Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hello, friends, and welcome to the first

week of my aggressively happy podcast series, where we'll be exploring how to patch together a life of joy and

beauty in this weary old world. I'm very excited to share this interview with you all. I recorded it

quite a few months ago. And it was a real lark that I got to have it happen because my guest,

Christopher Tin, is someone who I'm a little bit of a fan of.

I discovered his music during the depths of lockdown.

And his album, Calling All Dawns, was something that kind of filled my soul with joy in the midst of a very dull season when I was just writing PhD locked inside and couldn't do much other than fail at bread baking and brew yet another pot of coffee.

To my delight, he said yes when I reached out to his agent to see if he would talk with me about music and exploration in life and joy.

And to my even greater delight, I discovered that he is most

definitely an aggressively happy person. So I hope that you enjoy listening to this interview

as much as I enjoyed conducting it. Today I'll be talking with Christopher Ten, a two-time Grammy-winning composer of concert and media music.

And by media music, I mean that he has composed the music to some of your favorite video games.

Posting a long list of awards, Christopher broke records with Baba Yetu, a setting of the Lord's

Prayer in Swahili, originally written for the

video game Civilizations 4, and the first piece of music written for a video game to ever win a

Grammy. Christopher's music has been performed all around the world, from the Lincoln Center to the

Kennedy Center to the Hollywood Bowl, the United Nations, and the Carnegie Hall, where he had an entire

concert devoted to his music. Christopher's music reflects that kind of universal tendency with

a engagement with many different languages and texts and myths. And I think Christopher's Twitter

tag sums it up pretty well, where he writes, I wrote that

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