About The Show

Ruth Copland relaxing in the studio

Photograph by Dina Scoppettone

It’s A Question of Balance® broadcast live in California, USA, on independent stations KSCO AM 1080 Santa Cruz, KSCO 104.1 FM, KOMY AM 1340 Watsonville, and ZBS Radio.

We invite you to listen to podcasts of the show on this site by clicking on the Guests or Topics options in the menu. There are hundreds of amazing arts guest interviews and thought-provoking topic discussions to choose from!

You can also listen to music from the show by clicking on the Listen menu option.

 

Liam the radio show dog with Ruth

Ruth with Liam, the radio show dog

It’s A Question Of Balance® radio show balances the intellectual with the creative, exploring whether we have more in common than divides us through thought-provoking conversations – out and about with people on the street, and in the studio with inspiring guests from the arts. Balance is not a compromise. Balance is truth distilled from many places creating cohesive understanding.

It’s A Question Of Balance® has a topic hour and an arts hour. The show combines a debate topic with an arts interview because discussion and creativity are two of the most vital ways we engage with the world.

 

For the topic hour, Ruth Copland talks to people on the street about a wide variety of different subjects that affect us all, covering issues with local relevance and global significance. The show avoids politics, delving into the deeper, timeless issues underlying current events, politics and our daily lives.

Ruth comments “I want to bring an approach to commercial talk radio that provides a different way of talking, of opening up discussion that is more fruitful. The purpose of the topic hour of the show is to try to ask questions that make us think. I’m not necessarily trying to find a definitive answer to the issue, I’m trying to start a thought process, a conversation, to walk around a topic and look at it from different angles. In the Out and About feature, where I interview people on the street, I am giving a voice to people, without an agenda. I am not trying to equally weight opinion; I am featuring the thoughts of the people who agree to be interviewed. What I’m hoping is that by listening to others’ thoughts we may find ourselves revolving the topic in our own minds and explore what we feel about it. Maybe even see a new perspective.”

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For the arts hour, Ruth features in-depth conversations with compelling local, national, and international guests from all areas of the arts. Entire civilisations once founded every aspect of their culture upon the Arts, believing that the Arts could effect change upon the individual and society and even upon matter itself – Confuscius believed the Arts possessed tremendous power for good or evil. Whilst this significance today has been diluted, still artists challenge preconceptions, explore feelings and thoughts, stir emotions and take their audience on a journey through the consciousness, hoping variously to entertain, elucidate and inspire.

Ruth says “Art gives us a way of entering into another’s experience of the world. This can be by turns exciting, unsettling, pleasurable and healing. In my interviews I try to go beneath the surface and find out what motivates the guest to make their art; to explore how their life experiences have shaped and inspired their work and what place they see for art in the modern world.”

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