Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people of present-day Marin County.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize-nominated folk singer, a song collector, and the author of The Nightingale, Notes on a Songbird.

I spoke with Sam last year in the midst of England's nightingale season, about the transformative experience of creating songs in collaboration with the Nightingale, the stories of ancestors

that are passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is open with silence.

It is now once again Nightingale season in the UK, and this week I'll be experiencing Sam

singing with the Nightingales firsthand,

filming this special exchange of song for a new documentary series we're working on

that will be released next year.

In the meantime, we are revisiting this special conversation,

one filled with song from both Sam and the Nightingales.

Sam, really lovely to join you today.

Thanks so much for being here with us.

Thank you, Emmanuel, for having me.

So I spent, you know, the last week or so, kind of immersed

in your work, reading your new book, The Nightingale, listening to your albums and some of the

remarkable recordings you've done singing with Nightingales. And I was really struck by the

relationship and parallels between folk music and birdsong,

both in your work, but also more broadly in the deep connection to place and landscapes they both embody.

And this is something you write about.

...