WPKN/LOVE & COMMUNICATION
I was recruited to radio by Val Richardson, who asked me to come to WPKN as a programmer after a few casual mentions of concerts I was going to or had recently attended. Programming is something like a dream-I-didn’t-know-I-had come true. I was always the friend who knew a lot about music or was trying to turn people on to bands or songs I came across, but until now I didn’t have an outlet (or a semi-captive audience). In high school, when the wind was blowing the right way, I would listen to Bates College Radio out of Lewiston, Maine, and wish I could have a radio show.
ANHEDONIC HEADPHONES PODCAST: Season 7, Episode 2
“Sometimes, you buy a LP off of someone on Discogs, then out of curiosity, you begin following them on Instagram. Then, you make the bold move of asking them to be a guest on the podcast. That is how I met Michelle Morgan—a DJ, Yale employee (that's right brokies, YALE), fiber artist, writer, and as I found out during our conversation, a hilarious and charming person who picked an eclectic mix of tunes and was willing to share the story behind each of them.”
Photograph by Allison Hadley
COLLECTING
Michelle Beaulieu-Morgan doesn’t consider herself a collector, and yet she still beams with pride over her record collection. A DJ on WPKN with her own show, Love & Communication (a nod to the Cat Power song), she has a small but well curated vinyl collection with deep meaning to her. “My parents graduated in 1976, so they had tons and tons of vinyl. I listened to records all through high school. Typical stuff, like this,” she says, holding up a lightly battered copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. “My Dad had the vinyl, and then it became mine.” When she moved to New Haven in 2009, she parted with almost all of it. “It’s hard to carry all that around,” she notes. “I sold all the records except for those that were super important to me.” But then, as in the broader landscape, records made a comeback. “In grad school, I felt the need to buy books to help convince myself I was smart, because I had a lot of anxiety around that as a first-generation student,” she says. “After [a] breakup in 2014, I stopped buying books and started obsessively collecting records. They were liberation from a mindset around the crushing anxiety of books.” —Record Players, Allison Hadley The Daily Nutmeg, Nov 25, 2020
COMMERCIAL WORK
Cover art I created for Keb Mo’’s Oklahoma, 2019 Grammy Award Winner, Best Americana Album