“Friends & Neighbors” began as a podcast in 2020, inspired by the wisdom of Fred Rogers, seeking to cultivate depth and simplicity in complex lives. Initial episodes explored guests’ personal insights and approaches to building community, managing possessions, and finding reflection. As COVID-19 raged and host Benjamin Wagner grappled with post-traumatic stress, conversations shifted towards mental health. Dialogues with authors, lawmakers, and advocates about trauma, authenticity, and healing illuminated the power of making the “mentionable manageable.” By creating a space for sharing stories and journeys, the podcast provides roadmaps for healing and strategies for healthier lives, embodying Rogers’ belief that “when we look for the helpers, we know there’s hope.”
Listening To 2022
Listening To 2022
It has been an outstanding and occasionally excruciating year. Through it all, I’ve found hope and healing in the shared wisdom of my friends and neighbors. This week, we listen back to some of those insights, inspirations and lessons learned from Senator Sarah McBride, Author Tim Madigan, Music Therapist Kelli Rae Powell and more.
I Remember Everything
I Remember Everything
“I Remember Everything,” the penultimate track on my new album, Constellations, began as another in a long list of “disaster song” but evolved into something noticeably different, deeply instructive and profoundly transformative. This week, I explore how the song helped me understand the biology, psychology and neurology of somatic memory, and how the body keeps the score.
Patrick Riley
Patrick Riley
Cellist Patrick Riley has performed string arrangements on albums by Shawn Mendes, Imagine Dragons, and The Envy Corps, played live alongside The Eagles and Father John Misty, scored big-time Hollywood films – and graced every one of my albums since 2010’s “Forever Young.”
This Is Not A Test
This Is Not A Test
In the 90s, the CDC made the correlation between adverse childhood experiences like divorce, violence, substance abuse and mental illness and adult outcomes like anxiety, depression, addiction and many of the leading causes of death. It’s just that, well, no one told most of us.
Irving Washington
Irving Washington
As outgoing CEO of the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, Online News Association, Irving Washington has led programming and fundraising initiatives for journalists, media professionals, and students worldwide. This week, in the fourth of a series of Media Transformation Challenge-sponsored episodes, MTC Journeys, Irving shares how MTC helped accelerate the organization’s transformation, and how a childhood passion for re-creating mainstream media through the lens of representation connects his career of service at RTDNA, NABJ and ONA.
Jeff Berner
Jeff Berner
Whether as a touring guitarist for the avant-garde rockers, Psychic TV, or producer for artists like Boy George, Lenny Kaye, and Pharoahe Monch, Jeff Berner makes a safe, creative space for those around him to make great art. This week, we trace Jeff’s life from first falling for “Sunshine of Your Love,” to building his studio career, performing in Russia with punk legend Genesis P-Orridge – and producing, performing on and brilliantly wedging an electric bouzouki into my new album, Constellations.
Wherever You Go
Wherever You Go
“Wherever You Go,” Constellations’ fourth single and thesis statement, began as an expression of sadness and isolation but, with time and telling, transformed into something altogether different.
Lily McKown & Hayden Chance
Lily McKown & Hayden Chance
Philly singer/songwriter Lily McKown & Wilmington psyche rocker, Hayden Chance (a/k/a Chvnce) have both graduated to national stages but are close enough to rock ‘n roll’s rickety attics and ratty basements to remember the stale smell of beer and sharp shock of an ungrounded microphone. This week, we discuss early influences, song craft and what it feels like to finally arrive.
Tyler, Texas
Tyler, Texas
From a chance meeting with Nashville waitress with a profoundly personal and deeply universal story to a lushly realized FAME Studios recording, then mixed and mastered masterpiece featuring the Muscle Shoals’ legendary Swampers, L.A. Rocker Casey Shea, Brooklyn guitarist Jeff Berner and Des Moines cellist Patrick Riley, this is the story of one song’s journey to your ears.
Noreen Gillespie
Noreen Gillespie
When the Associated Press’ Noreen Gillespie walked through doors of the Media Transformation Challenge at Poynter Institute in 2019, she was tasked with evolving the AP domestic news operations amidst a rapidly changing ecosystem. Three years later, the AP’s approach to U.S. news is wholly transformed, and Noreen’s applying everything she learned to coverage of the rest of the planet.
Chris Bullard
Chris Bullard
Sound Mind Executive Director Chris Bullard talks about growing up in L.A., sharing a mic with Kris Kristofferson, being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his mission to end the stigma that surrounds mental health through the power of music.
The Secret Song
The Secret Song
We all have secrets, truths that gnaw at us, crush our spirit, and kill us from the inside out. The second single from my forthcoming album, Constellations, is that moment of realization and transformation made manifest. On this week’s episode, I share the journey of writing and recording of “The Secret Song,” from inception to release, and explore how it came to help me, as Fred Rogers often said, “make the mentionable manageable.”
