If you’ve ever found yourself tuning into BFF.fm on a Friday night, one feeling comes through immediately: warmth. Cohosts Gothic Prince Aaron and Brother Jill bounce off each other with the recognisable ease of a friendship that stretches back to their teenage years. You can feel the easy rhythm, and it’s genuinely such a comforting delight to fall into at the end of a long week.

What’s especially striking about Die Alone Radio is how it has become such a reliably heartwarming listen, because of its ever-expanding ‘community within a community.’ Over the course of the show’s three-year run, the duo has invited an impressive array of guests, from DJs to friends from the BFF.fm community, each with their own musical tastes. Somewhere between the chaos, there is a kind of effortless charm behind every laugh, joke, or rant, which has turned the show into a genuine pick-me-up every time. It really is about the atmosphere built on the show, with all the different themes from each week.

With Aaron becoming an official BFF.fm DJ as of May, we sat down with him and Brother Jill to talk about the radio show and what it takes to foster such a delightfully organic circle of friends and music enthusiasts!

You can tune into Die Alone Radio every Friday 12:00 PM!

Q: How did the show start, and when did you start collaborating together?

Brother Jill: “We have a mutual friend, Katie. She has a show called Maniac Mansion. It was on at 8 PM, and she’s DJ Fun Size. She actually started her show a week before mine. She told me about her show, and I was like, I want to do that too. And without really even properly researching it or anything, I just signed up and fell in love with it. I met Amanda, I met Jeremy Wheat, and I fell in love with everyone. Steve Foxx, everyone was so great!”

Brother Jill: “So this is like three years ago, maybe October 2022. I did it on my own for a long time, and I started having guests. I found that those were the best shows, in my mind. I can talk for a really long time, right, but it’s more fun to have your friend with you. Aaron just became a really frequent guest from there. Then we had the idea to creatively collaborate, and we have a long history of doing that.”

Aaron: “Yeah, Jill and I have been friends since we were like 15, so throughout the years we’ve always done various collaborations. Usually, it’s been zines and art shows. There was the Lobot Gallery show, this huge warehouse space in West Oakland in the early 2000s, where they would do art showcases and these big concerts.”

Brother Jill: “The most epic show I managed to catch with them was one where they had Animal Collective, Lightning Bolt, and Black Dice. For our show, we had around 100 artists. Tabitha Soren actually showed some of her photography there, and Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu was there the night of the art show opening too.”

Q: Were you always drawn to radio, or did that start with BFF.fm?

Aaron: “I mean, music, yeah. I’ve always been a big music nerd, but I never really had any ambitions or thoughts of doing this. Then Jill did it, and like she said, I started as guest appearances, and it just evolved. Since May, I am now officially a BFF.fm DJ.”

Aaron: “I’d been on Die Alone plenty of times and I was roommates with Brother Porter (of Them(e) Changes), so in addition to Jill, so I was already kind of pre-vetted, which I think is why I was able to skip a more formal application process.”

Aaron: “As far as me officially coming on, since I’d already been doing it a lot, I came to one of the town halls and met Amanda, and then it was like a done deal.”

Brother Jill: “It was organic. We did well on the show together. We’re good collaborators, we understand how each other works, and we understand how to allow each other space to be each other. What’s also been cool about Aaron joining forces with me is that he’s building out a universe of his guests. I feel like we’re creating a Die Alone collective. It was not the vision I had, but it’s the vision I’m happiest with. I didn’t think it would be such a community.”

Q: How does the social media aspect work, like Instagram and Discord?

Aaron: “Doing a weekly radio show that is two hours is actually a huge undertaking, because Jill is also really great at show promotion and posting things with social media, building specific show announcements, creating those in Canva and stuff. That takes a lot of time, and coming up with set lists and making sure things are unique and interesting each show is a lot. Having more than one person collaborate keeps the variety going and helps prevent burnout. If Jill needs to take a couple weeks off, I can come in and have my friends on, or vice versa, just to keep episodes rolling forward.”

Brother Jill: “With the Instagram, it’s so funny, because I feel like I should be doing 15,000 times more than I do. I feel like I should have put a lot more thought into the social media aspect of it, but for what I have bandwidth for and what we’ve done, I am proud of our output. When I started here, I was actually co owner of a barbershop a couple blocks away from here, so I already knew that if I wanted my show to grow and also to be cataloged, Instagram made sense. It’s funny because it’s not always accurate, there are some mystery episodes here and there, but we do the best we can.”

Brother Jill: “The idea was to have it totally cataloged on Instagram, and then it turned into this thing where I enjoyed thinking of the themes. In my mind, part of the process is thinking of the episode covers and creating a story around an experience, a feeling, a substance, a place, a memory, what that sounds like, and what that looks like. I love making the covers for episodes.”

Brother Jill: “Also the Discord is something that I definitely want to build out. Life has been so crazy for me the last couple of years that I am just grateful that I maintained the process and that I’ve grown the community and the practice. But yeah, 2026, we’re going to have a fire Discord server too!”

Q: How did you come up with the themes for the show?

Brother Jill: “For the first couple years, I was really like, oh my God, what’s the theme, what’s the brand. I have a background working in tech, so I’m used to hyper optimization and being on brand and on message. For a long time I was like, I know I’m a themed show, but what’s the overarching theme. What I found was brick by brick, just showing up authentically and not having a brand focus allowed me to step back and be like, oh, my theme is just chaos.”

Brother Jill: “I’m a chaotic person. I truly believe, above being a Scorpio, above being TJ, it’s like the Dungeons and Dragons personality thing. I’m chaotic good. My show is going to be chaotic. It’s not always going to be on brand. It’s not always going to be on message. We’re going to do bonkers episodes. We’re going to do depressing episodes. We’re going to do boring episodes sometimes. It’s been freeing to treat this as an authentic expression of who I am without worrying about how it comes off."

Aaron: “Also, a lot of the ideas honestly come from everywhere. Jill has a friend who has kids, and one of her kids was like, you should do a show with the theme of walking. So we’re pretty receptive and open to whatever people suggest to us. Ideas don’t just come from sitting down and planning them, they come from conversations, from things we watch, from stuff happening in our lives.”

“It could be like, oh, I just watched something on the Criterion Channel, and that made me think of this. That’s basically where the soundtrack show came from. Criterion reissued these Greg Araki movies, and his soundtracks are insane. I was rewatching the remastered films on the Criterion Blu-ray and I was like, oh, we should do a show on soundtracks. So a lot of it is just noticing something, getting excited about it, and then being like, yeah, let’s follow that.”

Q: If you were thinking super experimental, what kind of episode would you want to try out?

Aaron: “I really like reading and books, and outside of music that’s a big thing for me. I have a bachelor’s in English literature and an MFA in creative writing, so literature has always been really important to me. Poetry, especially, feels like a form of music. I really like Sylvia Plath, and there are recordings of her reading her poetry. I’ve wanted to do a show where I could integrate Plath reading one of her poems into the episode.”

“There are also a lot of poets who have recordings of themselves reading their work, so I feel like you could do an entire show structured around that. I don’t know that I would necessarily interweave songs the whole time, but a lot of people I like do spoken word. Lydia Lunch does a lot of spoken word, for example. When I sit down and think about it, it becomes a question of flow. How does it all work together?”

“There are also artists I really like that we’ve never played on the show, like Loreena McKennitt. One of her songs is literally a poem, ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ set to music. Diamanda Galás has done similar things with Baudelaire. So that could be another angle too, people reading poetry, musicians adapting poems into songs, and then spoken word. It’s something I’d really like to explore.”

Q: Has hosting the show changed the way you approach music?

Brother Jill: “It really always has been about storytelling for me. Music has been a huge part of my life, I’m full blown music nerd like everybody else, but this show, for me, the music was always incidental to the story I was telling. That’s why there’s such a wide genre of songs and eras that I cut across. It’s not about producing some perfectly packaged piece of music. I’m trying to tell a story through all these different songs.”

Aaron: “Yeah exactly, that’s why I like pulling in as many guests as possible. Personally, I have the same handful of bands that I’ve liked for a long time now, and I don’t know if music is less interesting now, but I’m finding it harder to find newer artists I’m as excited about as my core favorites. I could do the show and just play the same stuff over and over again, but even for me that would get redundant and boring.”

Aaron: “That’s why I bring in friends like DJ Hag, and our other mutual friend DJ Sad Champagne. She has great musical knowledge about stuff I have no idea about. I brought her on to do an Italo Disco night because that was a genre I knew very little about. I’m always on the lookout for that because I don’t want it to just be me playing Diamanda Galas, Coil, Throbbing Gristle, and Soap&Skin every Friday!”

Brother Jill: “Yeah and that’s the part of coming into BFF, enjoying and actually being a part of community at the station, and then growing our own little community with the show has been amazing. I think it really proves the power of community radio, of really making those connections, because everybody knows somebody.”

Q: Before we go, is there anyone you would like to shout out from the station?

Brother Jill: “Yeah, of course we have our ride or die, DJ Fun Size from Maniac Mansion. Without Katie, I would have never had this show. I mean, without a lot of people I wouldn’t have the show, but Katie really ushered me in. She brought me here.”

“And then Irving, DJ swirving from Audiosyncrasies, he’s like a brother to me, he’s shown up in my personal life, and I feel very close to him. This is where my memory is going to get bad, but Sweet Tea, WTFIFL, Wake the F Up! are all great. I love Steve Foxx so much. He built and did all our bumpers. He’s the best. If I ever feel a lack of motivation or drive, all I have to do is talk to him for like two minutes and he gets me so pumped on everything. He’s so encouraging, along with Peter Lorde, Amanda and TJ.”

Aaron: “Definitely Brother Porter, we have had him pop into the show at times because we were roommates for about five years. He moved in during COVID, and then he moved out recently.”

“And even though I’ve never met him, Owen from The Hanging Garden Radio Show, because he does the goth show. That’s my wheelhouse. There’s overlap, too, because DJ Xander has been on his show. We also follow each other on Instagram.”