How do you listen to music? Are you pro- or anti- shuffle? Do you even have a playlist or do you just click play on all your liked songs? Do you go album by album? Song by song? These questions, since the dawn of streaming, have divided music listeners alike. For the hosts of the radio show Making A Scene, the right way to listen to music is to create your own needle drops.
Chloé and Bonnie know what makes a good soundtrack. Their show—which airs twice a month on n10.as—dives into movie scenes we all know and love. Imagine yourself in a soul-crushing romance while “Bachelorette” by Björk plays or as a femme fatale in a spy movie while Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” blasts through the club. Diegetic or not, they curate their scenes to take you through it all. Needing to know all their lore, I sent them a few questions over Instagram DMs to talk about the show, their playlists, and of course, good music.
Name/age/occupation?
CHLOÉ: Chloé Galarneau/25/barista
BONNIE: Bonnie Iacono, 24, administrative agent at a hospital. So we’re basically both essential workers.
How did you two meet?
CG: Probably during recess at some point.
BI: We went to the same elementary and high school, but only got close in recent years. Time works in mysterious ways…
How was this idea born?
CG: I was going a little crazy last winter and had this radio show idea on the backburner. I had this ongoing playlist of songs I would eventually want to feature in my own movies. One night, while feeling antsy and hyper on the 55 bus (Montreal…), I decided to send Bonnie a risky text because I knew that she had prior radio experience.
BI: I always subconsciously envisioned what some character would be experiencing to the music I was listening to, so I loved the idea. I missed the creative outlet as I previously had my own show independently and later on campus radio. I remember I was leaving the movie theatre after seeing The Iron Claw when I saw her text and I said yes!
CG: She said yes :).
How did you know you’d make good creative partners? Do you operate on a hive mind or are you on two different spectrums?
BI: We make each other laugh a lot, so we figured everything else we did around that would just fall into place. We like movies, we like music; it all felt very natural once we started brainstorming.
CG: Bonnie is also super tapped into new releases and current music scenes, whereas I think I’m more tapped into older stuff, folkier things. There’s a lot of overlap and respect for each other’s tastes but also enough differences that we felt it would be a fun melange, finding the middle part of that venn diagram.
Do you ever have conflicts over making a playlist or a scene? Do you see them in a different way?
CG: Not conflicts necessarily. We sometimes take longer to solidify the playlist but it somehow mystically ends up being an almost 50/50 equal split of songs chosen by me and by Bonnie.
BI: We’re gentle with each other when we don’t fully agree a song works for a particular scene, and usually suggest where it might fit better. I’m not afraid to tell Chloé if I think an artist she selected sounds too much like a Muppet. She also does this thing where she puts “God Is A Woman” by Ariana Grande in every playlist, regardless of the scene, which got old quickly.
CG: I would kiss in the rain to “God Is A Woman”. Or speed on the highway. So…
Is there a structure to the scenes you create?
BI: We like to think of the playlist as 10 separate needle drops in different versions of one archetypal scene. It’s not so much a narrative arc following from song to song, but the scene as we’d see it play out in various hypothetical movies with various hypothetical characters.
CG: We also try to make sure each episode’s scene is different enough from the previous episode. We have a lot of episodes with love-related scenes, because that’s what so many movies and literally life come back to. So we’ll throw in a chase scene between two romantic episodes.
What kind of research goes into them?
CG: We have a shared note in the notes app that’s just a huge point-form list of potential scenes for episodes. We’re constantly adding to it, and because the show airs twice a month, we have enough scene ideas to carry us into 2027. God willing.
BI: We could be watching a movie and once it’s over, before even giving our review, look to each other like, “Okay, we need to do a running-through-the-city chase scene episode.” That happened when we saw Monkey Man, for example. Or listening to a song evokes some scene and I have to pin it down before I forget, which is why I have so many micro-playlists of budding ideas we can refer to when we’re in the early stages of an episode.
If you were making a scene for your life right now what would you call it?
CG: Time is running out scene because I’ve had a lot of deadlines this month.
BI: Birthday party scene because it’s my birthday this month.
What songs would be on it?
CG: “4 Minutes” by Madonna featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland.
BI: Something by 2hollis. He knows how to get me and my girls up and moving, which is important at a birthday party.
When are you most in need of a playlist?
BI: When I wake up, when I go from one room to the next, when I’m on the bus, when I’m on the metro, when I’m walking, when I’m at work. I don’t know if I’m always in need necessarily, but I’ve classically conditioned myself to believe so.
CG: I work at a cafe so playlists are very helpful to not be driven to Travis Bickle-level madness by the Spotify algorithm. No shade to Chappell Roan. But you know.
Could you live with one playlist for the rest of your life?
CG: It would have to be looooooooong AF!
BI: That would be tough. I think too many songs are “the best song ever made,” so I’d feel horrible leaving any out.
How much of the internet influences your scenes? Are you inspired by them or do you try to stay away?
BI: Sometimes something we come across online reminds us of a trope in movies, which I guess plants the seed. It really is mostly just by talking to one another, discussing movies we’ve recently seen, or songs we discovered, or even real things happening in our lives.
CG: It doesn’t really consciously affect our process in any way. We aren’t looking through other people’s playlists or whatever. But the “running through the airport to ask her to stay” episode was inspired by a tweet Bonnie saw.
BI: I guess we’re neither seeking out or actively avoiding inspiration from the Internet but sometimes you do see a good tweet.
What do you think of the internet’s obsession with naming trends and eras?
CG: We couldn’t even name you 5 genres of music to be honest. It’s kinda a linguistic thing too where once you name something you limit it.
BI: We famously don’t know how to describe music other than by saying “it’s good,” let alone how to define it by trend or era. I think we rely a lot, if not entirely, on feeling, as corny as that may sound. I always say I need a movie to give me chills in order for it to be a movie I like. I’m texting friends at least once a day to say a song just gave me full body chills. Trends are fleeting. Chills are timeless.
Who is your dream guest?
BI: Probably electronic music producer Vegyn. Crush aside, his co-hosting gig on Frank Ocean’s show was a reminder that radio is alive and thriving, and the first time I really considered it something I could do if I really wanted to.
CG: My instinct was Charlie Bardey and Natalie Rotter-Laitman, two New York-based comedians who host the podcast Exploration Live. Their podcast genuinely has changed my life a little bit in the past year, because they’re 1) funny af, 2) dear friends who clearly love each other very much and respect each other in a serious, thoughtful way, and 3) legit modern philosophers in my eyes. Lowkey me and Bonnie. JK. But, like, dream double date.
