Volunteer Profile Elaine Shute

You can hear programmer Elaine Shute when she takes her turn at the helm on On the Wing on Monday's at WERU.  Elaine says she wanted to be a DJ ever since she could remember but was too introverted as a kid to imagine being on the air. Instead she became an art major, envying the kids running the college radio station. She describes subbing for On the Wing and eventually getting her own show as fulfilling a dream.

Elaine chronicles fostering her love of music while growing up in Southern Maine "before it was the cool place it is now." "In those pre-Internet days, in a rural state, you had to work hard to be aware of music that was not on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. I remember being able to pick up a Boston station, WMEX- FM, at night and hearing great rock music that had not yet made it up to Maine."  

Elaine says she developed a lifelong habit of reading voraciously about rock, biking down to the local bookstore to pick up the latest issue of CREEM magazine when she was a teenager and these days grabbing a copy of Mojo magazine, which Elaine considers "the most intelligent writing currently available about rock."

1. Favorite genre of music? We listen happily to nearly every genre in our household, although neither my husband, my teenage son or I have ever developed a taste for country music. Rock of all sorts is definitely the default genre at our house.
2. What was the first LP or CD you bought? Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story on vinyl. Boy, how the mighty have fallen.
3. Where have you traveled?  Favorite destination? I’m a complete Anglophile. I have been to the U.K. three times and someday might just not come back. It’s the music, movies, humor, accents, scenery, everything! I feel utterly at home in Scotland, my favorite place in the entire world.
4. Favorite movie? To Kill a Mockingbird Never has there been a more perfect adaptation of a book to the screen with child actors so thoroughly believable, and a sweetly melancholy score by Elmer Bernstein so beautiful as to make you weep. My perspective on movies is similar to WERU DJ Jay Peterson’s perspective on music: Yes, there are still great films being made, but the best ones all came out prior to 1965.
5. Favorite holiday and why? Halloween. It comes at my favorite time of year, appeals to my love for Gothic drama and doesn’t require buying gifts for anyone!
6. What would people be surprised to know about you? I’m a distance runner. Probably only because of music. When I got my first Walkman (Yes, Walkman!), I discovered I could just about run forever if I had music pumped directly into my head. A little-known fact: It converts to adrenalin once it enters the body. I was ecstatic when the MP3 player came out. I can run even further now.
7. Any special talents? I can read the thought bubbles over my dogs’ heads. I know what they’re thinking at any given moment.
8. Best compliment ever received? When music is so important to you, there’s nothing better than hearing “I love your show." When people say that, I float on air!
9. Who has inspired you? My husband, whose exacting standards in everything he does, which I try to apply in my own life.
10. What makes you laugh? My pug. Or practically any dog. Nature’s noblest and funniest creatures.