How To Connect With An Audience
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guitarist and orchestrator Dillon Kondor knows his way around a stage. It's everything in between the songs that trips him up. Speaking to a crowd, filling the silence, not coming off stiff or defensive, that's where his confidence disappears. After too many gigs derailed by awkward pauses and self-protective sarcasm, Dylan reaches out to Mike for help. On this episode of How To!, Mike brings in the perfect guide: singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten, who knows firsthand what it's like to freeze in front of an audience. Sharon opens up about her own early battles with social anxiety and makes the case that great stage presence has nothing to do with rehearsed jokes or arena-ready charisma. She walks Dylan through how to think about a crowd, not as people to impress, but as friends you're about to grab a drink with, and shares practical strategies for pacing a set list, turning nervous energy into something the audience can feel good about, and letting go of the armor that self-deprecation can become. Then fast-forward to 2026 to check back in with Dylan and find out how those lessons on connection and worthiness actually changed his relationship with performing.
Executive Producer Corey Wara
Edited by Geoff Craig
Booking by Ben Astaire
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Shankar Vedantam, here to tell you about a great mystery. |
| 0:03.9 | That mystery is you. |
| 0:07.1 | As the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain, I explore big questions about what it means to be human. |
| 0:13.8 | Questions like, where do our emotions come from? |
| 0:17.3 | Why do so many of us feel overwhelmed by modern life? |
| 0:23.6 | How can we better understand the people around us? Discover your hidden brain. |
| 0:26.6 | Find us wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:29.6 | I can't keep this up for much longer. |
| 0:36.6 | I'm ready to cross the line |
| 0:40.3 | But how many ways can you say that you're sorry for the things you can't undo? |
| 0:52.3 | This is Condor. It's melodic. It's appealing. It invites you in. I love the horns. It's smooth, without being saccharine. How would you describe it? |
| 1:06.7 | It's kind of coming from like a steely Dan kind of neo-soul inflected place. |
| 1:11.4 | And that voice you heard is also Condor. |
| 1:15.0 | I'm Dylan Condor. I'm a guitar player and orchestrator in New York. |
| 1:19.0 | And 10, 12 years ago, I had a band called Condor where my friends and I got together and played some songs I wrote. |
| 1:24.6 | So what was the high point of Condor? |
| 1:27.0 | When did Condor go from fun indulgence, let's say, to something that stood up on its own? And I mean, Condor the band, not Condor the man. I think it was when I started getting comfortable and feeling like, okay, I can walk on stage. And I never feel like I got singing that together, but I got to a place where I'm like, okay, I can represent my songs and not not be in my head the whole time. I've never been in my head as a guitar player. Getting up there and singing in front of people and talking between songs and stuff was like, oh, I thought I was confident and it turns out I'm not. It was like when I took an improv class and realized, oh, I thought it was funny, but it turns out I'm not funny at all. I'm joking in front of a bunch of people. |
| 2:05.5 | Dylan Condor, the man who makes Condor eponymous, can play guitar like nobody's business. He's a veteran |
| 2:11.4 | of Broadway pit orchestras. The other members of the band, Condor, are great, maybe even near legendary New York studio musicians. |
| 2:20.4 | Dylan's proud of the songs. |
| 2:21.7 | He's proud of the product. |
| 2:23.4 | But there's one thing that's not clicking. |
... |
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