Connections

I just wanted to send a note with a few things that have brought me a modicum of happiness amid the miasma of hard times these days, along with a couple of updates.

This Saturday afternoon, if you’re in Los Angeles, I’m going to be on stage at Vulture Festival for an event they’re calling Song Exploder Exploder. It’s a conversation with Vulture editor Jesse David Fox about the creative choices I make for a podcast about the creative choices that get made for songs. I think it will be fun, or at the very least, pretty nerdy, so if you’re with me in the center of the fun + nerdy + music + podcasts Venn diagram, I hope you’ll come. Tickets and details can be found here.

Further in the future, I’ll be in Toronto for a very special event with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. On April 5th, I’ll be joining the orchestra and music director Gustavo Gimeno to break down Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” As Gustavo and I talk about some of the most significant and interesting parts of the composition, the various sections of the orchestra will play those bits and pieces live, culminating in a full concert performance. I’ve never done anything like this, but I’ve dreamed about it for years, so I’m very excited they’ve invited me to collaborate with them. Also, the Toronto Symphony has done a nice thing and set up a discount for anyone who reads this newsletter and wants to come to the event. You can get tickets here, and [switches to podcast voice] use the code ACCEPTCOOKIES to get 15% off. 

I put out a song this spring called “Cascade,” which you might remember from a newsletter I sent about it at the time. I’d written that song with my friends in the band mmeadows, Kristin Slipp (who also sings in Dirty Projectors) and Cole Kamen-Green (whose trumpet playing can be heard on albums by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, NBD). Their band is wonderful, and I remixed one of my favorite songs of theirs. You can hear it here – “By Design (Hrishikesh Hirway Remix).”

I spent several weeks riveted to the French espionage show The Bureau, aka Le Bureau des Légendes, which aired from 2015 to 2020. I’ve now watched all five seasons (via AMC+, which I didn’t know was a streaming channel, but like Royal Tenenbaum once said, what isn’t these days?) It’s thrilling, suspenseful, and heartbreaking, with complicated characters and impeccable performances. As the seasons progress, it starts to feel a bit like The Wire, where the world just grows and grows, and you see the repercussions of one decision reverberate in an entirely separate plot line. It isn’t the easiest show to recommend, because it is heavy, and full of the complicated, terrible geopolitical realities and horrors that we live with already, but it’s brilliant TV. 

Wordle is not really my thing; there’s too much chance and not enough strategy involved for my tastes, but I’m grateful for the rise in daily word games it spawned. I’ve become obsessed with Connections from the New York Times, where you have to sort 16 words into four categories (you have to figure out what the categories are). I’m in a group text chain with my friend and West Wing Weekly co-host Joshua Malina, along with his parents and his sisters, and every day, we just paste all of our different word game results and congratulate or commiserate accordingly.

From the literal Accept Cookies department: there were two recent articles about how cookie shops are proliferating in Los Angeles (via LA Times) and in New York (via Grubstreet). I am sending them along here despite the fact that I was not consulted for either article.

And lastly, as Thanksgiving approaches, I’m thrilled that Salt & Straw has brought back our ice cream collaboration from last year, Mom’s Mango Pie. You can get it in their stores or you can order pints to be delivered to your home. 

Thanks!
Hrishikesh

PS: In case you missed any of them, the last few Song Exploder episodes have included the theme to ‘Only Murders in the Building’; Alvvays breaking down their big hit “Archie, Marry Me” (also the song that led them to becoming a band); Laufey on the song she wrote that broke all of Spotify’s jazz streaming records; Kesha on a song she co-wrote with her longtime collaborator – her mom (!!!); and Paramore on the love song singer Hayley Williams wrote about guitarist Taylor York.  

PPS: I was a guest on the podcast Makes Sense, with the very charming Karen Chee (Late Night with Seth Meyers) and Chanel Miller (Time 100). I told them about the arc of my happiness (or lack thereof) over time while writing songs, and doodled this graph while talking to them:

A helpful way for me to keep my priorities straight!