Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

I am so excited to have my good friend, Dave Leopoepe, from the band Gang of Yous, back on the show.

Dave hasn't been on the show since episode 31.

This is episode 21, so we've come a long way, both of us since then, and what we've been up to. All good art has a

spiritual component, but how? I mean, sometimes it's obvious, of course. So, for example, a book

or a film will have spiritual content. But what about art that isn't apparently spiritual, but has deep spiritual meaning and resonance?

I wanted to talk about how Spirit finds unlikely locales. So in rock music, for instance,

Dave's latest album with Ganga Yu's Angel in real time, which is one of the most

celebrated albums of 2022, is a beautiful meditation on death and discovery. It has minimalist

composition structures, excessive layering. It sounds like those two things would contradict each other, but they don't.

Oh, I will see you in everything.

I will see you in everything.

I will see you in everything.

As you probably know, if you have listened to the band or you're a fan, the album is about the death of Dave's father. So it is, in a lot of ways,

a communication with the dead. So the album has this sentiment of interaction with a spiritual realm,

the realm of the dead. But being able to write an album like that, a beautiful one, one that actually holds its integrity throughout, means going through a spiritual development process or struggle.

As a musician, as a guy, I wanted to try and find God or find whatever version of him made sense

to me in the music.

You know that story in the Old Testament about Jacob wrestling with the angel?

If I looked at not only in my creative life, for my life in general, Jacob wrestling with

the angel, this furious, this struggle for inheritance against an ancient perennial being

sparsely superior and muscularity and fighting ability, right? And Jacob's wrestling,

...