Meet Eric Senich

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Eric Senich a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Eric, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Simply from the passion I have for podcasting and rock and roll music. This podcast requires quite a bit of work but it never feels like it. Reading a book about a band or artist or particular topic involving rock and roll is always a pleasure. When it comes to setting up the questions, recording the interview, then editing it all for release, it’s like creating an individual piece of artwork each time.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I was born and raised in Connecticut. I was also born into and raised on radio!

That statement is true in more ways than one. As a kid, I would visit my Dad (Jim Senich) at the radio stations he worked at and felt a connection from the start. He was a DJ, a sportscaster, and a newscaster and I was the son who followed in his Dad’s footsteps…every step of the way. Eventually, I fell in love with rock and roll through my older brothers who had albums on vinyl and cassette from all the great classic rock bands and artists. From AC/DC to The Doors To Lynyrd Skynyrd To Pink Floyd right through to ZZ Top. I loved it all. As a result, I got hooked on FM rock radio. Every day after school I listened to the area rock stations, especially WHCN in Hartford which had a popular local DJ named Lich. He set up the songs he’d play with fascinating information about how the songs were written, recorded, etc. I was hooked. But it would still be some time before I pursued my dream of being a rock and roll DJ. At that time, I was preoccupied with pursuing my first love – sportswriting.

After covering local sports for the town newspaper (The Observer in Southington, CT) in junior high and high school, I majored in journalism at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT before graduating in 1994. That would lead to my first full-time job in journalism. – the sound of record scratching here – But something happened during those college years that would alter the course of my future. After striking up a friendship with a DJ at the area rock station (Ed Sabitino from 99.1 FM WPLR in New Haven, CT), he hooked me up with an appearance on a Sunday night program called “The Amateur Hour”. I got to play the songs I wanted and introduce each for 60 minutes. Talking into a microphone that broadcasts my voice over 50,000 watts of power? Like a deer in the headlights. I’d never been so nervous. But, man, did I love it. It took me hours to come back down from that high and it was a high I chased from that point on.

In the fall of ’91, I went to my college radio station and asked if I could join. Just like that, I was a DJ. There, I was taught how to cue up vinyl records, talk up the songs just before the vocals kick in, the whole shebang. Eventually, after a training period, they gave me my very own show one night a week. When I went home each weekend, I grabbed a different set of records from my older brother’s collection and brought them with me to my dorm so I could play them on the air. I had a book called Rock’s Movers & Shakers published by Billboard in 1991 that I would use for information to introduce the songs. I started putting together a set of cue cards with trivia for each band and artist. Sitting in that radio studio one night a week for a few hours was a feeling I’ll never forget. I’d play a record, sit back, and look out the studio window. The campus at night was so peaceful, lit up by the stars under the night sky. It was like all time stopped. Heaven on Earth.

Eventually, college ended so it was time to move on with my career goals. While applying for jobs with newspapers, I continued to intern at WPLR until I landed a job as the sports editor of a newspaper in Cheshire, CT in 1996. But I didn’t give up on my radio dreams. I kept DJ’ng at my college station each Wednesdday night to sharpen my skills and make audition tapes until I finally got my first paying gig in radio. It was at WCCC in Hartford, CT. I did overnight weekends for 5 dollars an hour! The day before I went on the air, the program director told me I had to come up with an on-air name. During a brainstorming session, I reeled off my favorite movies. One of them was “Fletch”. And so my name on the radio was to be “Fletch”!

I moved from weekend overnights to the 3 to 7 pm shift on Saturdays at WCCC. That lasted about a year before I got a job with another Hartford station (93.7 The Point) doing weekend mornings from 6 to 10 am and commercial production during the week. That lasted from 1997 to 1999, which was when I got my first full-time on-air job. I was hired to do 6 to 10 pm weeknights after producing commercials in the afternoon for a rock station in Fairfield, CT (WRKI FM). I also did the 10 am to 3 pm Saturday shift. From 2000 to 2006 I got to interview famous rockers like Gregg Allman, introduce and meet my favorite bands (Blues Traveler, Collective Soul), and just have an all-around blast!

In 2006, I decided to make a career change. For financial reasons, I had to step down from my job with the radio station and join the 9 to 5 world. Not an easy decision. In fact, it wouldn’t be long before I went back to WRKI to do a Saturday mid-day shift in 2009. It was also during that time that I re-ignited my passion for writing. It started by writing blogs for the radio station website around 2016. I often wrote about my favorite band Van Halen. One day I was contacted by the publisher of the Van Halen News Desk website Jeff Hausman. He read a few of the articles on the web and asked if I’d be interested in writing for his website. I gave it all of a second to think about it before saying “YES”!!! I’ve been writing and uploading content to the VHND site almost daily since around 2017. As for that weekend radio position at WRKI, it lasted right up until around 2019 or so when I discovered podcasts. And so my next adventure began…

One craft I never learned in my radio days was engineering so the idea of launching my very own podcast was pretty daunting. Step by step I somehow got there, though. I bought the mixer and the microphone. I downloaded the editing software and, thanks to Youtube and the internet, figured out what plug goes where, and, before long, I actually had it figured out. I launched my first podcast called DISCovery just for fun. I picked an album, song, or artist and gave all of the interesting stories behind them. It quickly became a success. At one point it was trending on Spotify. I was shocked since it was just a creative release for me. That’s when I made the move to launching a monetized podcast and launched Booked On Rock.

I knew that if I was going to do a legit podcast from a legal aspect, I couldn’t play copyrighted music or content. The challenge was to come up with interesting content without playing music. That’s when books on rock and roll came to mind. What makes a great podcast? Great stories. Who has all of the compelling stories and the skills to tell them without the ability to play the music they write about? That was my eureka moment. Invite authors to be a guest on the podcast! This was the perfect way to entertain music fans while also helping the authors promote the books they worked so hard on. I haven’t looked back since. Today, the Booked On Rock podcast can be heard on all of the major podcasting platforms and can be seen on YouTube with no end to this story in sight. If you love rock and roll music, you’ll love this podcast. If you’re an author who wants to get the word out about your book on rock, you have a platform!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The first is having a love of rock and roll music. Because I’m endlessly fascinated with how it’s created and with the people who create it, it provides a constant and consistent drive to put that passion into a podcast. The second is experience. There is no substitute for experience. If you want to be a podcaster, just do it. Don’t worry about being good at it, that will come as you continue to do it. The third is by watching others do what you want to do, find the ones you think do it best, and use it as your platform. Eventually, you will find your own style with time.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

Making people aware of my podcast. Without a big budget behind me to run ads, book appearances for me to be on, etc., I have to really work hard to build an audience. What I do is utilize social media. Post as much content as possible as often as possible and people eventually want to know more. It’s also important to read up on the latest trends in promoting your brand. There are always new ideas right around the corner.

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Image Credits

Credit: Eric Senich

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