The moth is coming back to London at Union Chapel for our main stage.

Join us on Friday, September 27th for the quintessential moth two-act experience,

featuring a musical act and five unforgettable true stories told live as they're recorded for

episodes of the Moth Radio Hour and the Moth Podcast.

You can buy tickets now at the Moth.org slash London. We'll see you there.

Welcome to the moth podcast. I'm Michelle Jilowski, your host for this episode.

If you've only ever listened to the podcast or radio hour, you might not know that most of our shows feature a live musician.

An instrumentalist opens each act and then stays on stage throughout the show, acting as a sort of timekeeper, letting the

storyteller and the audience know when the teller is over their time limit.

We're all about storytelling here at the moth and music tells its own sort of story.

Our musicians help set the tone for our curated live shows and we've

been lucky to work with some incredible musicians over the years. On this episode, we'll be celebrating

how instrumental instruments are at the moth,

with two stories about learning how to play.

Plus, stick around, we just might be sharing

some music from a live moth show.

First up, we've got Alistair Bain.

He told this at a Denver story slam where the theme of the night was Pride.

Here's Alistair live at the mall.

So like a lot of queer kids in the 80s I ended up on my own pretty young and there were some harsh parts to that but there were some awesome parts like that Wednesday when me and my best friend Candy were in a dive bar in New York seeing 10 local

bands for a dollar.

Thanks to our new fake IDs.

...