How have you been, Tom? Have you been surviving the heat? It has been scorching, hasn't it? So bad. It's so bad. I had a debate with a friend about whether or not it's any worse now, and I feel like it always gets awful in D.C. Yeah, it's slumpy. But it, I don't know, this last week just felt heavy, almost hard to breathe. Life is heavy, right. Life is heavy. Yes. We're going to make it all better for everyone here. Welcome to All Songs Considered. The World's Greatest Podcast, whenever you're on. Tom Hisinga, welcome. Oh, thank you, Robin. It's always great to be here. This is one of our contenders episodes. We do one every other

week or so. We keep this running list of the year's best songs, and we add to it throughout the year. These are the songs that we love so much. They're in the running for a spot. They're contenders, for a spot on our best of 2025 lists. When we get to that point at the end of the year.

You know, when I started to dig more into the songs that were playing this week, Tom,

my first thought was that, wow, these really get into some pretty big, global, you know,

world problems like immigration and the environment and religion.

But the more I listened to him and sat with everything,

I started to think that, you know, it's really all from a very intimate and very personal point of view.

Well, you mentioned immigration, and there is kind of a connection to the first piece

we're going to hear.

It's performed by Julia Homo. She's a young American

pianist who grew up speaking Hungarian in her household. And her debut solo album is called

Ellis Island after the Meredith Monk track of the same name. So that's what we'll hear in a

moment.

I think it's really smartly programmed. And in its own way, it really tells the story of Julia Hamosh and her family, the Hungarian

side of her family through a wide variety of composers, some that you would normally

think would be on an album like this, like Bartok and Kurtag,

but some non-obvious composers, too, like Charles Mingus and Meredith Monk.

So this is the title track from the album Ellis Island, and these are all solo piano pieces, yeah?

They are, and what we should be listening for here is this crystalline quality that Hamash brings to the table.

Every note sparkles each with its own importance, especially when the other musical voices fold in.

You know, it's rhythmically taught but not really uptight.

And some pianists tend to just toss off pieces like this, minimalist kind of pieces like this,

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