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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. When was the last time you really listened to someone? Not while checking your phone, not while waiting for your turn to talk, but actually let their words land.

It's harder than it sounds, and it might be the

most important thing we've stopped doing. It's easy to get distracted, and we tend to listen to

other people that way, too. But you can't really get immersed if that's the case. Imagine trying

to listen to a song while singing a different song in your head. You can't do it,

or you can't do it well, and you can't fully appreciate what someone else is saying if you're

thinking about something else. That's Rishi-Kesh-Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder,

the beloved podcast and Netflix show, where musicians break down how a song was made layer by layer.

In 2021, he gave a TED talk about what happens when

you take that same kind of listening and turn it toward people. I started to wonder, could I

try listening to people the way that I was trying to listen to music? Because when someone

tells you something, just like with the song, there can be all these layers within it. There can be

all this context that you're missing.

It's a talk that stays with you, partly because of what he teaches

and partly because of what he shares, including a beautiful song about his mom

called Between Here and There, featuring cellist Yo-Yo-Yo Ma.

After more than a decade, helping other artists tell their stories and helping us think about listening,

he's made his most personal work yet, a solo album called In the Last Hour of Light.

He describes it as a sort of memoir about losing his mother, nearly losing his father, and learning to let go.

We caught up with him earlier this month to talk about his ideas about listening and how they've

evolved, what he's learned from hundreds of conversations with artists, and what it feels

...