Harmonious World #28 Luna Pearl Woolf

Episode 28 features an interview with my second Grammy-nominated guest of 2021, composer Luna Pearl Woolf.

'Fire and Flood' is nominated for Best classical compendium and we now have to wait until 14 March to find out if it's successful. Even the nomination is a huge accolade for this wonderful album. There's lots of laughter, and discussion of growing up playing clarinet in band, which is how I, too, start my much less significant musical career. This was another joyful interview and I hope you enjoy it.

To find out more about Luna, click here.

Thank you for listening to Harmonious World. Please rate, review and share: click on the link and subscribe to support the show.

Don't forget the Quincy Jones quote that sums up why I do this: "Imagine what a harmonious world it would be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing."

Transcript

Hilary 0:00

Hello, this is Hillary Robertson with episode 28 of Harmonious World. I I started renumbering the episodes from season three and it just didn't work. So, what was episode one of season three is actually episode 27. So I apologise if you've already listened to it and thought it was episode one. I got really confused and I didn't want to confuse myself further. I'm very excited this week to be joined by Luna Pearl Wolf, whose album Fire and Flood has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium. It's a very interesting piece of very modern, very 21st century classical music, but the cello especially is beautiful. Matt Heimovitz is the cellist on the album, and it's absolutely beautiful. Foreign Flood is a collection of pieces, including a deeply stirring mass, a couple of Leonard Cohen compositions, too. One of the most beautiful pieces is the cello choir concerto, April Moi le Deluge, which was inspired by Hurricane Katrina. Foreign Flood features to the fire for choir, and that's the choir of Trinity Wall Street on this album. And then it also features the April Moi Le Deluge for Solo Cello and Choir. And then Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen and Misa in Fines Orbis Terai, One to One to One. And then the amazing Who by Fire, Leonard Cohen, which is for three female voices and cello. I really enjoyed my conversation with Luna, and I hope you do too. Hello. How are you? I'm great, thank you, Luna. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I'm well. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Hilary 1:52

Thank you for joining me. It's uh it's a it's a real honor. I'm so um impressed with this album. It's amazing. Thank you. I mean, the Grammy nomination in itself is enough to prove that it's you know well respected, but I have to say the Grammy nomination was so shocking to me.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

It was so out of the blue. I I mean I completely wrote this album off from the sense of like any kind of wide popular response. So it's it's really amazing for me.

Hilary 2:28

Yeah, it's it's not an easy listen, is it?

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Well, no, it's not really, yeah, it's not really meant to be in the sense that you know it's it's intense stuff, it's intense subject matters, and yeah.

Hilary 2:40

It's it's it's incredible, and and unfortunately, now we were expecting to have the Grammys in some form at the end of the month, and of course it's now gonna be the middle of March instead.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

So I was like, you know, they weren't gonna put us on the big show anyway, couldn't they just let us know? Yeah, yeah, it'll be fun to be all the more suspense. I like suspense.

Hilary 3:02

Yes, absolutely. So tell me how Fire and Flood came about, and how long has it taken you to get these recordings together and the compositions together?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

This album is it's it's interesting. It at first it just had the uh it came about with the idea of music for voices and instruments, because I'm I'm I'm writing in in my professional life a lot of opera now, which is you know big projects that hardly ever can be recorded easily. Uh, but at the same time, I I had all these um smaller works that I felt had an equal kind of drama to them that involved solo voices or choruses. And um that was the initial idea. And when we we were looking at the various pieces that fit that bill, like Après Mala Deluge, like one-to-one to one, um I brought out this piece that I hadn't looked at for decades that I started in in 1994, or I finished in 1994, I must have started it sometime before, and I revised it for this for this album. So in fact, it's it's really a um kind of a retrospective of my works for voices over these 25 years.

Hilary 4:11

Right, and obviously there's the two cover versions as well, the Leonard Cohen pieces. Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Right. Those were initially inspired, in fact, by a UK group. Um, there's a vocal trio uh called Voice that was touring with Matt Heimovitz for for a couple of seasons. And I wrote these arrangements with them in mind, but it didn't quite fit them. I they weren't particularly enthusiastic about these arrangements, and and I still thought they had something in them, and I really wanted to explore what that could be. And I think the voices that that we chose for the album really, you know, highlights what what the what those arrangements want to be.

Hilary 4:47

Yeah, yeah. And and it's very interesting because you're quite unusual in in a good way, um, in having this, especially the cello and voices, and especially the um the one-to-one-to-one, which is three female voices, three cellos and three basses, that's just joyous. Uh the textures of that is just beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Thank you. Thank you so much. That was so much fun to write, and and actually a real challenge in some in some ways. Um, but the the concept of writing it for the three three cellos, three basses, and three voices was it that that idea sort of started off the whole piece. So then from there I had to build what would what would that make sense, what would really bring that out in the best possible way. And finding the text was difficult. Um, but then I had so much fun with with those with that orchestra of of sounds and the way that they can interplay and go in and out of all the different ranges and still give you that real sort of sensuous space.

Hilary 5:55

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Can talk me through your your background, where you where you came from, how this all how how you've ended up here, because your it, you know, your your influences must be very I'm guessing at some point I want to say non-American. I don't know. It just doesn't feel like you know, it's not it's certainly not the American songbook or the American, you know what I mean? It's not it doesn't feel like folk and um that kind of American influence. So so talk me through where you where you think this came from.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

God, that's such an interesting question. You know, when I was a teenager, I was playing um clarinet in the orchestra and I was singing in the choir. But even before that, I was hanging out with my dad, improvising songs at the piano and percussion, and being thinking of music as this very joyful kind of thing that that fills the room with family and and um uh and also I I think there are influences that go, even though I'm not a particularly religious person, um the Jewish tradition has these beautiful musical elements that that really guide the way we feel in the ceremonies. And so even if I was only going as a kid twice, three times a year, I still sort of absorbed this very melodic, very um singerly way of worshiping together. And I do sometimes now hear those those kinds of sounds in my music more than I might have expected, you know. So going back to sort of when I decided that I wanted to be a composer, that came more out of the vocal tradition than out of the instrumental tradition. Even though I just loved chamber music, I think my favorite musical experience in the clarinet was playing a Mio trio that was had had a bit of jazz in it. And chamber music is such a revelation when you're a young player because the first thing you do is, you know, just try to slog through, and then you know you're in a big band or something. But when you get to play your own part and you're interacting individually with other people, those experiences are what make you feel like being a musician has a way of an individual expression that that could could mean something. Um but definitely the the combination of text and words is where I really felt that that I wanted to speak as a musician, as a composer. Um you asked how I got from there to here, and I I've never tried to assess that question because um, you know, it's a it's a circuitous route to understanding your own inclinations. You know, so looking back, I can I can see that. The first piece that I wrote in a you know real composition class when I was in high school, but they sent me over to Amherst College to take the seminar with uh with Lewis Spratlin, who's a wonderful composer, friend of mine, tune up now. Um, and I was you know a 16-year-old in a class full of 20, 20-year-olds. Um and the first thing I did was a setting of, you know, it was a song setting, but not like you say, not in the American songbook sense or even in a leader sense so much. No, it's more like a storytelling idea, and that has really been prevalent through my whole trajectory, even when I'm writing instrumental music, I'm trying to tell a story, and I'm trying to get the characters, get get the instruments to represent characters, to transform their emotional trajectory through the sort of course of the piece. And um now that I'm working with opera, which I feel is is so sort of ingrained in in me, even though not sure where that comes from exactly. Um I I look back and I recognize that sometimes when I've had challenging experiences in instrumental pieces with the performers who didn't know what I was talking about or resistant to the musical ideas, it had to do with this with the idea of performers in general as storytellers, and that's a lot of times times instrumentalists aren't seeing themselves in that role. They see themselves more in a music, an absolute music role.

Hilary 10:32

And also I think I think musicians maybe, especially when there are when there are voices, musicians tend to be the support underneath, and you know the voices are the ones that that tell the story. Whereas that doesn't feel like the case with yours, that that that the instruments are, as you say, it almost feels as if they're taking on the characters within the the whole.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Right. And I and that feeling has always been very strong in what in the way I see music. Um and so over the years I think I worked toward that in my own sort of blind way until I discovered opera and and really started doing it in a more kind of like this is you know, so celebrating, celebrating that idea that this is what I really came here to do. Right.

Hilary 11:28

Yeah great stuff. Um I really wanted to talk to you, especially about because it feels like the at the heart. There are for me, there are two pieces that are at the heart of this album. The first is the the Katarina one. Oh, yeah, Apremoile Deluge. That feels to me like that's kind of at the heart of this, your which I believe is is kind of your response to the Katarina hurricane disaster.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

It was. It was a piece that I wrote just immediately after that, after the hurricane and its aftermath. And I was in a funny situation. I actually had this commission to write a work for Cello and choir, and and I had a completely different text by the same poet, Eleanor Wilner. But then, you know, we were all captivated by what happened in the news, and I remembered lying on my couch thinking, I can't write this. This is not the piece I want to write. And I and I called up Eleanor and I said, What do we do? You know, this this thing is so powerful, what what we're watching and what we're experiencing as a world and as a nation. Um, this is actually I was living in Montreal at the time, but I had just moved there like months earlier, so I really still felt very much as though I was living in the States. And um uh and she agreed with me that that we could we just put aside the previous idea, every the entire concept of the previous piece, and she wrote these incredible words for me just in like, I don't know, a week or two. And I set to work on the piece, and I had already conceived for myself various I I had given myself a toolkit or a paint box of ideas, of textures, of relationships between the cello and the choir that I wanted to work with. And so they were just sort of ready to pour out of me, and I had I had a really passionate response to what happened at Hurricane Katrina. And now that we're now that we're where we are right now, January 8th, is it? Yeah, 21. And we've just witnessed what happened at the at the Capitol building in the US two days ago, it's it's actually kind of hard to remember what it felt like in 2005 to see our government fail the people of Louisiana, especially the Lower Ninth Ward, to ignore the suffering of black people, to feel think nothing of crushing an entire cultural icon, iconic place where jazz came from, where blues came from, to to watch that happen was was what felt like a blow to the gut because there was this thing called the American Dream, which the world really believed in up until that moment. And you felt the air go out of that at when we were watching what happened after Hurricane Katrina. And those feelings, the the disappointment, the the idea of this dream being turned on its head were what instigated those feelings. But then the the piece, I wanted it to celebrate what New Orleans had brought to us as musicians, and and the to the joy of that, and and to know that that's not it hadn't also hadn't been killed. Even if the American Dream was was uh damaged beyond repair, there was um there was what New Orleans had given us.

Hilary 14:53

Yes. Yeah, and that it it was gonna take more than the floods to destroy that, to wipe it out entirely, although obviously the devastation's been terrible.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

On a human level, absolutely. And that's that's the br the crazy, you know, now that we're so many years past this, you you see that we never recovered from that, and it's it's gone downhill from there to what happened the day before yesterday.

Hilary 15:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

And what happens now is is equally scary, and we can only, I guess, hope. And now both I live in Canada, I'm still a US citizen, but I do feel I feel like I feel like a rat leaving the ship, you know. Right.

Hilary 15:35

Well, it's terrible. Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Because obviously, I hope over here in the UK, we've got uh we've just had Brexit. So we're the first country to leave the European Union. And there are lots of us, I mean, I'm definitely one of them, who I still feel as European, as part of Europe, as part of the global humankind, as as I did before. And and all it seems that it's brought, that Brexit has brought, and that a lot of the stuff that's going on in America has brought is division and sort of pointless economic trials and difficulties and all of that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

I wondered, I kept wondering over the whole Brexit period whether like why why not just reverse it?

Hilary 16:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Why just keep going with this charade? And that's in a way what we've been doing with Trump is is especially the the Republican Party was was just like, okay, it's just a charade, but we can keep it up until we get elected again. Yeah. And the consequences are dire.

Hilary 16:41

They really are. And the the I don't know if you saw the video that he put out that was kind of trying to be apologetic. The first one like on Wednesday? Yeah. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. Just awesome.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

I love you one.

Hilary 16:57

Yeah, yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Yeah, yeah. It's just I was listening to it like live when it happened, and uh I was just I could not believe it. And then afterward, the news people were like, okay, so that happened.

Hilary 17:11

Yeah, yeah. It it is ridiculous. Um it looks as if he's finally going to acknowledge that he is no longer going to be president in two weeks' time. But he's not gonna go to the inauguration, apparently, so you know, it's like it's like a child throwing his toys out of the prow, literally. So après moi le deluge is a very interesting piece because it's not only talking about something devastating, but there is also this sense of cohesion. I love the Lord, I'm going down in Louisiana, you know, that that final movement is just beautiful, and the cello and the voices all joining together, that it feels like there's some sense that we're all in this together.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Certainly that last movement was um I was trying to celebrate something that I've I think you know, the culture in in New Orleans is unique to the US. And the way music um is embedded in all parts of life, and irony even is embedded. For example, the the funeral march, you know, they're with a band to commemorate a funeral. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the US. I think it does happen in some places in Africa and and maybe other places, but um I actually wrote that last segment up to the end to in in that vein. I wanted it to feel as though we had a tuba and a snared drum and a and a big brass section, um, and that the cello was soloing over that, and that we were basically seeing out that era with you know an appropriately celebratory funeral march. Yes, you know, so to celebrate that music and those and the people and and to to not give up hope for for a be more beautiful future.

Hilary 19:18

Yeah. Well, let's yes, let's let's hope so. Uh so so talk to me about the two Leonard Cohen tracks, uh, Who by Far and Everybody Knows.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

It's interesting when I look look at those. I um so Leonard Cohen has been a big influence on me ever since I moved to Canada. I don't think I had even thought about him before then. But living in Montreal, um, I you know immediately started to, you know, read Canadian authors and listen to Canadian musicians and or recognize the ones I already knew that were Canadian instead. But Leonard Cohen's music really has it touches me partly because of what I was saying about text and music. He manages to to make a profound musical statement out of very layered and and evocative text and exceedingly simple musical settings. Like ridiculously simple. Um and he has married the two in such a way that the music doesn't feel simple. It feels like it's revealing something about yourself while you're listening to it. And so when I chose these two works, it was because these two songs, uh Who by Fire and Everybody Knows. It I felt like I wanted to take those musical ideas and the text and just sort of write an a a version of it that almost was what I already was hearing in my head when he's singing it. Kind of like a kaleidoscope of what you know, you hear what he's doing and it's doing it's blowing your mind. And I just wanted to write the music that was the blowing of that mind. Does that make sense? No, it does, yeah. I don't even think I've changed, I don't feel like I changed what he was trying to do. I mean, I that's very I can't say, of course, but um yeah, that's that's what was my feeling was that these pieces, this is like my musical language's version of of what I'm hearing when I hear his originals.

Hilary 21:21

Right. And that's why I think they're interesting because they're so much more than cover versions. I I always have an issue with people taking songs and trying to make it sound the same, but them singing it, you know, which is what quite a lot of of especially sort of uh artists early on in their careers, that's what they tend to do is they try to replicate the original, but with them singing it, you know, and there's there's not anything different. Whereas this is exactly not not that at all. This but it but as you say, it's almost like the response to the the the listeners. Musical response to those songs.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Yeah, I think there, yeah, there's something about, and I've had to analyze this in in retrospect to figure out what I was doing. Yeah. Then there's another way in which when I look at the full the whole album and and why I chose those particular songs, or or why I chose all the texts in the album and how I responded to them, it's very socially critical. It's really, it's trying to highlight the ways in which he was already, you know, talking to us about our own hypocrisy and getting us to realize our the irony of our own actions and our feelings and and our relationships. And those those elements are in all the other pieces on the album, too. And I didn't quite realize that till after I looked at it as a whole. Um, but the they fit so so very well. And when we were looking at the order of songs in the album, that's something that we thought about too. Yeah, so I put everybody knows after April Malouge.

Hilary 22:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Is very much a statement like, you know, you you could have prevented this. We all we all saw the ship sinking, you know, George Bush. Yes, yes. And so there's there is a sense that that I'm in a dialogue with in it sort of in a similar dialogue in a different era that that Leonard Cohen was when he wrote those uh those songs.

Hilary 23:21

Yeah. And and it is, I think that's why the Grammy nomination makes sense, because it is a collection that sits well together. It's almost as if you can't imagine these pieces in a different order or a different setting. They work so well as a as telling that that story somehow.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

That's amazing to hear. I think one of the things that shocked me when I looked back at the piece that I had written when I was not even 20, um, was how much it, especially seeing as a couple of days ago, it it almost describes exactly what happened in Washington two days ago.

unknown 24:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

Um but that I was I was already trying to express the individual and collective uh psychology and of of trauma and and straining against something larger than oneself. Um and the response that I had from the people who were around me at that time was like, you're kind of crazy. This no one will ever perform this. What are you doing? You know, and it turns out that 20 years later, that's what I was doing, and I've been doing it the whole time. Right. But every like, you know, everything does have its season, and and and people are more willing to embrace this idea of storytelling and of of of artists having a political stance or a social voice, which um certainly in the 90s was not, especially for classical musicians, was not really a thing. And um and yeah, so it fits so well, and it really surprised me when I looked back and realized that.

Hilary 25:17

Yes. I interviewed Maria Schneider for this podcast and her Data Lords album, which was obviously in the summer, it was you know ages ago, but you know, that that's another album which is saying so much about the world we live in and how we are responding to that world and how we need to you know wake up really. And I I get the same sense from obviously it's very different music, and you know, you're very different people, but nevertheless, it feels like women composers in 2020-2021 can are being listened to, and their music is being listened to, and their music is being appreciated, and it's okay to be more than just a composer and to actually have an opinion that goes behind that music.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

I think that's absolutely right, and it is interesting to think um you said it so interestingly. I it it makes such perfect sense to say that if you have a stance and you're expressing that stance, that is your voice. But back when we were in school, uh, those of us of my particularly advanced age, you know, um you were told that what is your voice has to be devoid of of your identity. That that somehow um especially because I was so much in the minority as a female composer, when I was a student, I was I was one of 14 freshmen at Oberlin as a comp composition major, and all the rest were boys. So the the idea of your identity having something to do with your music had almost like a taboo attached to it. Um partly because you you felt at the time that you had to fit in, you had to struggle against your individualness, your your uniqueness within this this world, because if you you know you would bubble yourself too much or something if you if you um but I but there's an element of that that is also about age, right?

Hilary 27:40

You do, you get to an age where you can go, actually, you you take me as I am, or you don't take me at all, and that's fine. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

And it's very hard for a 16, 17, 18-year-old to to feel that way. And the ones that do, it's it's always like, wow, cool, you know.

unknown 27:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Um, but I certainly was much more self-conscious and and conscious of my I'm gonna I was gonna say my place in the world, but I don't think I had any real conception of my place, quote unquote, in the world. My conception of it was you know much more narrow than it than the its potential could have been. And all of these contextualized problems or or contextualized interpretations that had that influence on me when I think about it.

Hilary 28:24

Yeah. This is a stunning album, Luna. I really enjoyed it when it first came through. I was like, well, what's this about? And and then I started listening to it, and and I I did what I quite often do with stuff that I get sent is I listen to you know the first track and then I'll dump through and just listen to bits, what we used to call them, yeah. But then I had to go back and listen to it all in order because I wanted it to make sense. And I love it, it's a great album. Thank you so much. Thank you. So thank you. Um, just quickly before before we finish, can you just talk me through what has lockdown been like for you? And uh what have you what have you seen as the positives perhaps that have come out of it? Because we all know what the negatives are.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Yeah, that's a good point. We do all know what the negatives are. So I am fortunate to be living in Canada. Um, as Canada goes, I'm living in the worst place, which is uh Quebec. Montreal, Quebec has been the most uh hard hit of all the cities.

Hilary 29:34

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Yeah, we had a uh you know one of these fluky things where the the spring break for kids here in Quebec is one week earlier than it is in the rest of Canada. So just before March, I guess it was the week before, so like March 7 to 13 or whatever, was the spring break. And so lots of Quebecers went down to no, I think it was more like March 1 to 10 or whatever that is. They went down to Florida, they went to New York, they went all over the world, and they came back and they carried with them the disease. So, so I mean it wasn't not in even remotely, like New York or anything like that, but but it became serious here fast, and they were able to control it with um people here just are a little bit more willing to listen to reason. You know, there there are masks worn on the street. If it's a busy street, people will wear wear their masks. If they're in the park alone, they'll take them off. If they go in the grocery store, they'll put them on. Uh the recently there's been a much more strict they went gone back to like counting the number of people in the stores, and um they are imposing starting Saturday a curfew here, which is the first time we've had a curfew, and that's a little bit scary. Um but amid all of this, my children still go to school. Right. So they have they have procedures in the school to minimize interaction with the students have only interaction within their own class, they're wearing masks all day above the age of uh nine-ish, ten-ish. Um and you know, we've gotten a few reports of cases within the schools, but not very many. So they know the value that that having the kids in school brings, and so we've had that. Whereas my friends in the states, you know, they haven't had school since March, and so many kids are suffering, so many kids without the resources to, you know, we have in our house computers and iPads lying around because we read music off of them, and you know, we were able to uh just like re redistribute all the technology so that our kids had everything that they needed, and and that is not the case for most people. No, not to mention just internet, and you know, we also had to upgrade our internet connectivity and whatever. Sorry, I'm getting way off topic, but it just it it just pains me so much that that the priorities have been so wrong in in the states. So, yes, here it's been hard, it's been lonely, but the kids are doing well, the stores are totally stocked, there are parks, it's like it's it's a nice life for an introvert, man. I mean, I swear it, my it's almost the same as my ideal life. I wish I could see some friends and invite a person over now and then, but I was never into parties, and you know, so this for me this has not been, you know, too, too tragic. No, no. And from from the positive, you asked about the positives, so I have actually written a lot of music this year. Um, I was able to take on a project that was that I never would have done normally. Uh, a friend of mine who runs a children's music program, you know, one of these things that completely unpaid, and and just for the sweet love of it, uh, it was incidental music to a play that they wrote about um uh about global warming and and like sorts of kids activated. And I loved this playwright, and she was taking input from the kids. They would have these playwriting sessions together with these kids. They wrote a play, I wrote the music, they did a whole thing on Zoom. You know, that was kind of the beginning of the year. And um I'm also I've been able to work on a new opera called The Limit of the Sun with Andrea Stolowitz, my librettist partner. Um, I wrote a solo cello piece for Matt Heimwitz for his new Primavera project, which he's recording right this minute. And in fact, as soon as I get off with you, I'm gonna get on Zoom with them. He's recording it in in Texas of all places.

Hilary 33:28

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

And yeah, so it's been productive in that way. Creative collaborations on Zoom are relatively easy if you're not actually trying to play the music. So we're talking about texts and talking about dramaturgy. Um, I've also been coaching some pairs of uh composer librettist teams that that won a prize here. Sorry. Um in Canada, there's a new prize for female composer libretto teams. And uh with one exception, really, the libr the teams are relatively inexperienced in both collaboration and opera. They're interested in storytelling and good composers, good writers, but to get them to mesh together and to bring it bring the piece to the point where it can be written to uh and can be workshopped, I've been kind of their coach through that. And that has been a lovely experience. I've really enjoyed all the very surprising and rewarding elements of trying to articulate what I see and what they're trying to pull out and trying to help them be you know bring their best to to each of the stages. It's challenging and it's really fun.

Hilary 34:42

Yeah, sounds it sounds excellent, very good. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

Oh, I appreciate your your interest, and I'm so glad that you love the album. That really makes me very, very happy.

Hilary 34:54

Uh oh, yeah, no, it's it's amazing, it's really good. And and it's one of those ones that I'm just gonna keep listening to. So, you know, this is not just a one-off. And I really hope that there's good news at the Grammys in March.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Hilary 35:10

Um great to talk to you. Yeah, thanks very much, Luna. Bye. My pleasure, bye. You know, sometimes it seems strange to me that I've taken on this podcast and I get to talk to these amazing creative musicians. It was such fun talking to Luna about Fire and Flood, and I hope you get a chance to listen to it. One of the things I'm planning to do as I develop the Harmonious World podcast will be to include some tracks, some clips from the music, but I've just got to find my way around the um copyright issue because what I don't want is I don't want people to take the music from my podcast and use it elsewhere. So we'll have to work that one out. But meanwhile, I do want to thank you, those people who have fed back to me about how they've enjoyed listening to these conversations. It's a real pleasure to know that people actually are listening and that I'm not just doing this for myself, even though it is an absolute pleasure to do these conversations. So please do subscribe to the podcast and then they automatically will pop into your inbox. Leave me a review if you can. There's also a new little icon which is buy me a coffee if you'd like to make a small contribution, because obviously there are some costs involved in having this podcast, and it would be lovely to have some supporters. But more importantly, please do let me know what you're enjoying. And I have some great people lined up, some very, very interesting musicians lined up for forthcoming interviews, and I hope you enjoy those. So, meanwhile, I hope 2021 is being kind to you. Please stay well, stay safe wherever in the world you are, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.