NPR Music - More songs to calm the nerves

Episode Date: November 3, 2024

In our second installment of blood-slowing songs we take a deep breath and let it out with the music of Max Richter, Hania Rani, Fleet Foxes, Yasmin Williams and more.Featured artists and songs:1. Joan Shelley: "Easy Now," from Over and Even2. Fleet Foxes: "Helplessness Blues," from Helplessness Blues3. Theo Alexander: "re; Waiting," from Animadversions4. Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher: "There Will Be Hope," from Inner Symphonies5. Nicholas Britell: "Eden (Harlem)," from If Beale Street Could Talk6. Max Richter: "Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)," from From Sleep7. Stars of the Lid: "Even If You're Never Awake," from And Their Refinement of the Decline8. Iron & Wine: "Passing Afternoon," from Our Endless Numbered Days9. Yasmin Williams: "Juvenescence," from Urban Driftwood10. Gidon Kremer & Keith Jarrett: "Fratres (for violin and piano)," from Arvo Párt: Tabula Rasa Enjoy the show? Tell a friend and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Question, comments, suggestions and feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

What is calm? Over the next two hours, we will be... We'll be taking a two-hour deep dive into what exactly we mean when we say calm. Oh, my God. Stephen, how are you doing? Are you, you said leading up to this taping that you were going to... You needed this as therapy. Robin, my brain is kind of a toilet fire at the moment.

Have you ever had... Have you ever, has your toilet ever caught fire? Have you ever just had a full toilet that somehow burst into flames? No, honestly, didn't even know that was possible. Oh, Robin. One more thing to worry about. Oh, I keep a fire extinguisher, like right next to my plunger. My brother, when he was a kid, when we were kids, and I'm not making this up, he was afraid,

because this was kind of a thing in the 70s, spontaneous human combustion. Oh, absolutely. And he was so afraid of bursting into flames that he couldn't. He was keeping him up at night, and he went downstairs to my parents and said that he was afraid he was going to burst into flames. And so my dad dug out a fire extinguisher, handed it to him and said, go back to bed. Just keep this fire extinguisher handy. Just in case. Just keep it handy. You can't have too many fire extinguish. Well, I'm sorry, the toilet of your mind or whatever it is, whatever comparison you were making there is on fire.

Yeah, just hyperfixating, doom scrolling. I am a man in need of constant distraction and constantly just kind of there's just like I need to I need to empower the lion tamer in my mind. I think there are a lot of people who identify it with exactly how you are feeling right now. We're taping this. We're a little less than a week away from the election. And regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, everyone's. nerves are frayed, probably a little news fatigue. So hopefully this little journey that we will take everyone on,

we'll maybe bring everyone back down to earth a little bit. Absolutely. I mean, everything is not okay? Is everything not okay? We'll debate that on this edition of all songs, considering because I think things are better than everyone thinks they are. You know, I think anyone who listens to the show can tell that I put a tremendous, tremendous amount of thought and care and planning into every episode.

Oh, absolutely. And I did none of that for this. So I don't even have an outline. I don't even know what we're playing, what or when. So why don't you just pick something? I know when I said we were going to do another episode of songs to calm the nerves, that it would be a very easy lift for you. So you probably have a million things to choose from.

What do you want to start? Yeah. Sometimes songs are not only pretty or calming or comforting, but they actually can provide a mantra, a way to recall the song in your head and have it give you the tools to self-soothe. Right. If that makes sense.

Yeah, totally. And one of the most calming and comforting voices in the world belongs to the magnificent Kentucky singer-songwriter Joan Shelley. Joan Shelley is one of my go-toes. If I'm listening to a lot of Joan Shelley, it's worth maybe doing a wellness check. It's a red flag.

It's a red flag. And like, there's never a wrong time to listen to Joan Shelley. She has a wonderful, magnificent voice. But if I'm listening to a lot, it means that I'm reacting to something. So the song that I want to play that gives me that mantra is from her 2015 album over and even. It's called Easy Now. Yeah, this song is there's shine and bright

You're long. Hang down with the sound and the sand from there. Yeah, this song is there to put some things in perspective. Yeah. We have each other. We, the world is a beautiful place.

There are comforts we can lean on. And, you know, we're not as far apart as we think we are. Yeah. And, you know, there are a lot of, you know, the word blessing is a loaded word. And I just mean it as we have a lot that we can rally around. And I think this song does a really nice job of centering those feelings. Yeah, I agree. And we're going to have, we've got plenty of

stuff here that's just pretty instrumental music that will very easily calm everyone's nerves. But I have some picks that kind of fall into the same sort of category. And so many of the songs that I turn to do exactly what you said. They put everything in perspective for me. And there's the song from Fleet Fox is called Helplessness Blues. Oh yeah. They came out back in 2011. It's the title track from the album Helplessness Blues. And it is just a song, kind of like you with this Joan Shelley cut. It just reminds me of all the things that are most important in life and really matter the most. Yeah. somehow unique like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes unique in each way you can see and now after some thinking I'd say I'd rather a functioning

in some great machinery serving something beyond me but I don't Last night, I was playing this. After dinner, I'm cleaning up and kind of dancing in the kitchen, listening to this song, tears in my eyes. And I hear one of the kids scream, what? Oh, come on. Oh, my God. What? And I said, oh, what, what is it? What is it? What is it? They said, the internet just went out. And I just thought, oh, my God, what a perfect illustration. of losing the thread of what matters most in life. And this, like the Joan Shelley song, you know, this is such a beautiful reminder of, you know what, don't get too hung up on yourself.

And we're better when we work together and for each other to build something bigger than ourselves, right? There's kind of two ways. I mean, there's lots more than two ways. to look at the world. But I think you and I, you and I are wired similarly in a lot of ways. And I sometimes am really drawn to and moved by.

Maybe this speaks to my ego. But I'm often drawn to a move. Songs that just tell you how awesome you are. Well, like songs that are like, you are huge, you are amazing, you are a light in the world. And then there are songs that are like, you are an insignificant speck of nothingness

in a vast and unfeeling universe. That's my jam. And that's your jam. That's Robin Hilton. I think, like, we are dust specks. Like, that's how Robin sees the world. But that you find something soothing in that, right? When you have a clearer idea of what really matters and what a miracle it is that any of us are here at all.

Right. Then you let go of all that other stuff. And then it, to the theme of the show, calms me down. That calms me down. And that's what this song does. But I do think it's a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of, a Rorschach test, right? Because I think there are people who, when they think about the insignificance of our place in the universe, that's depressing. That can, that can trigger some sort of a nihilistic

impulse, like LOL nothing matters. The response to that is not LOL nothing matters. It's just a way of putting things into perspective to not get hung up on every little thing and to not, to not catastrophize momentary inconveniences. Yeah. I feel like that is the very conclusion that Robin Pecknell comes to in this song. He was raised up thinking that he was a special little snowflake and then as he's gotten older, he's come to realize that he wants to be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond himself, right? There's that line. And then the other one that just gets me when I finally just can't hold it in anymore is when he says, you know, he's made it clear like, I don't really know anything. But if there's one thing I do know, is that. is that everything that I see of the world outside is so inconceivable that sometimes, you know, I barely can even speak. That's a beautiful song, man. I feel like I have slept on that. So I know, I've known for years and years that that's one of your favorite songs.

But for whatever reason, it's not part of my day-to-day rotation. And it is freaking gorgeous. What a beautiful song. It really is. And I guess a reminder listening to you now that you're just not. very good at your job. And in spite of that, you're about to ask me to name another song. You were about to call on my expertise in spite of what we all know.

I know. I realized in that moment, I was like, well, now, wait a minute. I'm just going to completely undercut everything that I just said because now I've got to ask him for what else he wants to play. Well, it's interesting. A bunch of the songs that I brought, a bunch of the pieces are instrumental. So the next thing that I want to play is a piano piece. by a guy named Theo Alexander, and it's called re-waiting.

Oh, that is, it's called re, like, re, like, regarding. Yeah, inexplicably, it's a semicolon instead of a colon. Right, that confused. So, honestly, you're so inept when it comes to technology that when you shared that track with me, I thought, Stephen mistyped the metadata, because some of these, the album title for some of these songs you gave me are the best songs of 2015 Disc 1,

which you've clearly renamed, right? So I thought you typed the name in there wrong. No. Okay, Theo Alexander re-cemicolon waiting. Can I tell you what it is about the song that works so well for me? Yeah. It's reassuring. Yeah.

That's the word I would use to describe this. And that was something else that I found in a lot of the music that I reach for is I'm looking for some sort of reassurance, lyrically or sonically. and this song has it. There's a sense of, I don't know how else to put it, but of someone who is down and trying to get up and repeatedly trying to get up and not stopping. But like there's this sense of a lift,

but it's never, it doesn't quite, I guess as we get later in the song that maybe there's more of a rival at something. Yeah, there are insistent patterns in the song that kind of bloom as the song progresses. I agree with you completely, and I'm so glad you used the word reassurance. What is reassuring in this song? If you start to kind of pick apart the patterns of this song in your brain, there's one note,

dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, that stays consistent. As he's forming little flurries of melody around it, to me, what I think of when I hear this song is, I'm imagining like a photo that has the effect where there's a stationary figure at the center of the photo, but around it there's almost like a dance going on. So you have that one note that's played over and over again, and then around it there's movement. But at the center of it, you're still yourself. And I go back to this piece again and again and again, and it is so centering.

because your brain can fix on different components of the song. It's so simple. It's a guy at a piano. But that, dun, dun, dun, dun, that's me. Yeah. And then the world is kind of dancing around me. And it's in a beautiful way. Yeah.

And so it manages to be, as you say reassuring, I would say centering. It's such a gorgeous piece. And it keeps kind of blooming and billowing for the duration of the song. but it always makes me feel better. Well, I actually want to play another pianist. This is Hania, Ronnie. She did this album with the cellist, De Brava, Chalker. They're both from Poland.

They've been friends since they were music students in Gadsk. And this album that they did in 2021 is called Inner Symphonies. It is, I think, just absolutely stunning. And I want to play a cut from it that is called There Will Be Hope. Was that a... Yeah, right. I like There Will Be Hope. because it's obviously an optimistic message,

but also it implies that currently, in the present moment, there is none. There will be. Eventually, you will be able to hope. Hope dies last, Stephen. I think this song only works because of all the tension and release that's constantly going on. It's just this constant cycle of tension and release,

tension and release. I mean, the idea of there will be hope. And to me, this song just, just insists. It's so insistent. It insists there will be hope. It refuses to let go of that idea. Although I have to say what you said just before I played it, kind of rocked my world. Like, well, the very fact that you say there will be a hope means there's no hope right now. I can find the cloud under any silver lining, Robin. You know, Robin, earlier this week, I got a chance to interview Robert Smith from The Cure.

One of rock and roll's great mopes. Right. And I asked him a question, and he was startled by it. And he was so bleak. Robert Smith. And I was like, Robert Smith from The Cure thought I was being a little too dark. Little too bleak. Wow, man, you didn't have to go there.

That's a beautiful piece, by the way. This really is. You know, it's calm and it's beautiful, but it never stops pushing forward. It's the idea of perseverance, I think, persistence, staying strong, and calm. And like the Theo Alexander piece, it has patterns working through it. I think when we talk about calming music, I think there's maybe a temptation to talk about music that is just, that's almost like a vapor, you know, ambient music that is just wallpaper. And none of the pieces that we're talking about here are frictionless. they're giving you patterns to chew on

because if you don't, if music is too quiet, if it's too vaporous, it doesn't give your brain anything to latch on to. And I think part of what makes music calming is that it is, it's giving your brain a little something to do, but not so much that it's overwhelming.

I like how you put that. Did I ever tell you about the time my cat died? Oh, Robin. I'm sorry. Do you want the super tear-jurker version that no one can get through, or do you just want the quick summary of it? I'm going to say, buddy, as somebody with two elder cats, as somebody who learned this week how to give my cat an IV,

this might be a little, it might be a little too raw. I cannot tell you, Robin, how much I love my cats. Yeah, I love this cat, too. He was the coolest, greatest cat in the world, and he got hit by a car one day just before work. And this has been a very long time This has been 20 years ago But he died just before work

I call in work I say I'm going to be a little late I've got to deal with my cat And I get to work At NPR And I get a phone call from the mailroom And they say we've got a package down here Waiting for you

So I go down to the mail room I get the package I open it up I pull it out It's the book Hope Dies Last by Studs Terkel And I thought Wow

What a time to get this book in the mail, I open it up and it is signed by Studs Terkel to me. And it says, to Robin, thinking of you and your time of loss, so sorry to hear about your cat, Studs Terkel. How? How did it happen? So the, because people are amazing. And all the friends that we talked about that we lean on in troubled times, word spread so fast. that my cat had died. And I just told one person, one person at work. But word spread so fast that it made it to a friend of mine

who worked at Nat Geo at the time. And Studs Terkel happened to be there. For his book, Hope dies last, that had just come out. So my friend said, hey, would you sign this for my friend, Robin? His cat just died. Studs Terkel absolutely signs it. My friend uses courier, has it sent over here to NPR. by the time I get in an office, it's sitting there waiting for me.

Incredible. Incredible. People are amazing. Despite what you may think or here, people really are amazing. There is an extraordinary amount of good and kindness in the world. Yeah. Absolutely. I have no idea where that friend is.

I haven't talked to him in 25 years. I cut him out of my life shortly there after. Yeah, that was sort of the last straw. I just, he just didn't get me. Oh, wait. You do have to pick a music. Some music now, though. I do.

I have to follow that up. I have to follow that. I mean, some of the music that we're talking about is very cinematic in nature, even if it's not composed for cinema. Right. Film scores are a really beautiful film score can work so wonderfully for this soothing purpose. And, you know, one of my favorite movies, a movie that I go to for the same thing that we're talking about when we talk about music that calms us is the movie arrival. Oh, God. from 2016, which has this, this, you know, stunning score, you know, a mix of Johann Johansson and Max Richter, who we'll talk about in a moment.

One of my favorite film scores is for the movie If Beale Street Could Talk. The score is by Nicholas Bertel, who also did the theme from Succession. Yeah, he's incredible. Brilliant composer. The central kind of theme piece from If Beel Street Could Talk is called Eden, parentheses, Harlem. I love his work so much. Have you heard Moonlight? The score he did for Moonlight. It's so incredible. Yeah, he works with Barry Jenkins a lot who directed both, If Beale Street Could Talk, on Moonlight. Yeah, I haven't seen this movie. Do you remember what's happening in this scene? You said something about it not matching the...

Yeah, I mean, if Beale Street Could Talk is based on a work by James Baldwin, and, you know, it is about injustice, about racial injustice. But there are also these bucolic moments. It's about a man who's unjustly accused of a crime and how he and his family deal with that. But it's also, Barry Jenkins works with light in such beautiful ways. If you think about moonlight, and it's a very blue movie. The color blue is integral to that film and the original title of moonlight invokes the color blue.

If Beale Street could talk is a wash in gold. And when I hear this piece, I'm imagining the beautiful people who were in this film bathed in gold light. And it's such a stunning marriage of color and music. I'm not synesthetic. I wish I was. This piece makes me feel like I am. I can see gold. This piece to me is so pastoral.

it's like I'm in a field of, well, I was thinking poppies, but now when you talk about all the gold colors, now it's something more autumnal, maybe in the fall, and it's wheat that's ready to harvest, or maybe you're even soaring above the fields in a way. But when you think of like the hook of the song, it's not necessarily a pattern of notes, so much as it is a,

and that's a great way to reset your mind. And that's a theme we come back, to a lot here, right? Is resetting and recalibrating your brain. Yeah. You mentioned Max Richter. Oh, my God. And yeah, he's, so much of his music has ended up in films and in TV shows. And he's someone whose work I love so much. Back in 2015, he did this piece of music called Sleep. Literally changed my life. Yeah, so we'll talk more about that too. Sleep. It's an eight-hour long piece. And as the name suggests, it was designed to not only put you to sleep, but to guide you through your unconscious sleep. And the piece, you know, it's broken up into

different parts. And there have been a number of different releases over the years that have distillation. Yeah, I guess to make it easier to listen to get that single, you know, to have that hit single out of it. So there was an album called From Sleep, which was a select from the piece sleep. This is the single, this is basically like espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, but like Max Richter's equivalent. And it's called Dream, Dream Three, and then in parentheses,

in the midst of my life. I mean, I don't think this track requires a lot of deconstructing. There is a really nice even pulse to it in that piano that is sort of like your heart slowing down maybe. But just so transporting, and you talk about recalibrating your day. But didn't you see like a full live performance of the full eight hours or something like that at South by Southwest back when this came out?

I did. And it's if you stuck a microphone in front of me and just said, what's the best concert experience of your life? I would say the Max Richter Orchestra. An eight hour concert. An eight hour overnight concert in Austin. And they got a mattress sponsor. Of course. And they like laid out something like a hundred and five.

mattresses. And they did tour this. It wasn't just at South by Southwest. But I had made plans with my partner to just like kind of check out this show. I got, I kind of got like tickets to this show. And it was the, it was like the night before the opening night of South by Southwest. And it was like, well, we'll go check this out. We didn't wear pajamas. We didn't, I didn't bring a contact case. I just thought, well, we'll dip in and we'll check it out. And we stayed for all eight hours. Wow. She slept. I did not. I could not. And one of the things that I learned in the process of seeing this concert is that I have severe sleep apnea.

That's not where I thought this was going. And God bless. So they didn't provide CPAP machines there? No, they did not. And I didn't certainly. Kind of an opportunity missed. Well, they didn't miss the opportunity, it turns out, because in the lobby of the theater, they had a. They, you know, there was a mattress sponsor.

And on the table next to the mattress was a CPAP machine. Oh, wow. And so they got like a, I think a community CPAP machine. No, no, it wasn't for use. It was for display. And I got to kind of study it. What does it look like? Because, you know, Katie, my partner had sort of said, like,

eh, your neck swells up like a bullfrog. Oh, God. When you sleep and you stop breathing and it's really creepy and unnerving. And it's keeping me up. Yeah. It's creepy. Yeah, and also I have to sleep with earplugs and sometimes go into the other room. And so because I couldn't sleep, the music was too loud for me to sleep.

I'm basically the princess and the pee under the best of circumstances. So I spent some time in the middle passages of this eight-hour work. There's a lot of, there are a lot of drones, like not drones like in the sky, but droning sounds. And it's a nice time I found to just kind of walk around the lobby and center. myself. And I spent some time studying the machine and kind of like, I could do this. It looks like an alarm clock. I'm not being hooked up to an iron lung. I could sleep next to this. And when I got home, I finally got a sleep study done. And if you are listening to this and you are somebody, maybe your partner has said, your neck swells up like a balloon and your neck swells up like a

bullfrock. And it's, and it's creepy and you could die in your sleep. get a sleep study. The number of people who have said to me, yeah, I should get one of those done. Oh, I hear that I, you know, I don't ever sleep well. For the love of God, from me, your buddy, Stephen, to you, get a sleep study. Treat your sleep apnea. If you suspect you have sleep apnea, you probably have sleep apnea. And it has improved my life and my health in so many different ways. and this Max Richter's sleep record and the experience of seeing that concert not only felt life-changing

from a standpoint of like oh my God, this was so amazing, it changed my life but like it was life-changing in that I changed the way I live. No, I mean, that's literally the definition of life change. Yeah. It changed your life. The way you brought that back to the album

and the music was beautiful, Stephen. Radio professional. It was really just, it was so smooth. Let's talk bedding. Now, did they provide clean sheets for everyone? Yes. Yeah, so it was like, they had a mattress sponsor. The bedding, at least I think had the logo of the mattress on it.

I have never objected so little to sponsorship. When you told me that this was your all-time favorite concert, I thought, because you were unconscious for the whole thing? I was not. You must have been so fried the next day. Like eight hours. You were up all night long? Yeah. And yeah, I took, you know, we got back to our room.

I ended at like 6 o'clock in the morning or whatever. And we went back and slept for a few hours. But this box set ends. You picked Dream 3 in the midst of my life. My favorite song from this record is Dream 8 late and soon, which kind of closes this record. And it is a wake-up song. And if the song kind of builds, it's designed to wake you up.

Well, you were talking earlier about how so much of the music we brought, you know, it has things that your brains can, that our brains can latch on to, right? Yeah. But you did bring something from Stars of the Lid. And I, which to me is the gold standard for ambient music. But it's music that I, I think, works and doesn't sound to whatever, elevator music or whatever you want to call it, you know. It can be fully enveloping music. Yeah. even though it doesn't have, even though it is more of a wash of sound. Yeah, I mean, you said Stars of the Lid is the gold standard of ambient music. They have a record called Stars of the Lid and their refinement of the decline. And kind of, I guess, title-wise, in the spirit of the Max Richter sleep set, there's a piece on that album called Even If You're Never Awake that I go back to again and again.

This piece is over like nine, ten minutes long. There's this moment when the piano comes in that's like five and a half minutes in, which is the way the piano always sounds on their recordings. Like it's way off in the distance somewhere like calling to you. It's in another room. Like things are okay in the other room. Not here. You've got to find a way to get to that other room.

I think despite this, you know, maybe at first blush sounding like just, this improvised wash of sound. There is a rigor in their music. You know, I think this is an album. I think they spent like five years working, crafting the sound of this album, getting it just right. It is not just this, like,

them pressing a key on a synthesizer and just letting it dry. Right, and just walking off to get a cup of coffee. Yeah, one of the members of Stars of the Lid, Brian McBride, died a few years ago, far too young. And I was so crushed by it and so saddened by it,

in part because I really feel like there are certain pieces of music where you listen to them and you just think, this is made by good people. The people who made this really sat down and tried to make something that would comfort people. And I'm so grateful for that. I experienced such gratitude when I listen to their music. Because it's like, have you ever had a headache and taken like in a leave and been like, I want to thank the maker of a leave?

Because literally never had a headache in my life. Wow. If you ever like taken a leave and feel better and you're just like, I'm so grateful that I don't have a way about air conditioning. Oh yeah. Where's the monument to the person to carrier or whoever invented air conditioning? Where's that monument? You know what? I'm not kidding.

I literally have never had a... I do not know what a pain in my head feels like because I've never had a headache. What a privilege. I don't know why. What a privilege. I get ocular migraines. Ah, geez.

Which are... It's migraine without the pain. Oh, so you get like the halos. Yeah, my vision goes blurry. And I can't see. It lasts like maybe a half an hour. But no pain. Not going...

Anybody who makes music that gives people relief are really doing good and important work. And I think stars of the lid did good and important work. So the prevailing emotion I experience sometimes when I listen to their music is just gratitude. It's just I'm so glad this exists. Well, gratitude is also a recurring theme that I found in a lot of the music that I reach for. And as easy as it was to find songs to play on the show, that is something I realized as I was picking the songs like, wow, that is gratitude is just this recurring theme. And there's the

song by Iron and Wine called... Speaking of people who deserve thanks. Yes, exactly. There's a song called Passing Afternoon from maybe the greatest named album of all time, our endless number days, our endless number days. I'll just play a little bit of passing afternoon and then we can talk a little bit more about why it works so well. There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon Summer, and she chose a yard to burn The ground remembers her

And spoons or children stir her Bougainville Things that drift away This number that she made Oh my gosh, this song, it is the idea that, you know, life has lived in the moment and it is fleeting, but it feels so eternal to us. The name of the album, Our Endless Number of Days, comes from this song. That's from one of the lines in this song. Did you ever see the sheltering sky, that movie, based on the Paul Bulls book? Do you know that? No. Oh, there's this incredible quote from it. I think I've actually used this quote.

quote on the show before, but this is the quote from the writer Paul Bulls. Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. He goes on to say, but because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet, everything happens a certain number of times and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five more times? Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless. And that is what this song, I think of that

quote whenever I think of this album or this song. And again, it's, I've had so many conversations with friends who, when they hear me talk about this, they're like, you know that's depressing, right? And I say, no, no, no, no. It is a reminder of what a precious gift life is and how we should cherish every little moment. Even when we're in this moment, even if it's God awful, just be in this moment, live in it, and try to cherish every moment, good bad or otherwise.

Robin, are you a fan of the TV show The Good Place? I am. You played the last time we did this show, the last time we did this, songs to relax. You played Spiegel and Spiegel, which was... Arvapaird. Yeah, which was used in that show. You also asked me before he came in to do this taping whether or not there's a movie or whatever that I can go to that calms me down and that show. Oh, yeah. That show, not just because it's funny, but because it is all, it just continually

puts everything in perspective and makes you appreciate the vast wonder and beauty of life. It's ruminating on endings in such an interesting way, and they stick the landing. so hard in that finale. Oh. And I remember the first time I watched that finale, I just cried almost uncontrollably the entire time, not necessarily because I was so moved, though I was. But because I was just so impressed that they stuck the landing so hard.

Seeing great art. Great art. Great art. Oh. I just love, I love, like, sometimes the ending of a movie will make me emotional just because like, oh, you crushed it. Right. No, I feel that too.

Like at a great concert even or something. Yeah. Just like beautiful things done by beautiful people to bring more beauty into the world to make the world a more beautiful place is beautiful. Yep. And boy, iron and wine. Yeah. You did it again.

You brought it back to music. Wow. I'm going to have you on every week. But I mean, iron and wine, I got to meet Sam Beam because he's played the tiny desk several times. Yeah. And every time I meet that guy, I'm always like, oh, I'm so glad you're such a great dude. Yeah. Thanks, Sam Beam, for being a, for being a, like, just a fun, chill hang.

Just a nice dude. And for giving me the song passing, me personally, that's right, the song passing afternoon. Oh, that right, that whole our endless number days. Oh, my God. So gorgeous. Naked as we came just annihilates me every time. I think you have one more thing that you want to play. Yeah.

And this one, honestly, is just a stunning piece of music. And sometimes, like, there doesn't have to be a larger point or purpose to a selection. As I watched this artist perform a tiny desk home concert, I had never heard of her. I think Lars Got Rich, our colleague, brought her, like, made this tiny desk home concert happen. And I was so awed by her talent that I just found it deeply moving. And deeply calming. The piece is called Juvenessence, and the artist is a guitarist named Yasmin Williams.

It's just so elegant. It's patient music. Yeah. And it exudes kindness. Do you feel that like it's kind? There's some sort of, there's something in the heart of this that is kindness. Yeah, and like some of these other pieces,

there's a dance to it. There's motion. And there's a sway. that feels very of the natural world. I just had this, this overwhelming thought enter my head that I couldn't escape. And I've had this, I've had this before. And it's hard to articulate without sounding like a complete ham. But that thought is, I love talent.

I love talent. I love watching people be great at things. And I love watching people succeed. it's just one of the best feelings. I don't know how to describe it. It's like... Well, I mean, it's true. And it's, again, it's just that beautiful people making beautiful things

and putting beauty out into the world. And then it grows. And, you know, and there's something like, again, going back to that idea of the kindness that I feel in this music, it's not just recalibrating me. It's a reminder to channel that kindness and to share it and to spread that kindness. And that is, I feel like, what she's doing.

in this music. Right. She woke up in the morning, and when she went to bed at night, after recording this song, she just made the world a little better. Yeah. We don't all necessarily have this specific talent,

but we all have the capacity to go to bed, having made the world a little bit better than it was when we woke up. And we're talking about this music at a tense time. And it's so important to take a step back, and think about what's in our control. And what we can do is make conscious decisions

to treat the people around us better than we treated them yesterday and atone for our mistakes and just look for ways to put beauty and kindness into the world. And that's what all this music did. You know, honestly, there was a time about a year ago. I found myself in very brief, but these little sort of verbal altercations with people in my neighborhood on two different occasions. And after the second one, I just stopped and I realized, no matter how right I thought I was or whatever, I thought, I don't want to be an angry person. I don't want to walk around being set off by whatever, my neighbor's barking dog or whatever.

The person who cut me off in traffic or whatever, I don't want to. And it was a real moment for me. And I started just working very consciously to let go. And that is also a recurring theme, I think, a lot of these songs. It's the idea of there being a struggle because you can't really have, what is calm, without the struggle that came before it. And then a letting go. And it's in that letting go that you find,

that calm and that beauty. And I want to play one more thing that I think really captures that really well. And it's a piece by Arvo Perth. We mentioned him earlier. On the previous show that we did, you played Spiegel and Spiegel by him. This is a piece called Fratris. It means brothers

in Latin. And this is a piece that Arvo Perth wrote with no fixed instrumentation. And what that means is that it could be performed by any arrangement, any instrument, piano, guitar, whatever. And there are a lot of orchestras versions of the song that sort of fade in slowly and have this slow bloom to them.

This is a version for just violin and piano. And it begins with what I think is the equivalent of a struggle. You're going to hear it in this violin. But then there's this beautiful release. This is performed by Gidon Kramer, the violinist Gidon Kramer, and Keith Jarrett, the pianist. These guys, they're in their late 70s now, but they put out this album in 1984. that they did together called Arvo Pertabula Rasa, which is just absolutely transcendent.

And I reach for this piece often. Perfect way to take us out. Well, thanks, Stephen, for just hanging out like this. Thank you, buddy. This has been surprisingly therapeutic. I don't usually step into a studio with my good friend, Robin Hilton, and come out of it feeling better. Right back at you, buddy.

And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.