If you listen to enough Howard Stern you know that as much as he loves his SiriusXM channels, more work is the last thing he wants. But the veteran broadcaster has long held a special place in his heart for his sister rock channel, Lithium, so on Wednesday morning (June 12) Stern will help kick off SiriusXM’s new Guest DJ campaign by doing a takeover in which he gets to spin some of his favorite songs and tell a few stories about why they are so special to him.
“Hi everybody, this is Howard Stern and welcome to the Howard Stern Guest DJ,” Stern says in his intro to the stunt. “Over the years I feature a lot of music on the show, I interview a lot of musicians, I just love music. And I also talk about music because I used to professional radio DJ.” In his best announcer voice, Stern then jokes that during his DJ stint he learned the delicate art of “talk-ups,” where a DJ speaks over a song’s instrumental intro until just before the vocals kick in.
Or as Stern described it, “where you talk over really good songs and ruin them.” He notes that on his three-day-a-week Howard 100 show he often plays his favorite songs and talks about why he loves them, which is why he wanted to share his personal home playlist during his Lithium guest spot.
In a perfect example of a song-ruining talk-up, Stern describes how much he thinks about late Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland while playing the band’s 1994 hit “Vasoline,” saying, “what a charismatic dude. We had him on the show a bunch of times and I used to go to Stone Temple Pilot concerts and see him perform and… fabulous band. And I would go and I’d think, ‘geez, he’s got it all. He’s f–kin’ good looking. He can sing like an angel.’” Stern also reveals some background about the lyrics he gleaned from the band’s other members, talking through almost the entire song as longtime co-host Robin Quivers adds some of her patented positive accents to his banter.
In addition to songs by Soundgarden (“Black Hole Sun”), Jimi Hendrix (“Are You Experienced?”), Aurora (“Life on Mars?”) and Public Enemy (“911 Is a Joke”), Stern will also queue up the Rolling Stones’ 1971 Sticky Fingers track “Moonlight Mile,” calling it the “epitome of a great song. This is when music was staggeringly good. How did he come up with this? How does that happen?”
Stern says the only thing he knows about the song is that singer Mick Jagger came up with it while sitting on a train and staring at the moon before going home to write the lyrics. He then goes into one of his patented digressions about being raised with a deficit of emotion that he wore like a “suit of armor” his whole life that has started cracking as he’s gotten older. In theory, that sounds to him like a great idea for a song. But, unlike Jagger’s emotional revelation on his train ride, Stern says, “and then I sat and thought about this and nothing happened! There was no song!”
The special will premiere today at 11 a.m. on Lithium and is available anytime on the SiriusXM app. The Guest DJ campaign will feature more than 70 other entertainers doing take-overs, including: James Corden, Kate Hudson, Kevin Hart, Busy Philipps, Rob Lowe, Conan O’Brien, Andy Cohen, Gayle King, NFL player Maxx Crosby, NASCAR’s Chase Elliot and more. The campaign will be heard on more than 35 SiriusXM channels across a variety of genres.
Listen to Stern on Lithium below.
