Today we give you a piece of friendship ephemera that we had thought was lost to time.
15 years ago, yr intrepid hosts planted the seeds of Iovis via a little podcast called House of the Winds. Anna and Mara (feat. a red-dirt Georgia poet named Shelly) freestyled a bit on country music's relationship to capitalism and Christianity, and sang songs of their own. The sound isn't great - we were all speaking into the hardware mic of a Macbook Pro from various feet away, and the servers could only hold so much. But the spirit, cadence (in spite of Mara's stronger Michigan accent and higher pitch), and content feels like an episode we would record today. Anna tries valiantly to get everyone to focus for five seconds while also kind of doing an audio version of cinéma vérité, Mara's obsession with hillbilly cultural appropriation apparently goes way back, and we were celebrating Dolly Parton's impact well before it was trendy for non-Appalacians.
Give it up for the 2008 Smoothbrain World Champions