What if a Musical Could Help us Tell the Truth

About Climate Change?

In this episode, Bill Cleveland sits down with theater director Emily Hartford and composer–storyteller Ned Hardford to explore Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs—a nine-episode musical audio drama that reimagines an ancient Greek myth as a near-future climate story.

What starts as a conversation about craft opens into deeper territory: imagination as resistance, music as pedagogy, and why genuinely new stories don’t come from algorithms—they come from people doing long, human work together.

In it, we explore three big questions at the heart of Metra and the moment we’re living in now:

1. How music, story, and the human voice reach places that facts, lectures, and policy arguments can’t
2. What it looks like to tell a climate story without fear-mongering or “disaster porn,”
3. How artists can build work that others can actually use,—turning art-making into cultural infrastructure rather than a one-off production.

Listen in to discover how art, music, and story can help us practice a different future—and why Metra just might be the kind of narrative infrastructure we need right now.

People

Bill Cleveland

Host of Change the Story / Change the World and founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.

Emily Hartford

Theater director, writer, and producer; founding member of Flux Theater Ensemble and co-creator of Metra.

Ned Hartford

Composer, songwriter, audio engineer, and co-creator of Metra, focused on musical storytelling and audio drama.

Alan Lomax

Folklorist and field-recording pioneer whose work capturing the emotional power of the human voice is referenced in the episode.

Enoch Rutherford

Old-time banjo player recorded by Alan Lomax in Virginia; referenced through a story of lineage, listening, and musical transmission.

Bill McKibben

Climate activist and author referenced for framing distributed solar power as a metaphor for bottom-up social change.

adrienne maree brown

Writer and activist whose work on emergence and collective power informs Metra’s worldview.

Martin Buber

Philosopher referenced for his concept of relational connection (I–Thou), via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Organizations & Collectives

Flux Theater Ensemble

New York–based theater company where Metra was developed and premiered, known for ensemble-driven creation and an aesthetic of liberation.

Gideon Media

Audio production studio that supported the transition of Metra from stage work to musical audio drama.

Third Act

Climate and democracy organization referenced in connection with Ned Hartford’s activism.

New York Communities for Change

Grassroots organization cited as part of the movement ecosystem influencing the creators’ thinking.

Climate Defenders

Climate justice organization referenced as an example of movement-based learning and narrative change.

Works & Publications

Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs

Official project site for the nine-episode musical audio drama.

Metamorphoses by Ovid

Source text for the myth of Erysichthon and Metra.

Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben

Referenced for its account of decentralized solar power as a model for social transformation.

The Overton Window

Political concept discussed in relation to climate disinformation and long-term narrative shifts.

Antidote by Karen Russell

Novel recommended by Emily Hartford for its imaginative interrogation of manifest destiny and power.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Recent book recommendation connecting ecology, reciprocity, and community.

Wendell Berry

Writer recommended for his grounding reflections on land, ethics, and community.

Hey there. What if a musical could help us tell the truth about climate change?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders and change agents.

In this episode, we sit down with theater director Emily Hartford and composer storyteller Ned Hartford to explore a climate revolution with Songs, a nine episode musical audio drama that reimagines an ancient Greek myth as a near future climate story.

What starts as a conversation about craft opens into a deeper territory of imagination as resistance, music as pedagogy, and and why genuinely new stories don't come from algorithms. They come from people doing long human work. Together.

In it, we'll explore three big questions at the heart of Metra and the moment we're living in now. How music and story and the human voice reach places that facts, lectures and policy arguments can't.

How what it looks like to tell a climate story without fear mongering or disaster porn. And how artists can build work that others can actually use, turning art making into cultural infrastructure rather than a one off production.

Part one the Storyteller and the Shapeshifter Emily and Ned, welcome to the show.

So, Emily, do you have a street name?

I really love this question and I was thinking about it prior to coming here today and I have three essences that, that I want to name and those are that I'm an ensemble member, I'm a seeker of wonder, and I'm a shapeshifter.

Oh, wonderful. That's great. How about you, Ned? You got any of those?

Yeah, mine's a little simpler. I'm a storyteller with a skill set. That's about it.

You want to describe what's in your skill set kit bag?

And suddenly overnight I was working with some of the top engineers studios in New York City at the time and I knew nothing about what was going on.

And over the years I've had to get good enough at a certain skill set that I could tell the stories I needed to tell in whatever medium I needed to tell them in.

Yeah.

So that's it. I just have had to learn things so I could tell the stories I needed to tell.

So Emily, I'm gonna ask the same question in a different way. And that is, what is your work in the world.

I am a director, first of theater, but also now I am a producer of theater and media, a writer, an educator, and a nonprofit grant writer.

So when I say that I'm a shapeshifter, I mean in part that I am often multiple people in the course of one day, and also that I'm trying to lead at least a few different lives at once.

Yeah, sounds like the artist way to me. Absolutely. And so, Ned, what is your work in the world?

My work in the world is singer, songwriter, writer of musicals, music producer, engineer, audio engineer, sound designer, voiceover artist.

So, Ned, how'd you get that way?

Well, I had a lot of opportunities as a musician to learn more and more about audio engineering. When the last label I was on went out of business, that was in Nashville, I moved back to New York with the goal of learning to write musicals.

And that road led me to get back into theater as an actor and then have to phase out of acting because of the demands of writing musicals. And so I basically work on these musicals.

So, Ned, all those things are material components that add up to something. You're a maker, right. And all those things help you do your making. Why do you do that?

It's a great way to get this story that Emily and I have written out into the world.

And I think we've done a great job of tackling an incredibly complex, difficult subject, climate justice, in a way that is really compelling, dramatic, funny, with great songs. I mean, I can say this. I've been doing this professionally for 40 years. I'm a good songwriter, and we have a great cast.

Emily did a great job, great job directing the dialogue. And we just feel great that we're getting this opportunity to get our story out to people.

So we're fellow travelers. I'm sitting here in a forest of five guitars and a lot of equipment.

But at the end of the day.

It'S a story making machine.

Yep.

And so, Emily, you could have done.

A lot of things in your life.

You've created a package that adds up to what one giant thing, which is to have the resources and the time and the space to make stories alive in the world.

Why? Why is that important?

It's important to me as a human because it's how I practice being a human. It's how I get to be with other people and figure out the world. And I think that it's important to the world because we are imagination workers.

And if we're interested in crafting something better, making an easier, kinder, more sensical place, to live in. I think imagination is a big piece of that.

Yeah.

And I'm just going to editorialize here and say we're not getting anywhere without new stories. And those stories are not going to come from AI and they're not going to come from the same old.

And the only place where new stories get born really are in that thing that you described as the imagination.

I was going to say in. In the proliferation of AI created content showing up everywhere.

Sometimes I just think about how what Ned and I and our collaborators are making is the antithesis of AI in the amount, the depth of blood, sweat and tears and the years of handcrafting that it required.

So when the things take so much longer than we think they're going to take, that is one of my comforts, that we are making something that only our human brains could possibly make.

Yeah. And even though my only interaction with it is through a set of headphones, the sweat and tears are. It's all in there. You can feel it.

It's strangely similar to the same energy coming through Alan Lomax's recordings from the Smithsonian.

Wow. Wow. That's so beautiful of you to say. I appreciate that. Well, you know, Alan Lomax's recordings are big to me.

Yeah, well, they're big to me too. And of course, maybe I'd say more than half the people listening to this won't even know who Alan Lomax is, but.

Well, Bill, you can edit this out, but back in the. I think.

God, I think it was back in the late 80s, I took a trip to Galax, Virginia, because Alan Lomax had recorded a whole bunch of musicians living in the mountains there. And I found one of the people from the recordings.

Wow.

And he was an old timey banjo player who'd been on the Alan Lomax recordings that were done from that area. And he took a shine to me at one point, as we're talking out from underneath his chair, he slid out a moonshine bottle and we shared moonshine.

Enoch Rutherford was his name.

There you go. We're gonna find Enoch and we're gonna play some of his music.

Cool. Very good.

That's the Kind of stuff I love to do.

And I will say that the first time I fell in love with the capacity of the human voice to change the molecules in the air and in your body was listening to a group called the Stonemans in West Virginia at a small bluegrass festival and listening to that high harmony, singing that very song.

And I ended up falling in love with that sound. So I guess you could say John Hardy changed my life. Part two, the Family Erosicthon so back.

To the major reason that we're having this conversation, which is that you have a work of art that is unfolding as we speak.

That's right.

It's in the can.

But it's. But you're.

Oh, it's not totally in the can yet, Bill. That's why I'm doing 14 hour days. If I work 14 hours a day till the day this last episode drops in December, I'll get it done.

Fantastic. So fresh out of the oven, right? And I have to say, if you're under that kind of pressure, the recording quality is amazing.

Oh, thank you so much. I had to figure out how to approach this, because you would approach an audio drama podcast one way with just dialogue.

If I was going to mix and master a song, I might approach that one way. If I was doing the soundtrack for a movie underneath dialogue, I'd approach that music one way.

Doing this, the music has to exist in the same world as the dialogue in audio, but it all has to sound like it's part of the same world.

Well, now that we've whetted people's curiosities, what is it and how did it come to be?

Yeah, I will tell this story. So what it is a climate revolution with songs, which is a musical audio drama.

So here's what it sounds like when you click play on episode one.

Mythmakers Media presents Metra A Climate Revolution with songs.

By the Hartford. Somehow, some way, the days disappear. Then one day you say, hey, how did I get here?

It's a show that began as a theatrical production.

I primarily work in theater, and about seven years ago, I had this ancient Greek myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses that I was really itching to mess with.

I love Greek mythology so much, but I've often struggled with many pieces of classic literature, feeling like it's not for me because the female characters are so often decentered and the subject of gratuitous violence. And so there's this myth called Erysichthon that's about an imperious king who decides that he wants the. The use of a sacred grove.

And so he cuts down the sacred grove and is cursed by the goddess Ceres with unending hunger. And it's a story about gluttony and unending consumption. And he has a daughter in the story named Metra.

And we get little glimpses of Metra and we learn that Metra becomes a shapeshifter in order to escape the. This fate that's befalling her father and her family.

She gains the gift of transformation and she's able to transform into all these creatures to escape. And so I was drawn to this myth and I gathered a cohort of artists who I really admire, including Ned.

And we got together for a few weekends in a rehearsal space and just started playing with this myth and its relationships to framings of power, its relationship to extractive and kind of greed based power, and its connection in the transformations to a more emergent and regenerative type of power. And so in the middle of those workshops, Ned came in with, I think it was three songs.

And I think it was the songs that are now in the show called Metra's Mother and Ciri's Curse and the one that became Fearful.

Fearful were the first three.

So I have to say that song, Fearful is one of my favorites.

It comes in pretty late in the story that has many twists and turns, but for me, this song really represents one of the most important themes in Metro, namely how intimidation and threat can paralyze resistance and the power of collective courage to break tyranny's spell. Have a listen.

Forgive me, my dear girl, My dear Corian Metra too. All the weight of the world you carry on you. I knew that I could use that to get what I needed from you.

I wasn't smart.

I was just fearful that if I wasn't vengeful, full of blame, I'd be broken down in tearful from all my guilt and pain.

Forgive me.

Forgiven.

Ned came in with these three songs that just broke my heart and made me so, so envious that he has the ability to create songs like this. And it just made me want to make the thing that these songs could be a part of. And so he and I started talking about Metra as this way to.

To talk about the climate crisis which has been created by and is perpetuated by this model of power that demands more and more. And so over the course of the next few years, we wrote it together.

And we wrote it first as a stage show that was developed by my theater company, Flux Theater Ensemble.

And subsequent to that, Ned expanded the music even further, grew it into from a play with songs into like a full musical. And we were able to do a concert reading with that with most of the cast that is now in the audio drama.

And it was so satisfying and so wonderful, but it was also one night and it was this glorious moment of presence with this audience.

And I love theater and theater is my heart, but you spend seven years working on a thing and then at least in our world, if you're lucky, you get to share it with a few hundred people.

So, so true. But then you go from stage to a nine episode serial. How'd that happen?

We have a number of friends who have had some success and are making really beautiful audio dramas. And our friend Sean at Gideon Media was really a beautiful mentor helping us figure out how to reconceive the story.

And so then we were able to expand it from a two hour stage show into a nine episode musical audio drama. And that's what people can hear.

Now, can I interject back to the stage show as far as the development, musicals are really expensive to produce. The biggest expense in a musical are the musicians and Emily's theater company, Flux Theatre Ensemble. Cutting edge, amazing theater.

They've been around for years. Even Bare Bones was gonna cost them twice as much as they were used to producing budget wise for a play.

So we were committed to making it as inexpensive as possible. So we wrote the stage show for one musician on stage.

But there's so much magic in the show, I felt like it would be lame if it was just a guitar or a piano accompanying singers. So we conceived an idea where the musician, the guitarist has this vast series of pedal boards to create these amazing soundscapes. Right.

So the music you're hearing in episode five is what we did live on stage.

Yeah. What we've got right here, a myth making Earthquaking Taking more blanket Shape Shifter. Slippery sisters even.

Well, who could resist Be a little.

Scary Evolutionary Running with the walls while dancing with the shape Shifter Heavy Lifter Taking no sh. Shaking Earthquaking system Shaking wall breaking shapes.

Our goal is that if the show does well enough to attract attention to the stage version. Well, let's say a college wants to license to the show, they could license the Show.

And if they just got the MIDI controller, a few Strymon pedals, and a couple source audio pedals, they could download all my presets and basically recreate every of these vast soundscapes. You gotta get used to loopers. You gotta do all those kind of things, but you can do it.

That's amazing. So I'm gonna break in here with a small story that may seem far afield, but I think is relevant to what you're up to.

The story comes from Bill McKibben's new book, here Comes the Sun.

In it, he talks about how poor farmers in places like Pakistan are installing cheap solar tech themselves and how this is dramatically accelerating solar capacity worldwide, and how these shifts are quietly changing what people believe about what's possible. I think arts fueled stories like yours might be the narrative equivalent of solar panels generating power for social change.

When politics fall short, particularly when we're confronting stories of fear and scarcity, we need to push back with notions of abundance, agency, possibility, and connection.

So when you talk about sharing the production with the source code for your music, it makes it something that other people can use to make powerful work in a very small space with a minimal investment.

Oh, yeah.

I was just gonna say that story is a real world example of emergence as an inspiration for Metra and emergence in the way that Adrienne Maree Brown talks about it, where complex systems arise from a multiplicity of small powers and the way that that kind of power, that emergence and collectivity, can create such miraculous outcomes. And what more could we do if the power structures controlling those systems would just help instead of getting in the way?

Well, Emily, I think you're doing it. You've created a way to make work and connect people that is innovative. But more than that, I think it's also very thoughtful.

In particular, I'd like to commend you on how you've portrayed what I think is the ultimate struggle in resistance and change work, which is how hard it is not to become the thing you're resisting, how hard it is not to go tit for tat, meeting violence with violence, fear with fear, which is, you know, not changing the story or the myth, as you say. It's just changing the colors on the battle flag.

Yeah, I'm really glad that's where you are. This is great.

Part three, the 21st century Erysichthon. So, Ned, another question that rises up for me is, well, obviously Metra is more than a retelling of the Erysichthon myth.

The world you've conjured in this show is a Projected possible future 20 years forward from now. Right.

And from my understanding, that dystopian landscape reflects what you see as the likely upshot of our current climate path, which is driven by institutions and policies and leadership operating as we speak. So could you talk a bit about what you feel are the real life foundations of the future story you're telling in the show?

And they said, and while we're at it, as long as we're all here, let's use our billions of dollars to destroy labor unions, destroy regulations, get rid of all our taxes. This is going to be a long term effort, but we can build the infrastructure. We have billions of dollars to do it.

Here is the New Yorker's Jane Mayer on Democracy now talking about the Koch brothers extraordinary power and their efforts to turn back the clock.

What they've done is kind of a magic trick. They've attracted around them. They've purposely built what they call an unprecedented network. It's a pipeline.

They talk about it too, where they've gathered about 400 other extraordinarily wealthy conservatives with them to create a kind of a billionaire caucus almost. And that's the group that met just as Obama was being inaugurated. Soon after that, they met to figure out how can we obstruct this.

They regarded it as a catastrophe that Obama had been elected and they wanted to see if they could stop change from taking place in the country and keep the order the way it had been for them during the Bush years and maybe even push it further to the right. It's an organization that I think people need to understand is not just about elections.

They've been playing a long game that starts started 40 years ago.

So they spent the past 40 years slamming the Supreme Court with their own justices, grooming justices, paving their whole careers. They gutted the regulation. They didn't just bribe politicians, they created politicians. Joni Ernst in Kansas.

They didn't want deregulation. They didn't want their banks possibly going under because of subprime mortgage schemes. We lived in A different world.

And they moved the Overton Window about what people thought was acceptable. And they got those policies passed and put into law. And the Overton Window is named after Joseph Overton.

And he described that mutable space as a window. I got that right, Right.

So Charles Koch said, okay, we gotta convince people that they want a whole bunch of things that are gonna hurt them. How do we do that? We lie. That's how we're gonna move the Overton Window. They've been very public about all this.

We have to move the Overton Window back, and we have to do it with the truth. And that's the urgency we felt with getting Metra out. We've got things coming up, like, where we dive a little deeper into those things.

We're proud of the way that we tell this really great story. But we have additional bonus material that really helps people know how we got here and how we have to go forward.

As you know, there are a lot of curriculum out there that. That teach what you just described that have not altered the landscape that we're in. The information is there. It's not, like some big secret.

And so now just. I need to be truthful here.

I believe that music, the human voice and story making are a squandered resource for connecting all hearts and minds, firstly and second, to help folks to begin to question the prevailing status quo. And so the question is, what do you think's going on with humans when music and character and drama bring a new story into their lives?

What do you think is going on that doesn't go on when you have a PowerPoint presentation or a college lecture or a speech from a politician? Emily, you want to talk about that?

Yeah, let me think about that.

I guess I'm asking the obvious, which is you two have been working for a long time on this to translate your values and your ideas through music and story, because you believe it can really make a difference. So what makes you believe that?

Yeah, well, Ned wrote into one of the character's beliefs that music speaks to the soul. And so I think that's a grounding power in our work, and I think it's something that we believe.

I think you mentioned connection, Bill, and I think it is about. There's something about music that can attune our frequencies to each other. It can remind us of our humanity and the wonder in that.

And the other thing I really want to say about the dramaturgy of Metra, the pedagogy of Metra is that it was really forged while Ned and I were evolving on our journey as climate activists. We've gotten to be a part of some really powerful movements, not just in the climate movement, but in the immigrant justice movement.

And the way that some of those spaces are evolving, to rewrite the story, to rewrite what power looks like and what collectivity looks like, I think is really powerful. We've gotten to witness some really incredible organizers at places like Climate Defenders and New York Communities for Change.

Ned has done stuff with Third act and the other driving force, I think, for my part of the shaping of Metra has been my relationship with Flux Theater Ensemble, because working on Metra coincided with Flux's work honing what we call an aesthetic of liberation, which means that with everything we're making, with every creative choice, that we're considering a factor in that creative choice or producing choice, is, does this make people more free?

And that, for me, has been a radical framing for my work and really influenced the way I thought about Metra as Ned and I were building it, since Ned and I are creative as well as life partners.

But, yeah, the idea that we can reframe our relationships and reframe our storytelling toward a lens of making each other more free is also at the heart of Metra.

I think, actually there's neuroscientists who have been exploring what you just described. There's a Brain Science Institute here, University of San Francisco, working on dementia, and they're doing cutting edge research.

And one conclusion is that music is a powerful resource that has demonstrable cause, effect for retarding, and in some cases, changing the terrible things that happen to the brain in terms of dementia.

Here's Dr. Bruce Miller from the Global Brain Health Institute talking about music and the brain.

Music, like language, is a form of communication that activates overlapping but different circuits in the brain. We're just beginning to understand that neurologic process, that marvelous play of brain circuits.

The story of reciprocal circuits that lead to our own individual strengths and weaknesses is an area of active study at the Membrane Aging center is, I believe, a key to understanding and treating neurodegeneration. And for that reason, they have a fellowship program. And 25, 30% of all their fellows are artists.

And they're not doing that because they want a tune to whistle.

They're doing it because they know enough about the brain and how humans work to know music can be a conduit to how humans think, believe, react, learn, and connect.

I will.

I'll even take it a step further, Bill and Emily, because to me, and this doesn't have to be for everybody, but for me, the connection is to that of the divine and what we do here on Earth. In connection.

Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou, he wrote about how I sit here and I talk to this person, and when I connect with that person, it creates a triumvirate. We create that connection, that strong connection between an other human being allows the space for us to be aware of the divine in our existence.

And music. We know the vibration of music.

Yeah.

Is connection to something that we don't understand. And that's why I believe a story like Metra. We're not judging people other than the billionaires and the capitalist system that's crushing us all.

Other than that, we don't judge people. In this show, it's all about connection. It's all about healing. And things are really bad when it comes to climate, and they're gonna get much worse.

We have 200 years of wetting our entire economic system to fossil fuels. We ain't gonna get rid of them overnight. What we're trying to do with this story is to make it clear who is responsible for how we got here.

The oil billionaires and the finance billionaires, that this very corrupted version of capitalism that we have now is what's responsible.

And they have to know we have to do something differently to move forward, that we can decide not to be pitted against each other like they're going to try and do that we can work together for a better future.

So how long have you been working on this?

So those seven years are consequential years in the story that you're talking about. This is a complicated question. Doing anything for that long means that you're not just making, you're learning.

You're probably doing more learning than making. So the question is to both of you, I'll start with you, Emily.

What have you learned?

Well, one thing that's interesting about making something over those seven years is that even though we began it during the first Trump administration, I would say from my perspective, a lot of the dystopian elements in the show were first envisioned as a consequence of the kind of incrementalism that I thought we'd fall prey to in something like a moderate democratic presidency. Now that we've gone so far off the rails, I think that Metro's world is a consequence obviously, of some other choices.

One of the things I've learned is that despite this being such a complex topic to tackle, one of the things I've learned is the solutions we need already exist.

The technologies we need to rapidly transition off fossil fuels, the ingenuity we need to continue to create the solutions that are going to give us the systems that can power the world without killing the world. All of that exists. And we really just have to make the choice collectively to move toward it instead of away from it.

Ned, what have you learned? I'm going to make it a little bit more specific. What have you learned about art making in service to story changing?

What have I learned about art making in service to story changing?

Yep.

I've always been drawn to stories that I felt moved the needle somehow.

I mean, I know that one of the biggest things that changed my storytelling approach was that I have a tendency to get really angry about these things and want to lash out. And Emily has been my co creator on this and has been a constant source of guiding me back towards kindness, compassion, and empathy.

Because I get really angry when I think about how shortsighted, arrogant, and the greedy that has brought us to a point where so many people are going to suffer.

So, Ned, she's done a really good job because you're taking some people into the hard future. And as you well know, dystopian stories can make you not want to listen. And that's not the case here. Okay.

We did not want to make disaster porn.

No, exactly. But here's the thing, Ned. You created music that invites people into thinking about a very complicated story.

You involved musicians, singers, and actors who can deliver the goods. I mean, these songs aren't easy.

And we had a very short time to work with these musicians. I mean, literally all the dialogue and music was like no more than 40 hours per person.

Yes.

They. They delivered.

Yeah. Can we shout them out by name?

Oh, please do.

It's a really incredible team that we have been so, so lucky to work with. Jeanette Beyerdell, who is a Tony nominee for Girl from the north Country.

She took Cynthia Erivo's place in the Color Purple.

Yeah. And so she is our powerful, are powerfully voiced Trina and just makes the whole thing sing in a way that is unreal.

And then Cherie J. Davis plays Corey. She's a literal rock star and has been also a Along with Corinna Schulenberg.

The two of them have been involved with this show for years now and have also been brilliant dramaturgical forces in the story. And Fred Inkley, who we were so lucky to meet in the last couple years, who plays Tyler.

And then our Trinamph Chorus, who is absolutely doing just incredible Olympic feats of harmonies, who are Sierra Ryan, Christina Obando Sanchez, and Aaliyah Munch.

So let the old story end Let a better story start on you Cuz the old story's friends are killing me and you so listen up all you boys and and girls Change the myth and you can change the, you can change the world so let the old story end Let a better story start Let a big old better story start on you.

So for those folks who are listening now, this is not probably what you expect in terms of a climate change polemic. It is truly a musical, which is very difficult.

Music theater is a three dimensional art form and you have managed to create three dimensions in a soundscape. It's not something people listen to a lot. Music theater as a serial podcast.

And I think within a very short period of time, at least in my listening, I felt well taken care of. Everybody's doing a good job here. I'll just listen. I'll just go with the story. Right. Which I really appreciate.

So coming to the end of this conversation. Obviously when you started, the world was a different place.

We're now in a story that has many more dimensions than the one that you all started off with with, but with the core issues really still centered power, decision making, the question of who says what's next in a society that has lost the practice of doing the what next dance together. And so where do you see this kind of work in terms of moving out of the dark forest that we find ourselves in these days?

Well, like I said, when it just comes to the climate issue, there are massive forces up against us. And what we're trying to do is clearly delineate what those forces are and how we got where we are now and how we can go forward.

There's a whole system of harm that we live under that got us here and that has to be addressed.

And the thing is, when the world starts really suffering from climate, if the story is out there enough, maybe people will be willing to make the change. Maybe they'll go, oh my God, those folks who were saying that stuff, they were right. Because it's not just going to be putting up solar panels.

That's me, Emily.

I'll say what I'VE hoped that this story will do from the very beginning, is help people feel like radical change is eminently possible, that transformation is possible and is seekable, and that it can come from these emergent sources, it can come from our relationships with each other, and that we don't need to wait. There's no climate hero in Metra. The change comes from the people in a room together figuring out how to move forward.

Yeah.

And by invitation, bringing in more people without giving away the end of the story.

Yes. And just to say, obviously, this will be one of those vehicles.

The connection to Metro will be in our show notes, but I encourage anybody to go on their little podcast thingy, and M E T R A is all you need. It pops up, it's everywhere, and it sounds good on earphones, on regular speakers, and when you're walking by the ocean like I do.

So the last thing I want to ask you is I want you to jump out of your Metro world and just talk about any works of art that have really sparked you recently that you would want to turn other people onto.

Yeah, I got one this summer. I read the novel Antidote by Karen Russell, and she's one of my very favorite writers. She writes incredible short stories.

But this is a hefty novel, and it takes the idea of manifest destiny and turns it into this magical examination of that impulse as a kind of rot at the heart of a lot of the stuff in our world, in our country. And because it's Karen Russell, it's fantastical and weird and surprising and incredible.

Weird, surprising, and incredible. It's really inviting. So, Ned, what is. What is something that's really sparked you?

Well, I'm a returner. I have a tendency to just keep going back and back to a lot of the same things.

So I just like to bring up two writers who, through their connection to nature and their, I believe, connection to the divine, give me great solace and comfort. And that would be Robin Wall Kimmerer and Wendell Berry.

I believe both of those writers just speak to me so deeply, and when I turn to their pages, I walk away a much calmer, kinder human being.

Oh, I was just gonna say Robin Wall Kimmerer has a new book out this year called the Serviceberry, so people should read that.

So. All right, you guys.

All right. I've had so much fun.

This has been so nice speaking to a kindred spirit. You've lifted my day, Bill.

Thank you so much. Adios.

And before we say adios to all of those out there listening, here are a few things that I think are worth holding onto from this conversation. First, you know news stories don't come from shortcuts. They come from years of listening, collaboration, handcraft and care.

The kind of work, you know only humans can do. Next well, music just changes how stories land in the body.

It opens doors that facts alone can't attuning us to each other, to new possibilities and to shared responsibilities. And finally, transformation doesn't need a hero, it needs a room full of people.

Metro reminds us that change comes from collectivity and emergence and the courage to imagine together. So thanks again to Emily and Ned for their work and sharing their stories, and to you for listening.

And be sure to check out the show notes for links to Metra and the artists whose work continues to help.

Us change the story.

Art is Change is a product of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscapes bring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson.

Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. And once again, please know this episode.

Has been 100% human.