“Dear Young Rocker” Is a New Coming-Of-Age Podcast That Tells the Story of an Awkward—and Secretly Awesome—Teenager
Let’s be honest: Many of the best and most successful people today started out as awkward teenagers. It’s a phase that mostly everyone goes through. iHeartRadio in partnership with Double Elvis Productions and executive produced by "Disgraceland" Host, Jake Brennan, now has a podcast that celebrates those confusing and sometimes difficult feelings of growing up. It’s called “Dear Young Rocker,” and it’s a first-person account from a girl who is dealing with the trials and tribulations of one’s teenage years.
The protagonist’s name is Chelsea, and just like Elsie Fisher in Bo Burnham’s movie, Eighth Grade, she’ll have listeners laughing and crying. She struggles a lot to feel cool enough to exist. And, in “Dear Young Rocker,” she explores serious issues like body image, gender power dynamics and social anxiety—and how these issues are severely magnified during our teenage years. The show also brings us back to the singularly-intense passion of falling in love with a favorite band as only a teenager can, and the freeing feeling of picking up a guitar for the first time.
In addition to this narrative story, each 30-minute episode features a letter from adult Chelsea to her younger self. In these notes, Chelsea lets her younger self know that there are others who feel like weirdos too, and that everything she’s going through is normal. She also takes time to remind her younger self that know matter how much it sucks, being weird can actually be pretty cool. Chelsea’s story is also one about wanting to be seen as just a bass player, and not a female bass player. “Dear Young Rocker” includes stories of learning to play the bass, first band practices, school talent shows, Metallica covers played on the cello and high-school garage band songs that sound a little like Nirvana.
The show’s host is Chelsea Ursin, who lives in Boston and regularly performs with her band “Banana” while volunteering as a mentor and bass teacher for the Girls Rock Camp in Boston. Chelsea started playing the cello and bass guitar at the age of 12 and later joined her first rock band at the age of 15. In college, she studied sound recording technology and later wrote a memoir titled Bass Player for her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College—which later became the basis for “Dear Young Rocker.”
Check out the first episode of “Dear Young Rocker” today with new episodes appearing every Wednesday!
Dear Young Rocker
