My Encounter with “GOB”
Before he was composing music for millions of children on Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go!, Steve Sandberg was chasing something else entirely—the sound of Afro-Caribbean rhythms that pulled him out of the academic world Yale had built for him and into the streets of New York.
He stood on stage with Celia Cruz. Toured with David Byrne. He built a life as a working artist in a city that doesn’t make it easy.
But this conversation isn’t really about that. It’s about a term Steve coined for himself in recovery—GOB. Not what you’re thinking. It stands for something smaller, and at the same time, something bigger: Get Out of Bed. The actual, daily discipline behind a life that had to be rebuilt more than once.
I’ve known Steve since 2003. I’ve seen him lose. I’ve seen him win. In this portrait, we talk about all of it—the music, faith, family, what it meant to grow up gay in America in the late 1950s and 60s, and what drug addiction gave him before it took far more than he expected.
This is a conversation about what actually carries you through the hardest years. Not the version that sounds good. The real one.
Hinweis: Diese Episode behandelt die Themen psychische Gesundheit, Depression, Sucht, Drogenabhängigkeit und Suizid. Einige Passagen können belastend sein. Bitte achte beim Hören gut auf dich.
