ALEX GOLDMAN: Hey, just a quick announcement before we start the show. We are hiring! We’re looking for a producer to come help us make stories. So if that producer is you, go to replyallshow.com/jobs. Once again that’s replyallshow.com/jobs.
[BREAK]
EMMANUEL DZOTSI: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Emmanuel Dzotsi.
ALEX: And I'm Alex Goldman.
EMMANUEL: Hello, Alex.
ALEX: Hey, Emmanuel.
EMMANUEL: So, uh, what do we, what do we—what do you have for me?
ALEX: Uh, this week, we have a Super Tech Support.
[MUSIC]
EMMANUEL: Okay. Exciting.
ALEX: So, it came from one of our listeners.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: So, yeah, I’m just gonna ask you questions about this. I’m very interested in this problem. It’s unique—
MARIAN: Okay.
ALEX: ... to say the least. [laughs]
MARIAN: Yeah.
ALEX: But first, I just wanted to ask you a little bit about yourself. Could you just say your name?
MARIAN: Marian. Yeah, Marian. [laughs]
ALEX: What? Do you, do you go by something else?
MARIAN: No, no, no. I go by Marian, but I don’t know if I want my last name on it.
ALEX: Okay.
MARIAN: [laughs] Publicized.
ALEX: Marian wants to stay incognito for reasons that will become very clear in a little bit. And the problem that she came to us for help with, it all began when she recently bought a used car.
MARIAN: It's a Toyota Prius. A 2016 Toyota Prius. It's, like, seafoam green. It's that really pretty, like, Toyota paint color. I would say, a very soft, gentle-looking car.
[laughing]
And when Marian drives, she almost exclusively listens to podcasts. She actually sent me a list of the podcasts that she listens to, and there are dozens of them, at least. Like, she listens to religious podcasts like Pray As You Go—
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: … uh, The Confessional. She listens to public radio podcasts like Death, Sex, and Money and On Point.
MARIAN: I also listen to a fair amount of trashy podcasts about, um, like, reality television, one of which is—actually, I would not call it trashy. He is a—I consider him a dear friend. Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino is probably my all-time favorite podcast, currently.
ALEX: I don't know who Danny Pellegrino is.
MARIAN: He is so wonderful. I mean, if you don't watch Bravo—
ALEX: I don't.
MARIAN: I'm a Bravo aficionado. My dog's name is Bravo, so...
ALEX: [laughs] After the- after the network?
MARIAN: Yes, after the network.
[laughing]
ALEX: And Marian's got one of those touchscreen consoles on her Prius. And usually when she plays a podcast, it just shows the name of the podcast itself, like no cover art, nothing like that. But one day, she’s listening to a podcast...
MARIAN: It must have been probably the second or third time I took the car out. When I first sort of got more comfortable in the car, connected my phone via Bluetooth, I think first I saw like a generic music note or something [ALEX: Mm-hmm.] in the space where album art should be. And then I saw my car demon.
[MUSIC]
ALEX: What the hell is your car demon? Can you explain what that is, please?
MARIAN: [laughs] So, my car demon is—he has like, this long wig of like, mullet hair. He's like, drooling a long line of drool. He has these scary, beady eyes. He's like, wearing, like, blue, gray, like, ripped up, like kind of like, tattered—I don't even know if it's clothes or skin. And it's very bizarre. There's no text or anything. It's literally just my demon.
ALEX: Uh, Emmanuel, I'm gonna send you the picture of the demon via Slack.
EMMANUEL: All right. Okay. Let me pull this up. Whoa. [laughs] What is that?
ALEX: It's- it's Marion's demon.
EMMANUEL: Yeah, very demonic-looking creature or person, like, kind of standing, like, kind of crouched over.
ALEX: I mean, it’s super mysterious because it is very low res, and it’s kind of hard to tell whether it’s real or like, a painting. And it looks like they’re covered in ash or something. It is a very, very bizarre picture.
EMMANUEL: Yeah. The first time she saw this, what, what did she say—like, [laughs] what was her reaction to that?
ALEX: Well, I mean, her first reaction was like, genuine surprise.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
[MUSIC OUT]
ALEX: And she was a little weirded out because she is the one who described it as a demon and thinks it looks like a demon.
EMMANUEL: Uh-huh.
ALEX: And she also happens to be a devout Catholic and a religion teacher at a Catholic school.
EMMANUEL: Wait, really?
ALEX: Yeah.
[MUSIC]
MARIAN: Being a Catholic religion teacher, it like, kind of adds a layer to this.
ALEX: Right.
MARIAN: Um, so I want, I want to preface, as a Catholic person, [ALEX: Mm-hmm.] I do believe, I do believe in the devil. I believe in who St. Ignatius would call the enemy. I believe in evil spirits. However, more prominently, I believe that if you're in right relationship with God, then the evil spirit has no power over you.
So it’s not exactly like Marian was scared of the demon, but it did start to seem like it had a mind of its own because it just started showing up on all these random podcasts.
One day, it was on Two Judgey Girls and then another day, it was on NPR’s Life Kit, and then In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt. And even then, like, it wouldn’t appear on every episode of those podcasts. It would just show up occasionally. Like, it just popped up whenever it felt like it.
EMMANUEL: Okay.
ALEX: She wants the demon gone.
EMMANUEL: Yeah.
ALEX: So that’s my task—get rid of the demon.
EMMANUEL: Wow.
[MUSIC OUT]
ALEX: I don’t say this to be blasphemous, but could you do like, an exorcist style thing, where you like, cast it out?
MARIAN: Oh. Well, I, I have said this before, and again, I don’t want to trivialize. But again, I have said that it’s fine. You just have to renounce Satan before you get in my car.
[laughing]
MARIAN: So, I mean, basically, I do every day that I get in the car. I drove to work with my demon this morning.
[MUSIC]
[Car Sounds]
[Door Sounds]
TOYOTA DEALER: How’s it going, man?
ALEX: Good, how are you?
TOYOTA DEALER: [Crosstalk] for service?
ALEX: Yes.
ALEX: A little while after talking to Marian, I did what I thought was the most obvious first step. Uh, I went to the Toyota dealership.
ALEX: Can I ask you, uh, a weird Toyota question?
ALEX: Because I wanted to know if they’d ever heard of a problem like this, and if they had any clue how to fix it.
EMMANUEL: And what did they say?
TOYOTA DEALER: Nice. Nice.
ALEX: And so, they were like, “Can you tell me what's going on here? And I was like, “I don't…”
TOYOTA DEALER: You need a young priest and an old priest.
ALEX: [laughs]
TOYOTA DEALER: And you have to say, "The power of Christ compels you.”
ALEX: After the sort of requisite, uh, Exorcist joke that he had to make—
EMMANUEL: [laughs]
ALEX: He told me he’d never experienced anything specifically like this, but he did have an idea of who I might need to talk to.
TOYOTA DEALER: That would be with Gracenote, with any images. You know, with the…[fades]
EMMANUEL: What's Gracenote?
ALEX: Gracenote is this company that has, like, a massive database of music images. So like, album art and pictures of artists. So, when you are playing something on your car stereo and an image pops up for the artist, that’s likely Gracenote sending it to your car stereo.
EMMANUEL: Oh, so Gracenote is—its function is just to, like, figure out, okay, this song is playing. I—the screen should be showing this art from this artist.
ALEX: Right. So, I went to Gracenote, and they declined to do an interview. And so I was like, well, maybe someone on the other side of this will know what’s happening. So I went to this guy named Russell, who works at Pocket Casts, which is the app that Marian uses to play her podcasts.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And I was like, "Do you have any idea what's going on?"
ALEX: So could I just send you this picture real quick?
RUSSELL: Yeah, please do. I mean, if I'm gonna end up cursed after this—I'm a little bit worried, but yes. Yes, send it through anyway.
ALEX: [laughs] Just so you can understand what we're working with here.
ALEX: He thought that there was maybe something going on with the car stereo and how it was trying to find the podcast art. Um, but he wasn’t super sure. And what he said to me was like, "You know, you should really go to Gracenote and ask them,” which, you know, I’d already tried.
EMMANUEL: Yeah.
ALEX: And it just sort of felt like, do you know that thing where you call a customer service line and they keep bouncing you back and forth between like, the same two departments who are like, “Oh, you need that other department.” “Oh, you need that other department.”
EMMANUEL: Oh yeah. I’m actually there right now with an airline credit I have.
ALEX: [laughs] It just felt like I was caught in that loop.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And without knowing who the demon was, like who this was a picture of, none of these people could really help me. And so, I figured like, if I’m gonna figure out what this problem is, [EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.] I have to know who the demon is.
[MUSIC]
ALEX: And so I got into the studio with Producer Anna Foley to see if we could figure it out.
MUSIC OUT AROUND HERE
ALEX: Here, it says Google—let's see images. Visually similar images. Let's take a look at these.
ANNA FOLEY: Okay. Let’s click through these babies.
ALEX: By doing a Google reverse image search.
ALEX: Taffeta Darlings, which is a band. Woodstock Performers. Dark aesthetic art replay. It's really having a hard time with this. What is the name of that Russian search engine?
ALEX: Then I tried this Russian search engine, which, um, a security researcher told me in the past is better at reverse image search. It's called Yandex. I tried that and nothing matched, and I mostly got horror movie posters.
ANNA: Uh, I got a man, or a man called Ron, Rob Zombie?
ALEX: You don't know who Rob Zombie is? [laughs]
ANNA: No. Why would I know who Rob Zombie is?
ALEX: Because he’s inc- he’s incredibly famous. He directs movies?! He was in a band called White Zombie for many years. And in every one of his songs he, like, ends every stanza by going, "Yeahhh. Aw, yeah, I'm an astro creep. Subadabado and a [sings]... Yeah. Yeah."
ANNA: Um...
ALEX: Some of the people working on this story—uh, Anna, Damiano, and I—we spent, like, the better part of a day arguing about what this picture might be.
ALEX: ... people on stages. Well, Anna was like, "I don’t think it’s someone on a stage. I think it’s CGI." And I'm like—
ANNA: No. No, that’s not what I thought. Alex is misrepresenting me.
ALEX: She, she's...
ALEX: Anna seemed to think this picture wasn’t even real.
[MUSIC]
ANNA: Okay. The one thing that I was like, it really doesn’t look real, is if you look at the picture, the drooling—it doesn’t look like…
ALEX: It's like, white drool.
ANNA: It’s like, gross, weird, like an actual human would never, like, look like this? Uh.
DAMIANO MARCHETTI: Ohh, I see what Anna’s saying.
ALEX: Damiano was hyper focused on the hair.
DAMIANO :The hair is surprisingly, like, healthy, like...
ALEX: Because he was convinced that it proved this had to be a stage act of some kind.
DAMIANO: It’s got volume. It’s got sheen. It’s got body, like...
ALEX: But after a good amount of back and forth...
ANNA: I said that it looked like something from The Walking Dead, and Alex was like, “Walking Dead people don’t look like this. Like, they’ve deteriorated.”
ALEX: I had started to form a theory.
ALEX: There’s a, there's a musical genre where everybody wears corpse, corpse makeup, called, um, black metal. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it?
DAMIANO: No.
ALEX: I couldn’t stop looking at this person’s face and like, the way it was made up. I’m mean, I’m kind of a metal fan, and the way that the demon’s face was made up, looked to me like a corpse paint, which is this style of face makeup where you, like, paint your face very white and then you put, like, black around your eyes and mouth to make you look kind of like a skull. And there is a subgenre of heavy metal called black metal where a lot of acts use corpse paint.
ALEX: It’s like, super fast, very symphonic. They use, like, lots of synthesizers, and they use, like, operatic singing with growling. Um, they’re kind of most famous for being weird anti-Christian racists. Like—
DAMIANO: Huh. Not okay. Okay.
ALEX: No, they’re terrible. Like, the first wave of Swedish black metal was like, all these guys who, you know, got arrested for burning down churches and murdering each other. Like, they’re all truly unhinged.
ALEX: So, Emmanuel, I was like, this could very easily be a member of a black metal band.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: But my concern is, if this is in fact a black metal musician, I am worried that it might make Marian even more upset. Because it’s not just a picture of some creepy guy, it’s like, a picture of an anti-Christian church burner that's like [EMMANUEL: Right.] she's riding around with in her car.
EMMANUEL: [laughs]
ALEX: It seemed like if I was going to figure out who this was, I was going to have to dive into the world of black metal.
That’s after the break.
[BREAK]
ALEX: Welcome back to the show. So Emmanuel, I wanted to figure out who this demon was in Marian’s car, and I had a theory that it was someone from like, the world of black metal.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: But I couldn't figure it out on my own. So, I reached out to this woman named Kim Kelly, she’s a reporter who mostly does labor reporting, but she wrote about metal for years and she knows way more about black metal than I do.
KIM KELLY: Much more of my life has been spent as a metalhead than it has not.
ALEX: How did you discover it?
KIM: So, I grew up in kind of the, the beginning of the Napster, like, mall goth, nu metal era. And of course, as like, kind of a weird, angry kid, I threw myself headfirst into the Slipknots and Papa Roaches of the world.
ALEX: Where'd you grow up?
KIM: I'm from the South Jersey Pine Barrens.
ALEX: Oh, okay. It's really cool and weird in the Pine Barrens. I love it.
KIM: Yes.
ALEX: The soil’s all sandy and strange, and like, the only thing that can grow are all these pine trees.
KIM: Yeah. Sugar, sand, and pitch pines. We have our own demon, too.
ALEX: Yup.
KIM: Jersey Devil, whatup?
ALEX: Um, are you saying hello to the Jersey Devil? [laughs]
KIM: Just in case he's out there. Because you never know.
ALEX: So, I really wanted to show Kim the picture. But first she told me this very interesting thing about my conception of black metal artists as like, anti-Christian church burners. What she said was like, yes, there certainly was some awful stuff in the origins of black metal, but I have a terrible misunderstanding of black metal’s become today.
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And she said like, look, black metal came into existence as this weird misunderstanding in the first place. So, there’s this British band called Venom.
[MUSIC]
EMMANUEL: Venom.
ALEX: And they put out an album called Black Metal.
[MUSIC]
KIM: They kind of helped develop this aesthetic of, like, leather and the devil and, like, we’re gonna set your children on fire. Like, this very—in retrospect, very kind of campy approach.
ALEX: I don't want to compare them to Spinal Tap ‘cause that’s insulting but, like—
EMMANUEL: [laughs]
ALEX: … they were on that spectrum.
EMMANUEL: Okay.
[MUSIC OUT]
ALEX: Like, when I was in high school, people used to pass around this cassette that was just like, a live performance of theirs, but only the in between song, “Banter”, because everybody found it very funny. Uh, it’s actually on Youtube now. Let me send you the video.
CONCERT AUDIO: [AUDIO PLAYS] Your souls to the gods rock and roll [Screaming]
EMMANUEL: [Laughs]
CONCERT AUDIO: [More screaming] Hell yeah! Oh, black metal!
EMMANUEL: I mean, it’s goofy, but like, I don't know, it’s joyful. I’m, I'm into it.
ALEX: Right. But what happened is, Venom fans, you know, they started sharing the music with each other.
[MUSIC]
KIM: They, you know, traded tapes with other little metal maniacs in other places, and a bunch of nerdy white kids in Scandinavia got a hold of their tapes. And without the context of realizing, oh, this a bunch of drunk English dudes who are having some fun, they thought it was, like, real. And they were like, oh yeah, Satan and hatred and death and anti-life, like, this is gonna be our whole deal. We’re gonna make some bands about it.
ALEX: And these guys happened to be pretty anti-Christian because they felt like there was this big colonization aspect of Christian missionaries coming into Scandinavia in the past and diluting, like, the actual religions of the area.
EMMANUEL: That makes sense.
ALEX: But Kim says that, like, black metal has evolved way beyond the weirdos that started the genre to be, like, a completely global phenomenon that is way more inclusive than it used to be. So, whoever’s in this picture is probably not an anti-Christian church burner. But I was still curious if Kim knew who it was. So I told her about Marian’s situation.
KIM: Haunted car. Obviously.
ALEX: Yeah, obviously.
KIM: [laughs]
ALEX: So she sent it to me—she sent me a picture of it…
ALEX: I sent her the picture.
KIM: Oh, man. Ha! Hahaha! [laughing] What?
ALEX: So, that's the picture that this—and, and just so you know, th- this woman is very Christian and, and, and is like—
KIM: Oh, honey.
ALEX: … a little weirded out. [laughs]
KIM: Interesting. It looks like they're spitting, maybe?
ALEX: Yeah, it looks like there’s sort of like this, this like—
KIM: [makes drool sounds]
ALEX: … white drool coming out.
KIM: Yeah. I mean, they're wearing a black leather vest. And they've got—well, that's not corpse paint. That's just all covered—I want—like, corpse paint is a very specific, um, like, black and white design, but...
ALEX: Yeah, this is more like, gray and chalky, sort of all over them.
[MUSIC]
KIM: I don't know, man. It seems like—I bet it's—hmm. It doesn't look like any black metal band I've seen. I've seen a whole lot of black metal bands.
ALEX: Okay.
KIM: I was so hoping I could just be like, “Oh, it's this band.” That would have been so cool.
ALEX: That would be cool. I wish that you could have too, 'cause now we're back to the drawing board. But I think—I don't know. I feel like we're on the right track, because it does have a—it does really have a metal vibe to me. Like, the vest feels metal-ly?
KIM: I don't know, man. This is a mys—this is gonna eat at me until the day I die now, I think.
ALEX: Well, if you want to download that picture, uh…
KIM: Oh, I already saved that shit. I'm like, this is, this is my, my new side project.
ALEX: [laughs]
KIM: I gotta send it around to some of the group chats and be like, "Yo, who is this?"
[MUSIC OUT]
ALEX: And so, we’re just like, fuck. Even the metal expert doesn't know who this is.
EMMANUEL: [laughs]
ALEX: But I was talking to Tim Howard, one of the editors of the show.
EMMANUEL: Oh, and Tim probably helped you, ‘cause he knows a ton about music.
ALEX: Yes. And Tim basically was like, “Look, just because Kim Kelly doesn’t know who this is doesn’t mean it’s not someone in like, the metal community. We just need to dramatically expand our search.” And so, me and Gimlet producer Bethel Habte and Tim reached out to like, tons of people. Like, I reached out to Sebastian Bach, who you may not know, but he is the lead singer of Skid Row. And he wrote back and said, “I think this is Alice Cooper's daughter, Calico Cooper.”
EMMANUEL: Oh wow.
ALEX: But we looked at pictures of Calico Cooper, and we were not convinced.
EMMANUEL: [laughs]
ALEX: And Tim reached out to, like, a bunch of record labels and stores, [EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.] including this label called Metal Blade Records, which [EMMANUEL: Okay.] has been around forever. Um, they put out, like Metallica's first release, and the person at Metal Blade was like, “I think that this is an artist named Lizzie Borden."
[MUSIC]
EMMANUEL: Lizzie Borden?
ALEX: And we spent, I would say, an hour looking at pictures of Lizzie Borden, being like, “This could really be him.” Like, they have the same broad nose. They have the same sort of high cheekbones. Like, this really feels like it could be Lizzie Borden.
ALEX: The owner of Metal Blade Records then reached out to Lizzie Borden, who was like, “That's not me. I don’t know who that is.” [laughs]
EMMANUEL: [laughs] Really?
ALEX: Yeah. So, we're banging our fucking heads against the wall.
But then Tim heard back from someone else who thought they had an answer. And he sent Bethel and I a voicemail.
TIM HOWARD: Uh, over the weekend, I got an email from this guy named Charlie, who runs a record store in London called Crypt of the Wizard. And he had taken the picture and posted it on a forum, like an underground metal forum. And they, within an hour, um, tracked it down.
ALEX: And they identified it.
TIM: It is the singer of a band called Murderdolls. They're like a glammy metal band out of LA. And the singer's name is Wednesday 13.
[MUSIC]
EMMANUEL: Wednesday 13.
ALEX: They are very—I don't, I don't want to say silly.
EMMANUEL: Uh-huh.
ALEX: It's like, kind of hard to take super seriously. Like, let me read you, um—let, let me read you the song titles of his 2019 album Necrophaze.
EMMANUEL: [laughs] Necrophaze?
ALEX: Yeah.
EMMANUEL: Dear lord. Okay.
ALEX: All right, here we go. “Necrophaze”. “Bring Your Own Blood”. “Zodiac”, which is about the Zodiac Killer. “Monster”, “Decompose”, “Be Warned”, “The Hearse”, “Tie Me a Noose”, “Life Will Kill Us All”, “Bury the Hatchet”. Like, all of it—like, it's like, all the songs are like, “You’re gonna die in a terrible way. Here's some heavy metal, and I'm gonna kill somebody.” Like, it’s way more on the Venom side of heavy metal than it is on like, the anti-Christian church burner side.
EMMANUEL: It's a, it’s a bit. It's not necessarily a full-on like, [ALEX: Right.] “Yes, I love the devil” kind of music.
ALEX: Yes. And if you Google Wednesday 13 and Ozzfest 2010…
EMMANUEL: Oh, whoa. That's the photo?
ALEX: Yeah.
EMMANUEL: That's the person.
ALEX: Yeah, that’s the person. And, because this picture is way more hi-res than the one that was on Marian’s car stereo, there were all of these little details that I didn’t notice before, like, uh, the spit.
EMMANUEL: Eww, that’s such a long luger.
ALEX: [laughs] It is super gross.
EMMANUEL: There’s like, a—there’s like, a bulge in the middle, too. [laughs]
ALEX: Uch. God, now you're grossing me out.
EMMANUEL: Okay.
ALEX: So, I mean, at this point, I was stoked. Like, I had a name, Wednesday 13. And I was like, I wonder if any of the people that I talked to for this story might be able to help me figure out why this is happening now. So I went back to Russell, who works at Pocket Casts, which is the, uh, podcast app that Marian uses. And I go to him, and I’m like, “Hey, look, we’re having this issue.”
EMMANUEL: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: We’ve spent ages and ages trying to figure out who this person is.
ALEX: The picture is from Ozzfest 2010. And if you—
RUSSELL: Is it ‘Aus’ as in Australia?
ALEX: No, Ozzfest as in Ozzy Osbourne.
RUSSELL: Ah, of course, yeah.
ALEX: Yeah. And the artist is someone named Wednesday 13.
RUSSELL: Mmkay. I now have a theory about how that podcast art gets there. So one of our users, our beta users reached out…[fades out]
[MUSIC]
ALEX: So I talked to Russell for a while and we figured out what was causing the demon in Marian's car, and not long after that Gracenote got back in touch with me and completely confirmed my findings.
So I’m like, super excited, and I got in touch with Marian with producer Bethel Habte to tell her the answer.
BETHEL HABTE: I know it's not a “Happy Ash Wednesday,” but like “dust to dust,” just want to see you.
MARIAN: Well, dust to dust…
ALEX: Uh, we happened to talk to Marian on Ash Wednesday, and so she had like, an ash cross on her forehead.
BETHEL: Absolutely. This seems actually completely liturgically appropriate.
MARIAN: Yeah. [laughing] Excellent. Excellent.
ALEX: And this has been another episode of Catholic Bros.
BETHEL, MARIAN: [laughing]
ALEX: All right, Marian. Uh, buckle up.
MARIAN: I'm ready.
ALEX: So, I told her about the whole journey, about the metal stuff, about the potentially black metal stuff.
ALEX: Your demon is actually an artist who goes by the name Wednesday 13.
MARIAN: No! [laughs] Okay?
ALEX: He, uh…
ALEX: I reassured her that her demon is just a guy doing theatrical metal stuff.
ALEX: It may—it may read as menacing to you—
MARIAN: Yeah!
ALEX: … but I—as a, as a metal fan, that does not read as menacing to me.
MARIAN: I, I appreciate you making that judgment because, yeah, I mean, heavy metal—demon obviously doesn't relate to me. Heavy metal is maybe, uh, five percent more relatable to me than a demon [laughs] in my car, but, um…
ALEX: And I explained to her that when I told Russell about Wednesday 13, like, the moment he heard the name Wednesday 13, he was like, “I know why this demon is showing up in her car.”
ALEX: A Pocket Cast user got in touch with Russell and was like, “Hey, you know, I've been looking at the data that you keep in the files, and I noticed that in, like, the artist field in the file, you guys always put the name of the podcast. But, um, I already know what the podcast is, because I'm the one who's putting it on. So, like, I don't need to see who the artist is in the artist name. You could use that field for anything else like, say, the day of the week.”
MARIAN: Wow.
ALEX: So, he started using the artist section of the files to automatically put the day of the week that that this—that the episode came out. And—
MARIAN: [laughs] Oh my God.
ALEX: … and Gracenote, trying to figure out what was going on with episodes that came out on Wednesday, started spitting out Wednesday 13's photo.
MARIAN: Stop. [ALEX laughs] Wow. Wow. Wow.
EMMANUEL: All of this was because poor Russell over at Pocket Cast took like, some extremely nerdy Pocket Cast fan’s email too seriously [ALEX laughs] and tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and thus created a whole new problem.
ALEX: It's like a butterfly flapped its wings and a demon appeared on Marian's car. [laughing] It's like this weird chain of cause and effect that created this insane thing that happened on this poor religious teacher's car stereo.
MARIAN: This is beyond my wildest dreams, literally. [ALEX laughs] I- I never thought that there would be a story wrap-up like this. That's pretty amazing.
ALEX: I'm glad. I'm, I’m glad that we could provide this closure for you on, on this very, very religious day. [MARIAN: Yes.] Uh—
MARIAN: Same. Well, you know what’s funny, is another thing that, um, is said liturgically around Lent especially, “Memento Mori,” which means, “Remember that you will die,” which is pretty heavy metal, if you think about it.
ALEX: That’s super heavy metal, and I will say, hold on just a minute.
MARIAN: Does he have a song called “Ashes to Ashes”?
[MUSIC]
ALEX: It's called “Life Will Kill Us All”, which is a very memento mori kind of—
MARIAN: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Yeah, maybe I should play that in the car today.
[MUSIC]
ALEX: Mm… [MARIAN laughs] I mean, that's up to you, but I don't know if it's exactly your vibe.
MARIAN: [laughs]
[MUSIC]
ALEX: If you update your radio software, you can probably get rid of the demon if you want to.
MARIAN: Okay. Maybe I'll reset my software one day when there's a small child in the car, but I don't—I don't know. I don't feel totally compelled at this moment to do that.
Reply All is hosted by Emmanuel Dzotsi and me, Alex Goldman. This episode was produced by Jessica Yung, Anna Foley, and Bethel Habte. It was edited by Damiano Marchetti, with additional help from Tim Howard. This also happens to be Jessica Yung’s last story as a producer. Jessica has been on the show for four years, and in that time she has worked on and informed some of my favorite stories that Reply All has ever made. Her telling me not to freak out when I was about to go into a head shop in Episode #151 is maybe one of my favorite moments in Reply All history. I’m going to miss her a lot, and the rest of the team is, too. Thank you so much, Jessica. The rest of the Reply All production team is Phia Bennin, Lisa Wang, Sanya Dosani, and Kim Nederveen Peterse. Our intern is Sam Gebauer. The executive producer of Reply All is Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Kwan with fact checking by Isabel Cristo. Music and sound design by Luke Williams. Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks this week to Carey Jones, Tyler Cordaro, Jonathan Selzer, Charlie Wizard, Albert Mudrian, and all the metalheads that helped us identify Wednesday 13. Thanks so much for listening!