Just Between You & Me with Jen Lee and Tim Manley

Just Between You & Me is an artist-conversation show built around the creative partnership of Jen Lee and Tim Manley. Its subject is art-making, but it rarely arrives at that subject by the front door. A rainy morning, a mouthful of food, a tea tray in bed, or a Skype victory can be enough to begin. The show trusts those openings. From there, the conversation wanders into the fragile machinery behind creative work: rest, health, feedback, routine, collapse, momentum, and the strange need to say a hard thing out loud before it can be handled. The pacing is unhurried. The talk often feels as if both speakers are making room for a thought before either one knows exactly what it is. That uncertainty is the point. In one stretch, sourdough breakthroughs, summer sleep schedules, migration offices, tax offices, and finding a place to live all sit beside the uneasy truth that life can be getting better and worse at the same time. In another, a month-long fever and a swollen inbox become a blunt reckoning with the kind of work rhythm that cannot be repeated. The domestic details keep the show from floating away. Video games, summer with children, jean jackets, The Godfather, Al Pacino, Coppola, Phil Collins, old books, and record players give the heavier material somewhere to land. It can be playful. It can also get grave. The episode excerpts include direct discussion of mental illness, terrible days, and thoughts of self-harm, handled with the rawness of someone still inside the feeling rather than safely narrating it afterward. What distinguishes the show is not polish, access, or a tidy creative-method framework. It is the patience to stay with unfinished emotion until a useful distinction appears. Art here is not separated from errands, sleep, illness, family, movies, or the body. It is mixed into all of them. Just Between You & Me suits a listener who wants creative talk that feels lived-in, tender, and occasionally painfully frank. The show offers company for the part of making things that happens before the finished work can explain itself.