Tulsa Times #59 The H-Bomb Podcast Show

The H-Bomb Show Podcast

Since 1997, many websites and online pages have emerged to tell the story of Hanson and share the excitement from fan to fan and into the wider world. Blogs, Facebook pages, Tumblr and twitter accounts, regularly post fan experiences or the latest news from @hansonmusic, 3CG Records and Hanson.net but The H-Bomb Podcast has created a space to detonate an audible and unique expression of the Hanson Music experience from the fans perspective.

We asked Nick Navarre, the creator of The H-Bomb to tell us about his own history with Hanson Music and the life of the H-Bomb.

“I live in Michigan, just outside of Detroit and I have been a fan since around 99-2000. I actively disliked the band during their “popular” era – I think MMMBop was #1 when I graduated high school, which kind of annoyed me at the time.

I had a girlfriend in ’99 that was into Hanson. I was pretty heavy into the Napster file-sharing stuff at the time, so as a favor to her I tried to find the TTA demos that she was looking for. As I heard those, to my surprise I thought a few of them were actually pretty good. Runaway Run stood out specifically (and the final version wound up being great on the album, obviously). Even after the girlfriend was a distant memory, the music stuck around and grew on me.
I went to my first show in 2000, but then really hit it hard starting with the acoustic tour in 2003 and onward. Around this same timeframe I was going to broadcasting school, and actually worked at a prominent Detroit news station for about a year before they laid off a big chunk of people. The combination of these two things are probably what planted the seed for what eventually became the podcast. I also appeared in a semi-prominent position on a couple of Hanson videos (UA Live and 5 of 5), which is how most people would probably recognize me at this point.

I started a blog in 2015 (“The King Has Risen” at http://hanson.zone) but after working on it for several months I realized I wasn’t really doing anything different or notably better than most of the other Hanson fan blogs out there. I was satisfied with it, but not “happy” with it. At that point I thought it may be time to do something beyond a blog.
A podcast had been in the back of my head for a while, but I really had to take some time to make sure it would be something worthwhile. I put a significant amount of money into it, everything from a new laptop to a higher end microphone and other equipment. I didn’t want this to sound like a guy talking into a headset mic that cost 25 bucks. The first episode of the podcast premiered the week after Hanson Day 2016 and was an overview of that event.

It seemed like something that was overdue. The band has been around for more than 20 years now, and the number of songs they’ve released, the number of shows and events they’ve held, and the number of fans that have travelled the world to see them perform meant there were plenty of stories to be told and topics to be discussed. There needs to be an outlet for some of that.

I’ve been pretty happy with how the show has gone so far. The listener count hasn’t been incredible but it’s actually significantly more than I expected – it’s a Hanson-fan podcast, which is sort of like appealing to a niche audience of a niche audience. If I ever question continuing the show, I eventually wind up getting a message from someone on some remote location of the planet telling me they like listening, which inspires me to keep it rolling.

I do try to keep the shows to a reasonable length. I listen to a ton of podcasts myself, and when stuff gets into the 2-3 hour mark every week, it makes it hard to stay current. I want something that people can listen to in one or two commutes to work.

I try to cover a wide variety of stuff with a variety of guests. If I only stuck to music discussion or only stuck to fan stories, it would probably wear out its welcome pretty quickly. So far I’ve had episodes discussing specific events (Hanson Day, BTTI, the Make It Out Alive Halloween event from years ago), “countdown” episodes for stuff like the top Hanson live songs, an episode talking to the fan that has been to the most Hanson shows, even an extended series of episodes where we tried to put together the best possible “greatest hits” album that pulls from all 6 of their studio offerings.

Not to spoil too much, but upcoming in May will be the 1 year anniversary show, which could be from Tulsa again if I wind up going to Hanson Day. Coming up after that will be a sort of sequel to the “greatest hits” series of episodes from last year, this time focusing on the best of the Fan Club EPs.
This December is going to have a time capsule episode – last summer I had people write in with predictions on what Hanson would do between then and the end of 2017, so we’ll see who was right and who was way off, which should be fun. I’ve got a couple of other things in the tank that are either half-done or in the early planning, so hopefully I can keep things fresh in the future.