Episode 41 - One Wild Life Body (Part 1)

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[Music] what is it like to be born [Music] how strange that every one of us has had the experience and not one of us knows the answer to that question what did it feel like to see light for the first time to fill one's lungs with earth's atmosphere to be introduced to color and form [Music] how strange and terrifying it all must have been what is it like to live in a human body pre-ego pre-memory pre-construct i imagine there wasn't any separation between any of it [Music] there was no sound versus sight delineations no words or concepts no you or i just business bright and wild still if you could put words to the experience what might they be i imagine one might miss the warmth of the world that you just left miss that steady drum of the mother's heartbeat the muffled music of her voice and then what is it like to be cradled in her arms from the outside for the first time and recognize her voice i imagine it would feel like home [Music] well welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody it's a really special one because today we're interviewing the folks in gunger about the final chapter of the one wildlife trilogy called body and holy cow that record's hot can i just thank you for saying holy cow i just talked about this yesterday i said holy cow really loudly about something in a coffee shop a very strange thing that's like one of my favorite phrases it's me too it's never in style ever never never wait wasn't that in style didn't bart simpson say holy cow don't have a cow don't have a cow man that's true yeah i think holy cow is like leave it to beaver [Laughter] which makes it the worst possible introduction for this show i really i'm not kidding this one's a tough one for me because i feel like body is an experience not just a record and i'm not only remiss to ruin uh some of the flow and the surprise of the track arrangement for people i also don't want to dispel any notions i may have about song meanings that could be incorrect i think i don't know if it's correct or incorrect though yeah well i know i guess it's art i've i feel so underprepared i've listened to the record end to end five times really and three of those times uh were part of i listened to the entire trilogy whoa and i could be projecting on my like own experience with the trilogy from that but it seems to me like there is a thematic sound to the trilogy but it's only present when you listen to the three records in order and even the cover art where you have the the lighter background for soul the medium background for spirit and the darker background for body is mirrored in a sonic transformation that is most striking when you compare soul to body when we put spirit in the middle it builds a bridge between you know two pretty different sonic landscapes and makes the whole thing very thematic yeah yeah so here's how we intended the trilogy to work thematically so yeah the first one is soul when i think of the word soul i think of the word essence i climbed up a lion frog what is the essence of a human being the story [Music] the personality the passion i was born [Music] spirit is that thing that we kept singing about through the whole trilogy the uh all beneath the all the breath within the breath [Music] spirit just is that which holds it all together i could see the stars dancing with the moonlight hear the strings ringing out in the sunrise that which keeps trees growing into the sky and our cells working together to form something larger and greater than just themselves spirit there's also that thing that drives us to love to justice wanting to see the world right the arc of the universe body is spirit manifest [Music] it's the word taking on flesh body is how spirit expresses itself and evolves into soul [Music] so throughout the trilogy we wanted to we wanted all three to work together but we also wanted each individual album to be able to stand on its own so body definitely fits into the thematic arc of the trilogy as a whole but also is a concept album on its own so it follows the development of a single life single body from birth to death that's kind of interesting to me the way that it's there's this like very visceral component in how beat driven it is but to me it actually ended up being the heaviest of the three existentially yeah yeah um now that might just be because it's it's so because of its body focus you end up contemplating your mortality so often on this record i was pretty swept away through through the process which by the way the first time i heard it i didn't know i had repeat on and so when i ended the end uh itunes went right back into introduction and i didn't know that that was happening so it's only when line of rock started that my brain exploded i i can't reach that act [Music] can you say the name of the first song it's called birth birth have you read nutshell by ian mcewen no no it's a novel he's a he's a british novelist he's really really an incredible writer and his most recent novel is told from the it's a murder mystery told from the perspective of an unborn baby so what this baby is surmising is happening outside the womb and then as the baby's kind of moving towards birth so i finished that book and was pretty moved by it and then immediately started listening to body for the first time uh so i go from that into the song birth oh that's cool which was amazing i guess i i'd never considered it before uh from a parental perspective you know birth is this this moment of gain uh but from the perspective of one being born there's a real loss that you kind of touch on in the first couple of stanzas a loss of warmth the loss of security loss of the constant presence of the mother's heartbeat and this this that our our life begins being completely unmoored from everything that we find familiar those first few moments are our first existential crisis and that's and that's what we're trying to get at with the second song step into the light we're also talking meta here because it's still kind of step into the light literally but then it kind of moves into like until if we almost die and that's that's tied into the birth story so there's this whole thing of like our lives speak of something of how things are at a deep that's like the biology speaks of the spirit beneath the biology in some way we come we we do enter this world unmoored and and as we enter anything as we enter into new ideas and as we as jesus talked about are born again um when when our eyes are opened even at any point of our lives to new realities to truer things uh that often if not always is associated with some sort of unmooring and some sort of loss and some sort of death i was surprised to hear a piece that unproduced on a gungah record and delighted yeah i'm putting it second second is real different i'm always a fan for something like that i love the unproduced i mean that's that's one of my favorite things and it feels like it opens it up from the very beginning like a surprise from the beginning and that's unexpected i love when michael's for a good untuned vocal and a one-take guitar this is the first record ever that we really didn't use any auto-tune through the whole record i mean there's a couple little spots i think that i may have tuned some bgvs slightly just on some of the really tight full passages all kinds of stuff playing together something needed to be a little tighter but we left things a lot more gritty as far as hardly any time correcting on players no tuning on vocals for those of you listening who don't make music for a living bgvs or background vocals oh yes thank you and uh and the other thing is i hate to break it to you you and lisa don't have pitch problems so i didn't notice a lack of auto-tune at any point oh that's nice i'm pretty pitch sensitive so i think i'll uh you know i would have caught that i there's something that takes the humanness out of it to me when it's things are overly tuned and it's kind of funny one of my favorite things about that is the breath you take at the beginning it almost makes people take that breath with you and relax you go okay and it sets the tone for being present for being here because it was even a lot it was a longer intro than i would have done as well just strumming a c chord sitting there strumming that c chord uh normally i would be like go against get to it um but i literally just yeah one mic sitting in the middle of the room and kind of yeah taking a breath we're about to launch into a lot of stuff here we've just come into a new world just take a breath be here for a second the whole record is like that it's very unhurried comfortable in its own skin uh not afraid to leave space that's that's something i noticed in every song every track it kind of made me think of um the rhythm of a body um how there's space between breaths and there's silence between heartbeats and every system of our bodies involves this kind of sine wave motion that includes a trough one of the things i as a listener experienced was that same kind of space and rhythm across the entire record it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better health that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists so now we'd like to present to you the song's birth and step into the light in their entirety and to kind of get you into the flow of where this is coming within the trilogy will actually play the end of the spirit record so you have some [Music] context [Music] [Music] ah [Music] [Music] [Music] ah [Music] [Music] what is this like why does it hurt where of is world what is that sound why is it so loud where is [Music] [Music] i know that voice is singing that song please do not stop now it feels so right [Music] is [Music] [Music] uh [Music] um [Music] [Music] god expresses [Music] we almost died step into the light [Music] ego i kind of found ego to not only fit very well chronologically coming after birth that being developed but also to speak to how digital culture is changing us and changing our ego formation and how we find value this whole the whole record if not the whole series the attempt is to move people to being present with their lives to look at their lives with open eyes and experience it with open hearts and be present in it all [Music] but we all have these egos that develop that really try to take us out of that moment we have these judgments about ourselves and other people the pre-ego there's there's not this rabies don't judge other babies you know my my diaper was less full than your diaper my mom's breasts are way better than your mom's breasts which look at those thankfully that's that's a comparison that even we don't even have to usually go through when we have egos that's we just avoid that thank goodness but the ego sets in and starts to have all these concepts and constructs about the self but what this does is take us out of that present moment and think that by getting something else by getting more attention by getting more views by getting more listens on the song that we just released more views on the youtube page that somehow will be intrinsically more love it's a lie right i mean it's an illusion and when we can see through the illusion and realize yeah you can get 100 million views on the on your viral video your tweet you go viral you're still just gonna be you i mean donald trump goes viral with every single thing he tweets but he still wakes up in the morning as donald trump poor bastard the selfies the tension the and i look at my girls all the time and they're look let me do this look look look look and and as silly as i think that can be sometimes we're doing it we're all still needing that attention and psychologically a lot of us are walking around still as toddlers yeah [Music] an interesting take to me was the inclusion of the technology language and ego formation because a it's indicting to me as an adult but then it also made me think of my children and growing up with us a semi-public figure dad i've noticed that if i take a picture with them and post it online a few minutes later they ask me how many likes it has or how many views and that they are looking for that validation already yeah emily did that once and it freaked me out yeah like we're training ourselves that we have not just an ego but an ego with analytics so here it is the song ego hope you [Music] enjoy [Music] i betrayed precisely who i am a thousand judges [Music] 15 minutes [Music] can you see me [Music] see me [Music] me [Music] lovely love me [Music] still [Music] what we have is [Music] lovely [Music] um [Music] so this album actually does have more than three songs on it but because we really wanted to kind of take our time and be able to play the songs for you in their entirety we decided to do something special this week and break up this episode into five parts where you get a new podcast every day how exciting so this is the first part and we will continue to post new parts every day we'd like to thank our patrons on patreon for making this show possible for doing what we do and being part of it if you'd like to become one of the liturgists who make this show happen please go to the liturgists.com podcast and there will be a link on the right hand side of the page for patreon all of the patrons actually get a bonus podcast as well that's called the liturgist conversations that releases on the off weeks of this show but please tell your friends about the podcast about this record about mike's book all the stuff that's going on it's an exciting time around here and we're so glad to be doing it alongside of all of you so uh listen this week with us as we go through the rest of this record and let us know what you think at social media it's always at the liturgists or for this music that we're talking about it's at gunger music alright well peace and love everybody talk to you soon [Music] [Music] you