DoT EP95: The Beehive Queen Christine Ohlman Talks Rock and Roll, Singing for Saturday Night Live, and Songwriting, plus New Comedy from Erica Rhodes

The Department of Tangents Podcast

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes in this job of talking to notable people, you get kind of a day off. You talk to someone with such a long history, with such a broad view of the world of entertainment, with so many stories, that your presence is barely required. That was the case with Christine Ohlman. I just needed to pitch a topic or two out there and get out of her way

Since 1992, Ohlman has been the singer with the Saturday Night Live Band, watching generations of cast members from Adam Sandler up to the current cast with Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon. She’s seen Sinead O’Connor tear up the photo of the pope, Alec Baldwin doing Trump, and everything in between. She can tell you about Paul McCartney and his band playing at rehearsal, dancing with Chris Farley, and all the private jams and cast parties.

But SNL alone does not define her. She has shared a stage and/or recorded with just about anyone in the rock and pop world you can think of. She gave a nervous and incredibly polite Eddie Vedder permission to sing next to her backing up Neil Young on the Bob Dylan anniversary show. Elvis Costello, Ian Hunter, Levon Helm, Maceo Parker, George Harrison, Ronnie Spector, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen. She fronted Big Brother and Holding Company. She was almost in the B-52s. And when she’s not backing up someone else, she’s leading her own band, Rebel Montez, recording and gigging around the country.

She’s also a songwriter, with new music in the works after a long recording absence, and that was one of the most interesting parts of our conversation to me. When you’ve seen the inner workings of some of the best songs in the history of American popular music, as a collector and a collaborator, what happens when you sit down to figure out your own sound.

You can find out more about her work at christineohlman.net, and you can find her on Twitter under @christineohlman. She’ll be heading into the studio to record the new album this fall, so keep that in mind for 2020.

This week’s featured track is “Eggshells” from comedian Erica Rhodes’ new album Sad Lemon. It’s a very tight, well-written set of comedy, and I chose this track because it’s one of the riffs we talked about when she was on the show in episode 91. In this track, she talks about her father and his Multiple Sclerosis, and how they can joke about it, but how audiences sometimes get a bit uptight about it. As I have mentioned once or twice on this show in the past, I have MS myself, and though it hinders me less than it does many others, there is still a bit of anxiety over how it might develop in the future. I’d like to think that if that next attack does finally come, I’d like to be able to have a sense of humor about my predicament the way Rhodes’ father does, and that people would feel safe to mention it. There are a lot of tracks off the new album I could have used, but this one has a bit of a personal edge for me, and I hope you enjoy it, too.

You can find out more about Rhodes at ericarhodescomedy.com and on Twitter under @ericarhodes and look for her on the upcoming NBC comedy competition Bring the Funny, which debuts July 9.