A local musician from the Lehigh Valley, Seth has appeared on television and won awards for his performing and songwriting. He was a headliner at Valley House Media’s 2019 music festival Valley Fest, which was held just before I joined the team, so I never had the pleasure of meeting the up-and-coming artist. I was excited to meet him and see what the talk was all about.
A local musician from the Lehigh Valley, Seth has appeared on television and won awards for his performing and songwriting. He was a headliner at Valley House Media’s 2019 music festival Valley Fest, which was held just before I joined the team, so I never had the pleasure of meeting the up-and-coming artist. I was excited to meet him and see what the talk was all about.
It was a warm, picturesque June day, but this June was unlike any the city of Bethlehem had seen before.
My team and I arrived at the location of our interview -- Ripper’s Pub, a place I had been to many a night in those blissful, rose-tinged days before the pandemic. Now, Ripper’s looked quite a bit different; the entire bar was empty, with chairs stacked on tables to drive their uselessness home. The only area with a population was behind the bar, where a limited staff of servers worked to make brightly colored alcoholic slushies for a sparse quantity of guests. I made a mental note to pick one up after the interview was in the can.
Our interviewees were Tyler Rothrock and George Wacker, hosts of Lehigh Valley With Love, the most popular podcast in the aforementioned Valley. We shot the interview at a table outside the Pub -- the only seating available -- and if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought we were interviewing any two guests at the bar that day. Tyler and George blended right in, Tyler with his Bethlehem Steel graphic tee and George with his dad hat and custom Lehigh Valley With Love polo. But listen in on the conversation and you would quickly realize that these were not two run-of-the-mill Bethlehemians.
As professional conversation-havers, they were in their element doing an interview. When we would cut to change the batteries in our cameras, the discussion wouldn’t stop -- Tyler and George continued to share their thoughts on subjects like anxiety, motivation, and the role of entertainment during the Covid crisis. This interview also took a much more conversational route than any of our other interviews, with Tyler and George even looking to hear our perspectives on these subjects while the camera wasn’t rolling. It may have been a gut instinct from the interviewers in them, but we appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.
Not only were they remarkably cordial and great to talk to, but they showed a real interest in helping us younger guys find our footing in the food chain of media. Although Tyler had another event he had to run to, George stuck around for almost an hour after the interview wrapped to give us advice on how to move up in the industry. (His secret? Just keep doing things until you find what sticks.) It wasn’t Ripper’s as I remembered it, but George and Tyler helped make a Tuesday afternoon at the bar a memorable experience in spite of all the madness.
And yes, the pandemic slushie was fantastic.
-John Wrigley
Head Content Writer, Valley House Media
