I feel like everyone has that one liner in their back pocket, the one interesting fact about themselves that gets you over the awkward introductions at the beginning of a new class, or meeting a new person. Here’s mine: “Hi, I’m Jessica, and my first job was at a radio station.”
It was actually a pair of radio stations in Bridgeport, CT, where I grew up. I’d taken a course at a broadcasting school over the summer, and was hired right after, during my senior year of high school. I was a radio nerd, through and through. I think I had to be to work in the business. For someone starting out, the hours were bad and the pay was low, but I loved it. I spent my nights and weekends at the board, reading the weather or the lotto numbers at the top of the hour, exploring the CD collection and hanging with my much-older coworkers. One of them introduced me to The JAM Song.
JAM Creative Productions is a jingle production company in Dallas, TX. Their jingles have been dominant in the radio business for over 40 years, and are played on radio and TV stations all around the world. In 1985, JAM created a song that was made up entirely of their jingles, “a promotional item never intended for airplay.” I can only imagine what it must have been like to receive this record and play it for the first time.  It is totally unexpected. And exuberant. And strange. And completely over the top. It just sounds like the eighties to me.
This is a song that rightfully should not be as catchy as it is. It’s mostly just radio station call letters sung in a row. But the music is bright and inviting, with big eighties horns and lively vocals that just sell the heck out of it. It’s a promotional song but it’s also a love letter to radio itself, written by the professionals for the professionals who played the jingles day in and day out. It starts, “There’s a friend I know called radio and it means a lot to me.” Radio is not a thing that you put on for background noise. It’s a person, a feeling, a connection to the larger community. As the song says, it’s “company.” I was taught to never think about all of the thousands of people who could be listening when I spoke on the air. Instead, I was supposed to picture just one person and talk to them.
As the song goes on and more and more stations are rattled off, my respect for the writers and performers grows. The sheer devotion and ingenuity to make this work as a complete project is astounding. There are even a few in-jokes about how radio station names are so similar: “Z-98, Z-93, Z-95.5, 92-Q, Q-92, ZZ-99.” There are also shout-outs to some of the biggest DJs of the eighties: “Rick Dees, Scott Shannon, Dan Ingram, and Casey’s [Kasem] Coast to Coast!”  To top it off, there’s even a strange bit that imagines a radio station named Zorp Furble, complete with its own alien language. It’s so bizarre that it works.
I think one of the reasons I love this song so much is because I can tell it’s a passion project. It clearly took a long time to write, and the intro says that it took three weeks to record. The devotion to making sure that all of the calls are sung by their original singers, that different jingle packages are merged into one song, that it was just for fun but also totally not a throw-away song, is extraordinary. I remember another radio type like me writing years later about The JAM Song, and to paraphrase, the comment said, “It’s impossible to be in a bad mood when you’re listening to this song.”
I was a kid in the eighties, and my experiences were a lot closer to the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” than the upbeat optimism of this song. I remember job loss, health problems, and a lot of quiet stress on the faces of the grownups around me. The city I lived in looked very different than the places I saw on TV sitcoms and news reports. But I remember that the radio was always on, either in my dad’s old green Duster, or the paint-splattered transistor in the kitchen, or the stereo in the dark wooden hutch. I loved not only the music, but the people talking about the music, or the weather, or the news. Public speaking was kind of my jam as a kid, and I knew that I’d probably be good at doing it for a larger audience. Through my early teens, I started calling the DJs I idolized, befriending them, getting valuable advice and mentorship. That finally led to me stepping up to the mic.
This tournament features so many great songs of the eighties. We live in an age now when any of them are available at our fingertips at any moment. The times of waiting by your radio in the vain hope that your favorite song might come on are over. You never have to listen to a commercial, or a promo, or a DJ if you want. But I think that maybe something’s lost when we listen this way. To me, it can feel sterile and cold. It’s too much in my own head, my own world. I want a human voice talking to me through the speakers, too. I want to know what’s going on in my own community. I want a place to gather, even if it’s just around a set of call letters. In a time when more and more local radio stations are disappearing, it feels more precious than ever.
So as you’re listening to this year’s songs, take a moment to listen to The JAM Song too, and imagine the experience of those who were listening to them for the first time, with these glorious jingles in between. “The sound of JAM is everywhere you go…”

Jessica Forcier’s writing has appeared in Air: Essays on Radio - An Anthology from Hippocampus Books, Hobart, New Delta Review, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She’s a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut.