film for people who don't have much use for James Bond. Walter Matthau is great in this.
The Right Stuff - which comes from being a fan of Levon Helm (see above). I'm also a fan of Fred Ward's performance as Gus Grissom, especially because he makes a Hoosier demigod come across as human, and frustrated as the rest of us on occasion (anybody who's seen the movie will know the relevant quote, here).
The 1996 English animated adaptation of The Wind in the Willows with Michael Palin among the cast. It's a good stuck-in-the-house-in-the-dead-of-winter movie.
Trembling Before G-d - this movie is a great documentary that goes a long way to humanizing many viewpoints of a modern issue, taking place in one of society's most traditional environments. Regardless of how you approach it or what side of the fence you're on, if this doesn't occasionally move you to tears, you may have a heart of stone.
Fishing with John - the fishing-show-as-narcotic, with the Lounge Lizards' John Lurie dragging various celebrities (Tom Waits and Dennis Hopper, among others) all around the world to explore man's relationship with the piscatorial. This also has one of the most useful commentary tracks ever issued on DVD. Description doesn't serve this disc all that well; it has to be seen to be truly grokked.
TV shows you find yourself watching whether you intended to or not -
 ***As of recently, I'm recanting my token fandom of anything involving Rachel Ray. She still has that perkily annoying pep-club presentation style that I can't stand, and now I can resist the adorable gravitational pull, thanks to her recent selling out in order to hawk crackers and "EVOO" - to me it's "extra virgin oIive oil" and it's going to remain so, acronyms be damned. Now I watch the show with the sound off for the eye candy, while listening to comedy albums. Which is about as informative. (That's why this picture remains up even now; in my head, Bill Cosby's going on about chocolate cake for breakfast.) I have now transferred my allegiance to Merry Olde England's dreamier and more savvy Nigella Lawson:
M*A*S*H (you'd think after over two decades of reruns, I'd be able to walk away from the TV when this comes on, but I still can't quite change the channel if I stumble on it...gotta say, though, that the TV edits are really, really annoying)
Law & Order, pretty much any run of the series, but mostly Criminal Intent (yeah, I think, "this time, I'll turn off the TV and go to bed"...then some plot twist happens and I'm stuck for the whole flippin' hour)
TV shows you try (or tried) not to miss -
 Mystery Science Theater 3000, now on DVD. Bucking the trend, I prefer Mike over Joel, and like the later seasons more.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.
Good Eats with Alton Brown on Food Network - this guy is a genius...anytime you want to know the reasons why you should prepare food a certain way and why it doesn't work when you try it another way, he fills in the blanks.
Taste of America - host Mark DeCarlo takes the art of culinary travelogue to a new level, specifically by not being the typical plastic show host. For starters, he's actually funny, sometimes in a sneaky way that catches you off guard and leaving the kids asking "what's so funny?"
Nova on PBS. Actually, pretty much anything on PBS.
A few not-so-big secrets about Todd -
1. I have what probably amounts to a lifelong aversion to almost all of
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong: Elvis' Golden Records, Vol. 2. When I lived in Colorado Springs, there were neighbors across the street that had it on 8-track and played it in their car at night, just outside their house, car doors open. In fact, they played it a lot. Of course, this being an 8-track player, the album played over and over and over and over and over. I can say, no exaggerating, that I can live the entire rest of my life without ever hearing "I Need Your Love Tonght" ever again. (Also, this being an 8-track, the songs were not in the same order as the original album, which means that I also heard all the songs in the wrong sequence constantly, and that also added to the irritation factor.)
To clarify, I generally like early Elvis, and I can even get behind "Pocketful of Rainbows" on G.I. Blues, but the second Golden Records album is where I become less of a fan (the exception is the song I heard the least, of course, because apparently those Colorado neighbors didn't care for it: his amazing cover of the Fats Domino song "One Night).
2. I have never responded to the siren call of Madonna. Can't do it. Everybody tells me how she's the revival of girl groups, or gives electronica a pop gloss, or something else, but I just don't have the ability to get into it. "Oh Father" had some decent pedal steel, and that's about as far as I can go. Well, and her husband Guy Ritchie is an awesome director, but that's admiration by association.
3. It is true, I do like Anne Murray. Early Anne Murray, though: I think 1974's Love Song album was the last great performance in vocal music, a record made for FM at a time when pop was AM...but that's where I stop. I hold stuff like "You Needed Me" in the same respect as
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong: Elvis' Golden Records, Vol. 2 (see number 1 above).
4. I'm firmly convinced that if there is a hell, and it's serviced by Muzak, the audio will consist of Melanie's "Brand New Key" on a continuous loop, and that's all. Maybe they'll throw in Rasputina's version just to throw more kerosene on the fire once in a while. My loathing for that song is limitless.
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