It’s not filed under “true crime.” He doesn’t expect it to go viral. Though his podcast eschews some of the sexier trends in audio, Nashville Sounding Board host Benjamin Eagles knows there’s an audience for his show, which focuses on local and state policy issues.
Launched in January, Nashville Sounding Board has featured 15 episodes so far, including interviews with four candidates in the recent special mayoral election, a multipart series on the transit referendum and an interview with Metro Nashville Public Schools director Shawn Joseph. Eagles has already recorded a couple more, including a discussion about the campaign to establish a community oversight board for Metro police.
Eagles, 28 years old, works in the Metro Finance Department, but he says his day job doesn’t pose a conflict with his side gig as a podcast host.
“I’ve tried to keep my personal political views more or less in the background of the podcast,” he tells the Scene. “Of course, my topic choices in and of themselves have a political component to them. I am a Metro employee, but as a resident of Nashville, yeah, I have opinions about any issue that’s going to be on the podcast, but I’ve really not tried to make it about me and my views.”
Eagles first came to Nashville in 2007 as a freshman at Vanderbilt. In the years since, he’s worked in labor organizing and on several political campaigns (including those of multiple sitting Metro Council members), left to attend graduate school and returned about a year ago to work for the city.
Most Sounding Board episodes are long (40 minutes, give or take), mostly unedited discussions with policymakers and other interested parties. So far on the show he’s had politicians like David Fox, Jeff Yarbro, Harold Love and Erica Gilmore, among others, and notes that he has yet to have anyone say no to coming on the podcast.
“I think a lot of people relish the opportunity to be heard,” he says.
Eagles doesn’t anticipate replicating the same kind of campaign interview in the months leading up to August primaries and future elections, though. Interviews with political candidates can only go so deep, he says, because you have to touch on myriad issues.
“If you talk for 40 minutes, you’re talking about 10 different issues,” he says. “Whereas the one [about] the community oversight board, we talked for almost an hour, so it was really a deep, long-form discussion about community oversight. Personally, that’s more interesting to me, and I think there’s more of an opportunity to draw out content that you don’t already see duplicate coverage of within a paper.”
Eagles sees his show as a way to dive more deeply into an issue than an incremental news story is able to do.
“We have great papers that I feel like are under-resourced, and there are a million issues to cover,” he says. “As a reader, you read a news story and you see a few quotes, and a lot of times I find myself thinking, ‘Well, that’d be interesting to talk to that person at length and see what else they have to say.’ ”
Eagles says he thought his interest in how policy can improve people’s lives would translate to an audience — small at first, maybe — of like-minded citizens hungry for “productive and respectful and intellectually generous conversations with involved people about really important issues.” He says it was a milestone when he started encountering people he didn’t know who listened to the show, proving that more than just his family and friends were interested in the discussions.
When he began producing the show, Eagles had listened to barely a handful of podcast episodes in his life. Now he’s an avid consumer, and some of his favorites include Bloomberg’s Masters in Business, as well as the local podcast Education Conversations. But Eagles had no audio experience when he started: He says he recorded with a single table-top microphone at his guest’s office or home or “wherever is convenient and quiet.” He has since upgraded his equipment and, he says, improved both his production and interviewing skills.
Eagles wants listeners to have a better understanding of the city and state they call home after each episode. But at the end of the day, it’s still a hobby for him.
“People aren’t really listening for me, so if I bumble around a little bit, it’s fine,” he says. “I try to do some research, ask good questions that are going to elicit a substantive answer, and then roll with it.”
