When Dry January’s Too Much, There’s Damp January

There’s Dry January, the annual month-long sobriety challenge that just kicked off, along with its spinoff cousins Sober October and No Booze November. There’s California Sober, a phrase that connotes being alcohol-free while still partaking in other substances.

Add to the list of buzzy nomenclature: Damp January. That’s the idea of cutting way back on drinking for the month, and also the title of the new podcast by Luke Burbank, the host of public radio variety show Live Wire Radio.

Damp January launched Jan. 1 and is distributed by PRX, which also puts out Live Wire. It’s a limited-series podcast with a new episode dropping every Wednesday in January.

In the premiere episode, Burbank interviews his mother, Susie Burbank, about her own path to sobriety. He contemplates his own complicated history of drinking, dating back to his days as a public radio reporter by day, dive-bar regular at the Tattle Tale Room in Culver City, Calif., by night. That duality made him feel like he could have it all, but his drinking and gambling stayed put way beyond the point that it had “stopped being charming,” he says in the episode.

Today, Burbank has cut way down on drinking, but not all the way to zero. (Damp, not dry.)

“If this was a sobriety podcast, I feel like I would be telling you that with taking alcohol out of most my life I have, like, reconnected with some kind of rich vibrancy of the universe and that foods taste better and the air is more oxygenated or something,” he says. “But, really, it’s not that. It’s just instead of drinking, I often just lay on my couch looking at TikTok.”

From that searingly honest starting point, Burbank will interview guests such as author Gary Shtyengart, podcaster Nora McInerny (Terrible, Thanks for Asking), comedian Moshe Kasher and journalist and hangover cure-seeker Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall.

HEAR IT: Damp January is available now for free across all major podcast platforms and at livewireradio.org/dampjanuary.