The Worm with Tom and Matt Lowell by Helen Crimmins
Q: America wants to know, which one of you is the head and which one is the butt of the worm?
Matt: I think I’m the butt because I’m nicer.
Tom: Wow, that is nice. I’m the face of this operation.
Q: How long have you guys been with WMPG?
Matt: We’ve been here for five years. It was just before the pandemic, and then we went remote for the pandemic.
Tom: Yes, I moved here five years ago and we started pretty shortly afterwards.
Q: Why did you want to get involved with WMPG?
Matt: We have both been doing radio for over a decade now.
Tom: Close to two decades. We both go into it in college—we’re four years apart.
Matt: It was 2008 that you joined WPCR in Plymouth. I joined WUNH a couple of years later.
Tom: But you joined WPCR because we wanted to get all of our friends on the exec board so we could all go on a trip together to Virginia.
Matt: Yeah, to do a college radio convention. It ruled.
Tom: I was the treasurer and I don’t think I did a single treasurer duty.
Matt: I was news director and I did do that.
Q: How did you get involved with WMPG?
Matt: We asked nicely, I think.
Tom: Yeah! We just kind of asked. We messaged them and they told us to come in and we’d get it figured out.
Matt: It was a pretty easy transition since we had both trained at two different radio stations before.
Photo Credit: Helen Crimmins
Q: What’s the best thing about being a part of WMPG and having your own show?
Tom: Spending time with each other.
Matt: That really is the best part of the show—two hours that we get to spend to be brothers together doing the thing that we love, which is music.
Tom: Yeah, that and I don’t have much time to be connected to music anymore. Music is a very important part of my life, and ever since the pandemic plus having a child has made it really hard to get connected and get back into it. This makes me feel connected to music and fills that void in my life.
Q: Do you have a memorable moment from your current show?
Matt: Interviewing Kim Warnick from The Fastbacks, which is an old Seattle punk band. Someone at the station had a connection with her because she lived in Portland, Maine and had offered to reach out to interview. We interviewed her over Zoom and I produced an hour long interview that we ended up airing. The Fastbacks have been doing punk music since the 70’s and they’re some of the earlier women in punk. It was really cool to talk to her.
Q: Any hopes for the future of your show?
Matt: I want to have some live punk bands come on.
Tom: I think that’s both of our main priority and goal for the future, but it’s hard because we’re on at 11 p.m. Bands that are in town are either still at the show they played, so we’d have to squeeze them in from midnight to one. Scheduling is difficult. Or a band has to come here just to do our show. In order to get that kind of reputation, you have to do it a bunch of times.
Q: Are there any WMPG shows that you regularly listen to?
Tom: I love Frothy Cascade’s Diamonds in the Dustbin. I also listened to Autumn’s show today —Gemini Radio. It was all hardcore at 5 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. It was so sick! Hell yes. I imagine that they’re a young person, but they were playing bands that I was listening to in high school like Poison the Well. I cranked it up in the car.
Matt: I really like Dana Morse’s show, Wax Poetic. It hits me on drive time.
Q: Is there anything you’d like your listeners to know about you that we haven’t covered?
Tom: We’re brothers.
Matt: It’s true.
Tom: And we’re worms.
Matt: We are actually worms.
Tom: It’s important that people finally know the truth. We’re wearing human suits.
Matt: Very bad costumes that we made.
Tom: Worms don’t have hands so they don’t turn out great.