Me + TED + Yo-Yo Ma
Today’s a big, exciting (and complicated) day for me.
I have a new song out – my first new song in ten years – and it features Yo-Yo Ma on cello, if you can believe it. (I still can’t.)
The song is called “Between There and Here,” and it’s about the connection that we keep with the people we’ve lost. More specifically, it’s about the connection I keep with my mom, who passed away last year. I wrote it a couple weeks after her funeral; one night, I had a dream where I saw her again, and we had a conversation, and it felt like twenty years ago. The next morning, I already had a songwriting session planned with my dear friend and collaborator, Jenny Owen Youngs, and I went into it with this heavy, aching feeling in my limbs and heart. But it was a feeling I knew that I wanted to breathe out of my body, to hold on to, and look at, and think about it. So, with her gentle and steady help, we wrote the beginnings of the song.
Jenny was incredibly kind to me in those first raw hours, and over the next several months, I got to experience a similar kindness in others. Over Zoom one day, Yo-Yo Ma spoke to me for a long, long time, and asked me about my life, my dreams — and he offered to play cello on my song. (He offered. I mean, I would never have dared to ask him.) I enlisted my friend Daniel Hart to play violin and viola and help me get the string arrangement ready for Yo-Yo to record. And then Yo-Yo played cello from his home studio in Cambridge, while I sat in my garage in Los Angeles and gave him some notes (again, this does not seem like a real sentence, even as I type it).
I finished the song with producer and mixer John Congleton, someone whose work has been featured on Song Exploder many times – but we’d never met. But then we got together, and had a long conversation, and began our collaboration. And at every step, I felt like he handled the song with a careful touch.
There’s also a music video for the song that’s out today. I co-directed it with Prashanti Aswani, an animator and director who magically came into my life exactly at the moment when I was daydreaming about the animated video I wanted to make. The folks at Dropbox, who have shown me so much support over the years, stepped in to help make that daydream a reality. Then, my generous friend, the writer Jonny Sun, helped me express what I was trying to say in what was a new medium for me. And I was able to pour so much of what I was feeling into that video.
So, it’s an exciting day – but a bittersweet one, because the person I’d be most excited to play the song for isn’t here to hear it. But I hope you’ll listen and share it with someone close to you instead.
The artwork for the song features a photo of me holding a photo I took of my mom in 1998, I think. The actual year doesn’t really matter. This image of her, at this time in her life, is how I remember her in my head.
Today would be overwhelming already with all of that, but it’s also the day my TED Talk comes out. It’s not a coincidence; my talk is about what you can learn when you listen closely, and how making Song Exploder has changed the way that I relate to people. I spoke about how taking the time to hold someone’s story deepens your connection with them, and what you can do to help make that happen. The talk is bookended by excerpts of my song, and followed by a live performance of it. After a very long hiatus from my life as a performing musician, I played guitar and sang, solo, in front of a crowd of a few hundred people at the conference. It was a wonderful and challenging experience.
I know this is a somber tone for a newsletter that’s ostensibly about delightful things; please forgive the exception, and all the feelings (and parentheses) that leaked out. And if you’d like to watch or hear these things that I’ve made, here are a bunch of links where you can.
Listen to “Between There and Here” on the music platform of your choice.
Watch the music video for the song.
Watch the TED Talk and live performance.
Listen to the audio of the TED Talk on the Song Exploder podcast.
Thanks,
Hrishikesh
ps:
- I’m @HrishiHirway on Instagram and Twitter.
- I maintain a Spotify playlist of soothing songs called NapCaviar.