Rabbit Rabbit Radio


(Rabbit Rabbit Radio illustration by Mariko Ando.) 

Next Wednesday, February 1st, professional musicians/married couple/doting parents Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi –whose various other projects have been mentioned on Coilhouse many times— are launching a very interesting new multimedia musical subscription service called Rabbit Rabbit Radio.

“Saying ‘rabbit, rabbit’ on the first of the month is a tradition here in New England,” Kihlstedt explains. “It is said to bring good luck and a sense of renewed purpose. We’ve taken it to heart and are releasing a new song on the first [day] of each month along with photos, videos, and other implicating evidences of our creative process, all on rabbitrabbitradio.com


The Kihlstedt/Bossi family: Matthias, Tallulah, and Carla. Photo by Eurydice Galka.

Last year, not long before the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (a legendary band they were members of) closed its doors, Kihlstedt and Bossi moved from Oakland to Cape Cod with their baby girl Tallulah. “Our lives have changed a lot since [she] was born and since we moved back East.” Kihlstedt and Bossi predict that their Rabbit Rabbit Radio project will help them to accomplish many things, warmly and comfortably, in ways that more traditionally grueling channels (constant low-budget touring is exhausting enough without kids!) could not:

“It keeps us in touch with you [our audience]. It conveys each song with much more depth and dimension than a simple iTunes download would. It holds us to an ongoing commitment to our own creativity. It allows us to be creatively independent from home, which in turn allows us to be good parents. In short, everyone wins. We have finally created our very own dream job.”

Fans who subscribe to Rabbit Rabbit Radio can choose to pay $1, $2, or $3 per month (but there’s no difference in content access; it’s just a chance to pay them a bit more for their efforts, if you can afford to). You can learn more –and get a taste of the quirky, sweet whimsy this lovely duo creates together– from the following YouTube pitch video:

RRR has its own Twitter account and a Facebook page as well.

Rabbit Rabbit Radio is a fascinating-yet-simple premise that feels very new, and fresh, and… cozy! Kihlstedt and Bossi both hope this kind of project takes off: “there are lots of artists whom we would gladly subscribe to ourselves!”  While there may very well be other musicians out there attempting similar transmedia subscription services (and please feel free to give them a shout-out in comments, because we’d love to know more about them, too) it’s certainly not status quo quite yet. Fingers crossed that it soon will be.

The modern quest for reasonable and sustainable alternatives to a more staid career path in the arts is always worth discussing on Coilhouse. We live in interesting- no, scratch that, fascinating times. It might feel daunting to watch the old regimes fall down around our ears, but there’s no doubt about it: we are lucky to be alive during a time period where there’s so much opportunity to build newer, better, kinder infrastructures. Let’s stay tuned in!

5 Responses to “Rabbit Rabbit Radio”

  1. Ben Morris Says:

    This sounds like a wonderful idea and more music and other creative works from Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi is always a good thing.

  2. Angela Says:

    They’re not explicitly musicians (though one is Suzuki-trained), but my friends Marc & Fausto at the Feast of Fun podcast recently switched to a partly free/partly subscription model, since just taking donations and selling t-shirts wasn’t covering the costs of bandwidth and site maintenance. They don’t have a great number of subscribers yet, but the hope is it will succeed the way the subscription model at the Mysterious Universe podcast has.

    Links to those:
    Feast of Fun (LGBT news/entertainment): http://feastoffun.com/
    Mysterious Universe (paranormal geekery): http://mysteriousuniverse.org/

  3. Carla Kihlstedt Says:

    Meredith,
    Thank you so much for your post about Rabbit Rabbit Radio! I would love to know about other people who are doing a similar thing, so i’ll stay tuned to the comments here.

    RRR is a grand experiment for us. The learning curve has been steep, but it feels like the most personal and multi-faceted way i’ve ever found to convey our music (not including playing it live, of course!). We’re excited to not only use RRR to point people to our own work, but to point them to the people that we’ve been inspired by. In a funny way, generosity and community is what the internet fosters best!

    -Carla.

  4. M.S. Patterson Says:

    I love them both, and have been waiting oh-so-patiently for this to get rolling. Glad to see it getting some airtime on the Haus.

  5. Rya Says:

    Absolutely fantastic. I look forward to march 1st already and February has barely begun!
    Xxx