Claim OwnershipTalking to Strangers (About Music)
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Connections to other humans are crucial. But what does that look like? How can we trust others? This second segment of Talking to Strangers focuses on Steph Thompson, founder of sound healing practice Sacred Bloom Tribe talking to strangers about music. Sound and rhythm are crucial aspects to building up our listening skills. Trusting one another--whomever we might be, whatever race, creed, religion, political persuasion--we have to learn to listen to one another and find a common vibration. We need to get in tune, and in this podcast Steph will chat with the amazing people who create and work with sound and music, those people who make creating harmony their mission! We have a lot to learn from one another, and it all starts with DEEP LISTENING!
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When confusion reigns, where do you turn? We are strangers to ourselves in these moments, unfocused and unclear. I often turn to the piano, or other musical instruments to get at and get out what's going on inside. More even than writing, composing music allows thoughts and feelings to flow through me unencumbered (or, at least, less encumbered than the more rational reasoned way I sometimes feel I have to write, or talk.)In this episode, I play some piano and talk through some ideas about ho...
What makes us love a musician? The connection with a performer and their music is not unlike other loves probably, a slightly inexplicable alchemy that hits us hard, right off the bat.Seeing a long line of people waiting mid-morning for the best seats for the Phoebe Bridgers benefit concert in Prospect Park last week, I was curious: why do these folks love her so much they’d wait all day in the hot sun to get as close as possible?So I asked. I’d never even heard of the 27-year-old indie...
My interaction with the young band Moxie is a direct result of saying 'yes.' "Can a band stay with us a couple of nights?" my son Eli asked a couple weeks back and--based on my love of strangers, especially meeting them in my house--I didn't skip a beat. "Yes," I said. And so it was that I found myself in my kitchen with four of the most lovely dynamic clear-headed young people ever, the Brattleboro, VT-based members of the fast-rising Moxie the Band, in the early days of their Summer 2022 Ea...
When I sat down to write about Dani Markham, the first thing I did was look up "cool." Even though it was the first word that came to mind when I thought to describe her, I guess I don't really know why, or what 'cool' really means...Obviously, like all words, 'cool' is subjective. But what came up from psychologists who study perceptions of human behavior were qualities like 'attitude and behavior seen as uniquely their own" and "accepting who you are, showing up authentically, being kind to...
For this episode, I sat down naked at the piano. Sometimes, it is only through music and rhythm that I am able to get at what I'm REALLY thinking and feeling, what I want to express. Sometimes, often, words don't work. I so like to express my naked thoughts and ideas. And I like to hear other people's. People often can see that in my eyes, in my body language. They tell me things, sometimes things they haven't told anybody else. I often wonder what that is, why people feel they can say t...
Trust is an interesting thing. To talk to someone, to engage with them, is to offer them a sort of trust. When I first talked to Jason Naradzay a few years back, it was to interview him for a piece I was writing in support of Musicambia, a nonprofit music education organization he had been involved with during his time served at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He was out of Sing Sing and applying the therapeutic skills he'd learned inside the prison to help those still there. He knew firstha...
I knew that Jamee Jurecki and Leonissa Morris were to be my pals back when I first encountered them in December of 2017. As we stood there in front of the long mirrors of the communal bathroom at the Posh Hostel in South Beach, brushing our teeth and hair, preparing to hit the town, it was very clear. We had come to Miami on our own, adventurous ladies staying at a low-cost high-style hostel by the beach during the city's fabulous Art Basel show, and we were definitely gonna be able to hang t...
On Facebook the other day, someone posed the question, "what career did you dream of having when you were a kid?" I didn't skip a beat. "A singer!" I responded. My sister and I spent countless hours singing into a tape recorder (yes, a tape recorder, with cassette tapes whose plastic film we often had to detangle and re-roll with a pen. I am that old.) There was something about the freedom of belting out one's more melodramatic emotions full on with a fake microphone in the mirror that was tr...
I first met Nora Fish in a little cafe named Parco, in Park Slope. She had a beautiful German Shepherd named Annika and an adorable pug named Tootsie. As she reminds me during this podcast, she and I "were constantly complimenting each other's boots!" I have always admired Nora's style, from the great knit ponchos she makes herself to the gorgeous knit sweaters she has made for her dog, my dog and so many others, including those four-legged creatures she so lovingly invites to stay with ...
When James Yang came to my kids' school to talk about his illustrated children's book back in 2013, I was immediately struck by its powerful simplicity. I had just started volunteering at a school where kids didn't get to meet authors like my kids did, and I invited James to join. We reminisced during this podcast about that day, about how the kids swarmed around him as he showed them on a big piece of butcher paper taped to the wall how to make the simple shapes and designs of the robots and...
It was quite the coup to get one of my teenagers to come on to the podcast. After all, they are independent humans with ideas of their own about how to live life, and doing my bidding often takes low priority, as it should be. Over the years, I humiliated them bi-weekly with my Fearless Parenting column in the Brooklyn Paper, subjected them to a few awkward photo/video shoots for newspaper and TV and regularly interrupt family outings by...yes, talking to strangers (at one point stopping to g...
When I first met the lovely Emily Sause a few years back, she was 'head of community'for a stunning Manhattan co-working space called The Assemblage. It was part of her job to be welcoming, but she seemed to go above and beyond with her bright-eyed enthusiasm. While I didn't end up joining the super-cool workspace, I did manage to come for a couple of events, including Emily's 'vocal toning' workshop, which was one of the more relaxing deeply meditative hours of my life. We got together a num...
I met Roberto at Cafe Martin in Park Slope. He was a mathematician/philosopher working there between gigs. A song had come on and I asked a question about it, and he said how popular it was with the French kids. He said it with a bit of a scoff. He sounded French but...”where are you from?” I asked before I guessed.“I’m Italian,” he said. He grew up in Monaco though. Maybe I learned that then, or later, that relationship between his Italian roots and growing up in France. It read on his face,...
When I run out of coffee, I am always glad because it means I can take a walk over to Java Joe. For so many years, I have been going to this little shop on 8th Street, in Park Slope, to buy their deliciously strong Black Magic espresso beans. The shop is adorable, run by a lovely frank Irish lady, and besides the INCREDIBLE mint malted milk balls (a holiday gift staple) I always have a good chat. In this episode, I went in for beans and a new mug (I have too many, but always want a new one wh...
In this episode, I head to the beach to drum, and I talk a bit about how we learn to trust ourselves and others. It's not easy. I often use the metaphor of music, and work with people, including homeless men, to try to get at thoughts about connection, and trust and flexibility through drumming together. What we can create together, quickly, us strangers, with a little music, is nothing short of magic. Have a drum or something to hit your hands on to make rhythm with me at the beginning. List...
What I loved about Samir LanGus from the first time I saw him was how comfortably he seemed to mix cultures seamlessly and stylishly. As a Moroccan musician steeped in the classically spiritual Gnawa music of his homeland, he is always sporting American fashions like his favored Adidas jackets or running pants along with more traditional Moroccan garb. The look is representative of Samir's extremely nimble balance of traditional and modern, which has shown up in the collaborations he has forg...
I'm "friends" on Facebook with a lot of people I've never met. Maybe we have mutual friends, maybe they read something of mine or listened to my podcast, maybe I heard them play somewhere. Neither Chris Rael nor I remember exactly how we became "friends," though we have a long list of friends in common, mostly musicians (since he is one.) Even though we've never met, I reached out to Chris recently after a post of his caught my eye, and asked if he would be on my podcast to discuss it. In it ...
I try not to take advantage of my friendship with veteran psychoanalyst Mubasher Naseer. After all, he is clearly easy to talk to, listens well and has many years' experience helping people sort out relationships and other of life's strains and stresses with his sage advice. Since we met, roughly six years ago, Mubasher is always a good person to chat with about what's happening in the world and what people are feeling, including he and I. It is nice to hear what a mental health professional ...
Since meeting jazz pianist James Carney seven or so years ago in a little bar in Park Slope, I have sat many times in various venues to see and hear him tickle the ivories, his fingers flying fast across the keys masterfully to create rhythms that resound in the soul. It was a pleasure to sit with him again and hear a few of these sounds, this time in his new PianoWorks studio in Brooklyn's cool Industry City complex. While musical performances came to a halt during Covid, James decided to ex...
It is fitting that in our chat, in her sumptuous living quarters in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn, stylist/creative director Hilary Robertson would quote Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn. She waved her hand this way and that with her usual English dramatic flair, and the crisp striped fabric of the full-length dress shirt she wore shifted slightly. "'Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth' or something like that," she said, eyes up toward the soaring brownstone parlor ceiling as she rendered the per...
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