We're so conditioned by capitalism, by money, by having careers and, you know, raising families and having all these responsibilities

that we tend to get on the train and not even know where the train is going.

Oh! This is Joe Wong.

Welcome to the Trap Set, where each week we explore the lives of drummers.

I want to play something for you. The hour is ended, can't you see?

There is no way now to be free.

In the shadow of the season, without a reason to carry home.

You're hearing Shadow of the Season by screaming trees, featuring my guest Barrett Martin on drums.

Martin's strong sense of time and unique approaches to orchestration and arrangement earned

him a place in several seminal Seattle rock bands, including Skin Yard, Screaming Trees, and Mad Season.

After the dissolution of those bands, Barrett worked as a session drummer, playing on film and TV scores, and on albums by artists such as R.E.M., Queens of the Stone Age, and Mark Olson.

He also earned a master's degree in ethno-musicalology and has traveled the world extensively, studying musical traditions.

The devout Buddhist, Martin was ordained a Zen monk in 2000.

Over the course of the last year, he's released his sixth album as a leader, Transcendence,

a book, The Singing Earth, and won a Grammy for producing the best Portuguese language album,

Jardine Pomer.

And now my conversation with Barrett Martin.

I grew up in the forests of southern Washington, so pretty far out in the sticks, south of Olympia.

And it was kind of in the foothills of the Black Hills Forest.

And I do remember as a little boy going outside of our house in the middle of the night in the summers.

And because we were surrounded by kind of a water system so you could hear frogs and birds and just the sound of the forest.

And that honestly is the first thing I can actually remember doing.

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