Switched on Pop - Bhi Bhiman Puts the Music Before the Message

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

Bhi Bhiman joins to explain the "nerd punk rock" behind releasing his new album Peace of Mind with an accompanying podcast. Since Bhiman explores issues like deportation on the track "Beyond the Border," there's a lot to say about each song. Even though he tackles tough topics, Bhiman make sure he puts music before the message. "Beyond the Border" summons a vast range of funky influences, from Van Halen to the Allman Brothers, to ask what America really means. Featuring •Bhi Bhiman: Beyond the Border, Moving to Brussels, Bread and Butter, There Goes the Neighborhood, Guttersnipe •Van Halen - Jump •Allman Brothers - Ramblin' Man Listen to our Spotify playlist of contemporary politically motivated music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, a few weeks ago, we talked with Justin Tranter on how he imbues activism into music. And that conversation got me thinking about the history of politically engaged music.

And frankly, I was inspired to go out and look for new songwriters in the tradition of artists like Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy and Joan Baez, which led us to to B. Beeman. B. Beeman, in his own words, is a singer, songwriter, producer, dad, and an American. His album, Peace of Mind, has evocative lyrics that artfully speak to issues like immigration, voting rights, and even Russian statecraft. The topics are all serious, but the music is so much fun. Yeah. B is releasing each song as a podcast where he interviews experts on the issues and contextualizes them

by breaking down the making of each song. And B. Beeman joined us in the studio to share his track on immigration called Beyond the Border. It's the story of kind of the head of a household. In this case, it's a father of a household, but it could be a mother. But it's basically about this father who is an undocumented immigrant and his family is presumably legal. I mean, I didn't, and I read a novel about this as a three-minute song. It's somewhat loose around the details, but it's a father who's deported leaving the rest of his family behind in America. And that's a story we've all heard, you know, with the news and ICE detainments.

But you don't hear about a story about a person. And so I always see people as people, not numbers and statistics. And over the years I've written songs like this where I talk about kind of the underdog kind of person. I mean, it is a worthy topic to me to discuss. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk about the chorus. Mm-hmm. It's like we're an outrage.

They give us heartache and keep all the freedom. It's like we're an outwreck. It's like we in our trade. What is this lyric? Where is it coming from? It's a pretty cynical look on things. And it definitely has to do with white supremacy. And that kind of strain of.

of hate running through America today and maybe always, unfortunately. And it kind of comes from, I mean, I grew up wanting to be a comedian. I loved comedians a ton, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, but this one comes from like kind of this specific thing that Bill Hicks said one time, which was that humans are viruses with shoes, which is like a really cynical-ass thing to say. But that always just pops up it in my head, like six months.

But there's this thing of, of, you know, historically with African Americans in slavery and Native Americans being kind of something undesirable and that sort of thing about germs and it's like those brown people are an outbreak and then the white supremacists are the treatment to this scourge or whatever, you know. And so, I mean, it's one of the most cutting things I've ever written in my life. just boiling it way, way, way down to say it's like we're an outbreak and they're the treatment. Like they can't exist until we are eliminated. And, you know, it came from, I mean, I wrote this post-2016 election.

And that was kind of a mandate by 40% of America that talking about Mexicans as though they are subhuman, talking about Muslims as though they are subhuman, was okay with 40% of them, 30, 40%, whatever that might be. It was hurtful. It was very hurtful. Even though I'm neither of those things. I'm like a Hindu person, but I might as well be in a lot of people's eyes. So it comes from a place of hurt, but I don't know. Maybe I over-analyzed it or something.

Not at all. That's our bread and butter here is over-analyzing things. Part of what makes this chorus so powerful for me is obviously the words, but also how you perform them. And first off, this is the first time in the song that we get background vocals. Yeah. So all of a sudden we get this. There's many bees speaking on top of each other, but you also have one that almost

sounds like it's behind like a megaphone. Yeah. And that quality has, it's like there, it's an outbreak of voices that happen. I never even thought about it that way, but very cool. This is the first album I've produced by myself from top to bottom, and I took a lot of inspiration from, you know, like, Tame Impala, and like some of these bands are really just like one person doing it, and I remember him saying, you know, if you want for like one millisecond,

you want a thousand of your voices to play, you can do that. So, you know, the world's your oyster when you're producing your own stuff. and I mean, these are just things when, as you know, like when you record something

and then you play it back, you hear something in your head, it needs that, it needs this, it needs that. And so it's just a process of elimination and addition. The other thing I noticed

about the performance is it's contrast in rhythm to the underlying drums. What's going on with the way that you're singing this? The way that you're singing this.

that I'm saying it's like we're an outbreak. Yeah. Rhythmically, it feels like that the drums are kind of like pretty clear like, duh, duh, duh, and you're like, you're kind of have this really hard swung, almost triplet feel. Oh, man. I've been asked that question a lot and I really just don't know the answer. It's just like, you know, it just is. It's a lot of years of

doing things my way, I guess. And I did a tour with Chris Cornell and And he was like, where did you learn to do that? Because I'm always like behind the beat. Yeah. Like I play, sometimes I play solo and I play guitar and I've been playing guitar since I was seven years old. So I consider myself a guitarist first and then a singer. But my guitar work is pretty metronome, you know, metronomic.

That's a word, right? Oh, yeah. I just made that word up. There's a zamp in the lamp and that's metronomic. Yeah. And that was sexy. Yeah, keep going. I've turned you on right now.

Yeah. So it's been kind of a mystery. Maybe it's something to do with like, I listen to like Nina Simone like a ton. Yeah. And she's kind of way behind. Totally. I was going to say Billy Holiday. Okay.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's, it's can be, especially when I venture into anything that is like within the realm of pop, it's like, can be problematic. Because it's too sexy. Yeah. It's too swung. No. It's just too swung sometimes. so I have to like really physically like make sure I'm on it or I'll just do it in post.

Well, I think that it works in this song because you have an underlying rhythm. Maybe we can think of that as like racial normativity. And then you have this lyric of the immigrant story, which isn't completely in sync with that normative rhythm. It's sort of doing its own thing, trying to assert itself and be a part of the song. That's awesome. Man, you guys are making my song really, really deep. And I like that. Just wait, because we want to go even deeper. We want to take this section and break it down a little further.

You've been kind enough to share some of the musical stems of this chorus with us. So we were interested in actually going through each musical element here and seeing if it might have some commentary on the larger themes of the song. And let's start with the synthesizer. Might as well jump Yeah You mean Yes

You knew it Awesome That makes me very happy Yeah that's really fun What do you think the sound is doing In the song It's a syncopated feel Because I came with the guitar

Cause it was like Bring Bidoo bong Bung It's more dreamy But this is more staccato Like Z

Do do Doo do Doo Doo Like there's a lot of syncopation going on. And it's just fun. I don't know. Even before I had the drums in there, it was something I was bobbing my head too.

Yeah. Let's talk about those drums. Yeah. Wow, that sounds terrible by itself. Sounds so corny. We were really digging on this earlier because there's like two related but separate drum feels we're hearing here. One is like the big bombastic, funky hip-hop groove. and then it moves into this sort of sparser, more melodic.

I don't know, how do we describe that second drum? It sounds like some kind of mallet or like, what is that song? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's, you're calling those drums. Those are just like, yeah, straight up mallets. Gotcha. Okay, so percussion maybe is more accurate. But the role that that plays in the song is, I mean, it's singing like,

It's like we're an outbreak. Yeah. Don't dun, da, dunk, dun, it's kind of just enforcing it a little bit. We have a notion that there might be some mirroring of the larger themes of the song here in these two drum beats. Like perhaps one is, you know, say us and them, I guess, if we're just going to abstract the whole song narrative. Like maybe one drumbeat is us and the other is them. Is that, are we... That can be said.

That could be said. I think it's also appropriate, I mean, to take your analysis even further. Yeah, yeah. Is that we have on one hand, like, global pop music drumming in the beginning, and then you have what sound kind of like West African-style percussion. Totally. And so you have that mirroring of us and them, the global center and the global periphery, the sort of themes of the song happening within the drumming.

I like that. I like it. I like that. You guys know more about me than I do. We're still tunneling. Maybe that's my subconscious work in there. It's, yeah, I mean, it is. That's, I mean, part of it was, I mean, this is a challenging subject.

Sure. You know, no doubt. And it's in a pop, in a pop world of music, it's incredibly challenging, I feel. So part of the reason I needed to be catchy as fuck was, like, musically, that was, you know, sugar with the medicine sort of thing. And I can't just talk about subjects without the songs being very, very good. Like, the subject matter is not more important than the song being good. And that's my top criteria. Sometimes, unfortunately, people, you know, like to preach more than they like to write the song.

Yeah. So I'm very careful with that. So these rhythms are also just serving the fact that they're fun. I mean, yeah, totally. That's like number one. Because I know this shit's challenging. Yeah. It's not normal to be talking about a deported family.

And I'm limited. myself with who will like it, but I think a lot of people can resonate with this message. No, no, I think, you know, a big part of like why we were excited to talk to, this is, in many ways, not a pop song just because by its nature, it can't, like you said, this can't exist on, it's too specific, it's too real. Pop by its nature needs to be a little, you know, like, vague and obfuscatory or something. Nice. Thank you.

I wanted to match metronomics. But this is effective because it's still pleasurable and fun and doesn't like alienate you, I guess. Anyway, but we got to keep going. We got to dig further through the musical sediment to the next layer, which is rhythm guitars. And once again, it's like a binary. There's two sounds at once here, right? And they're very different. Just like the drums had the hip hop and the mallets.

now the rhythm guitars have like the really big distorted chords. It's like Green Dayish or like dark distort, yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. And then at the same time, these like tight, syncopated, chunky rhythms reminiscent. Yeah, maybe actually reminiscent of like West African guitar styles. I'm definitely a big fan. Yeah. So maybe that's coming out.

Yeah. So it seems like, again, we might have this contrast, us and them. That might just be me. That might just be all me. The two sides of your personality. Yeah. I literally don't think about it in that way when I'm doing it, but you're right. I mean, there are two totally different things.

It's not like code switching or whatever you want to call it, but it's like living in two different worlds. And I do kind of as an artist have to live in multiple worlds sometimes by the nature of me not being white or black in America. and I know a lot of Hank Williams songs. I know a lot of ACDC songs. I know a lot of West Coast rap guitar riffs and stuff like that. And I just know a lot of different things. And that can serve me well, for sure. There's a melting pot of music happening in the production of this song.

Yeah, there's a lot going on in the song. My favorite sound and the whole thing, I think, is the lead guitar. Yeah, for sure. That's the mind, too. harmonized. I mean, that's me trying to be the Allman Brothers right there, because they are well known for their harmony, their lead guitar harmonies,

and they're like one of my favorite groups. They're very unique in terms of American rock and roll. And their guitar playing is really, really sweet. It just is. If we got a little taste of that, yeah. Oh, yeah. Inimitable. They are so unique in that sense.

I love here that you have layered in a southern rock guitar sound into a song about immigration called Beyond the Border. It feels like you're capturing the sound which it's almost like it feels like a misappropriation of a southern sound and almost like a reclamation of that sound for a different purpose. Yeah, it totally is. I think that's like the most catchy part of the song in a lot of ways. And most of Almond Brothers band fans are kind of country rock fans, right? Which indexes generally older and more white. Yeah, for sure. I think we have three fans in this room as well.

But that is a trend. It's not there are also trends towards, yes, like more conservatism in that fan base. So I wanted combining my lyrical, you know, what I was saying with the lyrics and then this sort of very, something that. It's like, oh, I've heard it before, but I haven't heard it before, this kind of thing. And one of the things I thought was really cool was bringing that classic rock, southern rock thing into like kind of a more, dare I say, EDS sort of style. I mean, it's not EDM, but I thought that was fascinating to me. I thought, and the fact that it worked, it wasn't like, oh, it's fucking put two fucking things together. That's cool.

It was like, yeah, it worked well. And it took a lot of noodling on my part. I mean, I was listening to the backing track for a while and then came up with that guitar part. just from soloing over it. Yeah, I think those two worlds coming together, like you've been saying, a lot of worlds coming together. And that's partly why I think it's catchy and good. On your podcast, you talk about your motivation for the song, and I want to play a clip of that. Okay, sure. We're all trying to find a safe place to live here on this little blue marble of ours. And many times when you see a mass migration of people, it's because of violence or destruction.

And sometimes the lack of empathy and compassion for these circumstances is frustrating. The experience of the immigrant, it's not an easy one. It's something that I've woven into a lot of my songs. My last album was sort of an immigrant story. I wrote songs called Moving to Brussels, which was kind of like a breakup song, but an immigrant's breakup with the only country they've ever known. Bread and Butter was another song which is celebrating the hard work and also the vitality of many immigrant communities.

I had a song called There Goes the Neighborhood, and that took a different tact. That took the tact of the Stephen Millers, Steve Bannon, the steves of the world. Basically someone lamenting the changing face of their America. And even maybe my most popular song to date, which was a song called Gutter Snipe,

a person who's penniless and just roaming from town to town almost, doesn't really have a home. Something that's always stuck with me was the Statue of Liberty and those famous, incredibly moving words by Emma Lazarus. Give me your tide, your poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these. The homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lap beside the golden door.

I'll never forget those words. So you weave the stories of immigration into a lot of your stuff. songs you're saying. Here, there is a sort of a strange narrative choice in which you're almost singing parts of it. Sometimes it sounds like you're speaking from the immigrant perspective and others. You're referencing the sort of white supremacist's perspective. But I wanted to know, is there any way in which you're in this song? Oh, yeah. I can definitely say that something that's part of me is this, that feeling of all my family's dead and gone this side of the fence I'm on. So this person's been deported and, you know, ostensibly is Mexican born and raised or, you know, let's just say

he's Mexican born and raised. And he goes back, but there's nothing left for him there, even though, you know, why don't you just go back to your country? He's like, well, there's nothing for me there kind of thing. And so that part of it is definitely, you know, I've been told that before. And, and there's some truth to it in my songwriting. Yeah, the bridge and outro, I took a bit of a risk of alienating people there, but in this crazy time of like we elected Donald Trump, I mean, it's, it's pretty crazy. He's a strange man. And so part of it is like everyone's lost their goddamn mind is one of the lines in the song. And that's in reference to like a lot of people professing to be Christian and, you know, caring for others. And that's a big ethos of Christianity.

Look out for your brother and your neighbor. but there's this cognitive dissonance thing going on there that is undeniable. That's all my voice of God opinion in that song. So I do play around with perspective there for sure. It speaks to something you said earlier and something you actually shared on your podcast about how humans have an absurd capacity to rationalize any narrative that will make sense to support their... A really interesting part of that was...

So I spoke with the social psychologist Lee Ross, and he's done conflict resolution in Israel and northern Ireland. And so intense situations where violence was on the table for sure. And saying that, you know, people can obviously rationalize, but collectively groups of people rationalize, not by their own thinking, but by something somebody else came up with. And they accept that rationalization as a group and group think. And that was like, holy crap. Like, that's amazing. And one of our worst capacity is the ability to rationalize othering. Yeah, across some sort of line.

For sure. Why get political in your music? I ask that question to myself a lot. It's part of me. I mean, it's like in certain genres of music, it's prominent. In hip-hop, it's one of the defining features, you might say, to be socially conscious. But in other genres, it's not. not okay at all. In some genres, only certain issues are on the table. I mean, in 2009, there's a

big civil war in Sri Lanka and our people, the Tamil Sri Lankan people, were on the receiving end of most of that. And it was a lot of violence. And so that was a definitive moment of knowing that no one's coming to help, I guess, in that situation, which is terribly sad. I'm sorry to bring everybody down on this topic. But it's... We'll play some fun beats later. Yeah, but... Some cool beats, some hot beats. This is important. But yeah, so that was a defining moment in a lot of our community's lives. The Tamil diaspora is what we call ourselves.

So that's part of it. But like in the 90s, I was super into just all kinds of stuff. I don't know why. I think Bob Dylan is to blame for that because, you know, everybody says Bob Dylan is like every songwriter who has anything to say. It's like Bob Dylan, that's cliche, but it really was him for me. And, you know, I had the essential 20 greatest hits of Bob Dylan that I wore out. You know, that gray cover that ever be banned from Best Buy, probably.

And he changed my thinking about how big the world can be. And like, I was just sitting in my room, you know, I didn't venture too far out. But that opened my mind way, way up. What you were sharing about the Civil War in Sri Lanka, it seems to connect actually to lyric that you were saying that feels personal. If people have yelled at you get out of here, go back home. Of course, you're an American. You're born in America, but your family

is from Sri Lanka. But that is a very true story. I mentioned going back home for them or going to as a family is not like they would have known it to be. Yeah, totally. I have a funny story about being told to go back to your country.

My mom is a ER pediatrician in St. Louis, which is where I grew up. and sometimes, you know, parents come in with sick kids and they're, you know, they're pretty upset and volatile. Yeah. And somebody, you know, my mom was telling her, like, asking her maybe tough questions, what's going on at the house or whatever.

Maybe too personal. But so she said, you know, got fed up and why don't you go back to your country? And this is my mom, who's pretty soft-spoken, was like, excuse me? It's like, this country chose me because of that point she was a citizen. And it's like, did this country choose you? And I was like, damn, mom, I didn't know you had those burns in you. And she's usually not like that. But I was like, oh, man, wow, good for you, mom.

That's awesome. That just got my heart racing. Something that really moves me about this song is your willingness to put yourself in the position of someone else, someone at risk of being deported. That's a real powerful act of. empathy, but you know, as one of our a friend and listener, Matt

Linda pointed out on Twitter, on other songs, you're embodying characters who are less empathetic. On another song in the album, Can't Nobody Stop Us? You're singing from the perspective of a dictator. What motivated that? Randy Newman, probably.

Because he plays with that perspective stuff a lot. When I was a kid, he crystallized in my mind what you could do, like from the viewpoint of somebody who's not nice. And, you know, I liken it to an actor who's like, oh, I got to play this juicy role of the villain. Like, there's so much opportunity to say biting lines that you can't say from the underdog perspective.

Only the person looking from up high looking down on somebody can say certain things. And in that instance that can't nobody stop us, it was a powerful way to get my point. across it that you can't do from the underdog perspective and like you can say some stuff with glee like with the perspective you can kind of like embody that and and show pure gleeful evil is that that sounds terrible together gleeful evil but uh i mean i think most dictators feel gleefully evil gleefully evil gleeval for sure so gleeval always nice necessary is the... Mr. Burns

finger taps. Finger tapping. Exactly. But yeah, if you're going to tackle certain subjects, it's a lot more fun. Like,

I have one where from my first album, where I'm the Enron, an Enron executive who's like stealing money from people's pensions. That's great. He's loving doing it.

And like, there's that gleeful evil there again. Yeah. Gleeval. Yeah, you have Wall Street executives. You have,

you have a great song. is it from Russia with love where you play basically an oligarch or a Putin? I play, yeah, I play well, I'm playing partly Trump at one point, but it's kind of like I'm

Trump's Russian handler who can't quite get a hold of him because he's gone off script because he's such a narcissist and he's like, oh, I can do it. It's like, no, they still have blackmail on you. Like, you still have to report to them. But yeah. You said earlier about the important

of when you're making politically charged music that it's the last to be fun and your music is all fun. You can listen to it and never listen to a lyric and you're going to have a good time. And then you start listening to the lyric and you're going to think. And there's something about taking on the position

of a third party in which you don't have to just sort of like raise a fist and say, hey, I hate you. You're a terrible person, but rather you can just show instead of telling. Yeah, I mean, going through the back door of somebody's mind through storytelling is kind of the way to go a lot of times

in my opinion. Like, I was talking in, in episode one, I talked to this, to Glenn Washington, who does Snap Judgment, really great storyteller. And he's like, I've had a lot of experience, you know, he's from rural Michigan, and he goes back home and he can't talk politics with people. He's like, you know, nobody wants to argue, nobody leaves an argument with a changed mind. People respond to stories and, you know, putting yourself into somebody else's shoes for a second really is more effective.

So that's kind of where I come from too. Well, this is, I think, a great opportunity to transition to talk about your show because you have released an album an entirely untraditional way. So we're going to take a very short break. When we come back, we're going to hear about how to,

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Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violence.

violent displays that we've seen in the street from ice. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Now that we move from talking about this particular song to the album,

a whole, we can ask you a question that's been on our minds. Why release this album as accompanying podcast? What was behind that decision? Yeah, I mean, it's accompanying, but it's also, I'm literally releasing it in the podcast form too. So first off, it was like nerd punk rock to me to release an album as a podcast. I love that. It was, it was, it was, it was just like anarchy slightly, you know, very tiniest bit of anarchy. And, and, And it was like an MP3 is an MP3, an audio file is an audio file. What's stopping you? And I soon realized there's nothing stopping you.

And, you know, my podcast network that I'm on critical frequency is a woman-owned, woman-run podcast network. And if you want to do that, you can do that. There's no hurdle in your way to doing that. As you guys have known for years now, podcasting is this beautiful format that is the Wild West. You can do anything you want. song as it's good. People will listen and it's totally merit-based, you know? The music industry is not always merit-based, you know? It's like, how do you look? What's your cool name and what,

you know, there's a few things, your image and stuff like that. I feel like it would be irresponsible for me to not point out, though, the number of women who get attacked for not having proper voice and overusing vocal fry is a like trope within podcasting. And so props to critical frequency for are also trying to fight that trend because it is a constant. I'm sure if you talk to any. Yeah, no, they have, I think critical frequency has merch that says, I love vocal fry. Yeah, exactly. That's great.

Sure, yeah, for sure. But it's wide open. Releasing an album as a podcast was an idea that my wife actually kind of brought to me, and I probably scoffed at it. I thought I was above it or something. But she's the one who's been obsessed with podcasts. I'm a fan of podcasts. I have been for a while, but she's one of those people who's just like, at least four podcasts a day type of person, you know?

Like, just because she can do a bazillion things. Yeah, yeah. Hard to write songs and listen to podcasts. No, yeah. You've got to pick and choose what you listen to for sure. But the album is a concept album. I mean, had Trump not been elected, it would have been a different album for sure. I mean, life would be different for everyone.

But it's definitely political. I have a song's about a lot of big issues going on today. Immigration is beyond the border. A song called Einy Meany, which is about voter suppression and different tactics, voter suppression. Another one's called Brother, Can You Spare Some Peace of Mind? It's about kind of mental health in America. Giant is a song about women in gender inequality and so on. So each song has kind of a different theme.

And I didn't quite see a space for like this album. in many genres. I mean, rock world, folk, Americana world doesn't fit. Pop world doesn't really fit. But the audience for politics was fully in the podcast world to me. Like, everybody who's passionate about politics and what was going on was listening to Pod Save America. Right. The Daily. All these different podcasts, these major ones. Lots of Vox podcasts. Right away. And in your podcast, you're doing more than, and just waxing poetic about your own music. So in your episode about Beyond the Border,

you speak with an ACLU Immigrants Rights Attorney, and you also talk with an activist-artist-artist author about their experiences in fighting for justice. For you, what does pairing the music with these experts do for the listeners of those songs? Well, when I write the songs, they are three to four minutes, and you can only say so much, obviously, in a song. And, you know, when you write songs, you edit yourself,

and only the certain bits make it through, right? And there's a lot more to be said about these issues than just releasing. And that was part of the appeal of doing the podcast format. I can really, like, control the narrative of what we're talking about and all this stuff. But every episode has to do with these themes, and this one was immigration. And I am the dumbest person in the room every single episode. And that's the way I want it. Yeah, yeah.

I'm hoping to learn something myself, and by extension, other people, or learned something who came to my podcast for music, let's say. Are there any surprising conversations that you've had with some of those experts where were like, oh, I had it even, I wrote a song about this subject, but I had no idea what was actually going on. I'm writing these songs from afar a lot of times. If they have to do with a political subject that isn't like in my world necessarily. So a deportation isn't in my world.

I just see it on the news, but I empathize with it and I feel like it's a story to be told. I know only so much, and I'm bringing these people whose lives are these issues. So they've worked their whole life on immigration or voting rights. I had the guy from the ACLU Voting Rights Project on there, Dale Ho, and he, I didn't know a goddamn thing about what he was talking about, but it was all interesting. Like all the hours and sweat and tears and stuff of just fighting to maintain voting at a normal, at like where everyone can kind of vote is incredible an incredible amount of work.

Oh man. And people are fighting really hard to chip away, chip away, chip away, chip away, and purge people from voter rolls and all this stuff. And just seeing how much like passion these people have. And, you know, lawyers get a lot of bad raps for being, you know, who's the most famous lawyer right now, Michael Avanadi or something? It's like, like there's a lot of beautiful people who are lawyers who are doing a lot of hard, hard, unheralded work.

And it was, the podcast was an excuse for me to, like, showcase some of these people. Isn't that a beautiful thing, though, where you have, you were saying earlier about, you often want to embody another character and be able to tell a story

and have it be specific enough. It has the details in there. It feels real. And yet the way that you're releasing this show, you're bringing in other people's stories that relate to that song. And so it almost becomes this, like, lattice of storytelling.

where it's not just the song as the essential experience of beyond the border immigrant experience. It's an opportunity for someone to hear a piece of themselves in that song and then tell their story. Absolutely. I mean, their stories are more interesting than my song's stories. My songs are, you know, candy kind of, you know. These are real things that these, this is real work that people are doing. They don't just talk on TV. They rarely talk on TV.

They just work and work and work and do their work. Beyonce famously dropped a visual album, you know. Maybe the podcast album is the next. Yeah. I want more of these. I'm really into this concert. In five years, somebody's going to like, a lot of people are going to hate me for like opening this Pandora's box. We asked this question on our last episode, which is about the sound of streaming and basically how do you get noticed in the sound of streaming.

I like how you put it. It's like, an MP3 is an MP3. way to get notice is actually it's not in the normal playlists it's in a different playlist it's a different place it's still just audio and so one way of being heard and when everything is available is doing something which is a little bit different yeah this is super

different and it's been fun to like learn a trade a craft that's certainly adjacent to music production but it's certainly right up that alley and with this podcast I thought I mean I watched the news

I checked Twitter all that stuff and it's insane. And you feel like a goldfish sometimes. You're like, I don't even know what happened yesterday. Like, I don't know what's going on. And something I wanted to do with this is like a year from now, looking back, it's like kind of a proper time capsule of what's really going on, not just like hour by hour, day by day.

What did Trump do or whatever? It's like what has been going on for these two years or whatever? And I feel like by talking to these specific people who work on these issues of immigration or mental health and an upcoming episode's about, you know, teen suicide, which unfortunately is a personal issue. And kind of getting a 30,000 foot view as opposed to this, you know, Twitter view, I guess. And so if somebody wanted to look back on it five years from now, what was going on, maybe this podcast would give them a taste of what was going on. Yeah, I love that.

I mean, it's like you say that a song can only do so much, only should do so much, really. With this approach, you get that context and that nuance, but the song can be intact as this pleasurable, mysterious, wonderful artifact. We'll check back in in five years. Yeah, check back in. We'll see where the podcast album is at. Band from podcasting. Completely banned.

I think what's cool about your music is that it shows that you can be political in a lot of different ways, kind of like we were talking about, right? You can be very overtly political in your lyrics, but you can also be, you know, now I'm thinking like, is singing behind the beat? Like, that can be, you can interpret that even as politics. I mean, which is to say like that is doing some kind of work of de-centering us from our expectations, and that puts you in a place where you're like maybe looking at the world in a different way and imagining things as they could be other than the way they are. And that itself is a political imagination.

So I like the idea that music can like even music that doesn't seem on the surface, like it has a message or has a social critique in its very, you know, its musical DNA can be doing things that still like help you raise. and protest and like express to yourself, you know? Yeah. I mean, you were talking about some guy on Twitter saying, like I, or a girl was saying, I don't want politics in my music. Yeah, yeah.

I like the escape. And I totally get that. Like, I loved listening to Post Malone and like escaping. It's pretty awesome. But what I find funny is that why is television and comedy saturated with politics, like saturated? Yeah. Really, it's like almost you can't even pull the two apart, right?

But music is not there yet. Like Hassan Minajah's Homecoming King was like inspirational to this podcast thing because I could control the narrative. I could tell people who I am, telling people I'm from fucking St. Louis, Missouri. I'm not a world artist. I'm not a Sri Lankan American Woody Guthrie or whatever the fuck.

I am just a kid. It was a different name, but I am American. and that's even just that little sentence is a political statement apparently. No doubt. But it's nice to see the world changing and hopefully for the better. This has been such an amazing conversation. I think you do such an essential job of showing people how to bring big issues into weighty issues into music and still make it fun and enjoyable.

Any song which is going to protest something. People still have to sing it together to protest together, and they have to want to sing it. And I think you really pave an amazing path for people to do that. So thank you for breaking the stuff down with us. So before we send you off, where can people find your music and your show? You can find it on all the podcast streaming platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, etc. The album and the podcast are both Peace of Mind, as in World Peace. Peace of Mind is the podcast and album title.

The album, which is comprised of, you know, three or four minute songs, is available on all the streaming platforms, Spotify and Apple Music. And the podcast also called Peace of Mind is available on all those podcast networks. Check it out. Peace of Mind. Bebeam. Thank you so much, B. No problem. Switch on Pop is a production of Vox Media. Our producer is Gillian Weinberger, engineering by Brandon McFarland, and our community manager is Sarah Terry.

Our executive producers are Nashat Karwa and Allison Rocky. You can find our playlist of politically reactive music on Spotify. We'll have a link in the show notes, or you can find it on our Spotify profile. And we also want to say thank you to the folks who helped seed some great songs for that playlist. Jess Shoreland, AJ, Ed Harris, Allison Shillington, Blinky Bill, Justin Talbot-Zorn, Andrea Warner, Ian Watt, Tyler Bunsey, August Miss, Kevin Anders, Jeannie Unes, Kevin Welsh, Mackenzie Orr, Conahita Mala, Matt Linder, Caitlin Foster, and Amy.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switchedumpop, and we really like it if you send us your thoughts and recommendations there. Also, if you're an Apple podcast user, please leave us a review. It really helps the show. See you next Tuesday.

Until then, thanks for listening.