The Thing with A Thousand Names: Maggie Wheeler on Music, Acting, and Finding Her Voice

In this episode of inTUNE: Stories of Connection Through Music, Dr. Melissa Martiros sits down with Maggie Wheeler — actress, singer-songwriter, and community choir director — for a conversation about music as a lifelong practice of finding your voice, building community, and showing up for people who need it most.

Maggie is known to millions as Janice from Friends, but for decades she's been quietly doing something else entirely: gathering people together to sing. What started as a monthly community sing at a Los Angeles gallery grew into the Golden Bridge Community Choir, which she led for 17 years. In this conversation, she traces the thread — from a folk music summer camp at age seven, to a seven-day vocal workshop that changed her relationship to music, to the moment she walked into a maximum-security prison in Iowa and heard a room full of incarcerated men singing a song she'd written.

It's a conversation about the courage it takes to claim your own voice — and what happens when you use it to build a fire that other people can gather around.

Music Featured

• "How Shall We Come Together" — Maggie Wheeler
• "Until We Meet Again" — Maggie Wheeler

Learn about the Golden Bridge Community Choir and stream Maggie's music at goldenbridgechoir.com and  maggiewheeler.bandcamp.com.

Learn more at maggiewheeler.net 

Intro and outro music written and produced by opporTUNEity students.
Submit questions or topics at https://opporTUNEitymusic.org/intune
Episode produced and edited by Angela Senicz.

Learn more about our programs, stories, and community at https://opporTUNEitymusic.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

We went into the prison and my recollection is I walked in and they were singing. They were singing my song. And I was absolutely floored.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to Intune, Stories of Connection Through Music. This is the podcast where we explore stories from educators, artists, and community leaders who are using music to break down barriers and build community. We'll look at how inclusion shows up in private studios, classrooms, in community programs, and even inside correctional facilities. And I'll share a few stories and strategies that might just shift the way you think about teaching and connection through music. Whether you're a teacher, a musician, a parent, or someone who simply believes in the power of music to bring people together, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Dr. Melissa Martiros, a music educator, consultant, and the founder of Opportunity, an organization that uses music to connect people across backgrounds, bridge divides, and open doors. My guest today needs very little introduction, but I'll give her one anyway. You almost certainly know Maggie Wheeler from her iconic role as Janice on Friends, a character so perfectly rendered that even now, more than two decades later, you can probably hear that laugh in your head without any prompting from me. But that is not why she is here. A while back, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mary Cohen, a choral music researcher and educator whose work with the Oakdale Community Choir inside an Iowa correctional facility is remarkable in its own right. During that conversation, Mary told me a story that stuck with me. The choir had performed a song written by Maggie Wheeler, and Maggie got on a plane and flew to Iowa to be there for it. Mary described it as the highlight of her life. That detail piqued my curiosity and made me want to know more. So I went down a rabbit hole. What I found was a whole world I had no idea existed. The Golden Bridge Choir, years of community advocacy, a deep and rigorous commitment to using music as a vehicle for connection and healing. I reached out to Maggie that same morning before I had even had my first cup of coffee, and I am so glad I did. What followed was one of the most generous conversations I have had on this podcast. We talked about the Iowa experience, what compelled her to make that trip, and what it felt like to hear her work performed in a correctional setting. And then we ranged much more broadly into her musical life, her passion for singing, her work as a choir leader, her identity as a community advocate, finding her voice and using it as the through line that connects all of it. Her acting career came up, but honestly, only barely. This was a conversation about music, about service, and about what it means to use whatever platform you have been given in the most meaningful possible way. Please welcome Maggie Wheeler. This morning I interviewed one of the original participants in our songwriting class inside the jail. He talked about how singing has been the most therapeutic thing for him his whole life. So I was looking through all of the videos of the Golden Bridge community choir. And you have had an acting career, obviously. Like you've been very successful. But if you peel back all those layers, right, into your voice, I mean, that has been your superpower. I mean, even just thinking about the role of Janice, I mean, it was her voice that became the most iconic thing. And also the way that you use your voice to bring people together and song through community and healing. And I just wonder if we can start with that and if you could just reflect on what that means to you.

SPEAKER_03 3:27

What a place to start, like all the way in the deep end. We're gonna have to swim back to shore. Um while you talk about the voice that way and you see where the voice like has played such an important role in my life. The first thing that I think about is how hard it was for me to find it as a child. I think I used humor and I used entertainment. You know, that's a way that I could find my voice. But the journey of owning the sound that I could make, I think I was aware early on that I could imitate and I could make funny sounds and I could sound like this person or sound like that person, that gave me a lot of vocal freedom. But in terms of the kind of courage and sort of centered kind of expression of personal power that comes from what we think of as finding your voice, I mean, that is a long journey, and I think for me it started as a child. And I was very fortunate that when I was seven, I was sent to a summer camp that was run by Pete Seeger's brother, John, and his wife Ellie. It's a camp that was full of musicians and folk music and instruments and also other things, you know, hiking and archery. But music was really at the core, and I found myself in the company of people who sang and who played, and we would gather around the campfire, and those musicians would sing to us and teach us songs. And, you know, those songs still live in me today. They became the soundtrack of my inner peace. So my New York City life, which was sort of disjointed from my spirit, and this, you know, kind of camp life, which was also a struggle for me because I was a city kid. So it's not like I was like, yeah, come on, put me out there in the country and ask me to hike 10 miles. No, that was not that easy for me. But the music itself was like home. And I know that it's planted a very deep kind of mission in me to always be looking for that core feeling wherever I was and however it manifested. So when I think about the work that I've ended up doing, you know, I followed first the search for that feeling. And then I had an affinity for certain kinds of music. So gospel music and African music, initially folk music, and I followed them. I followed them in all the different ways that I could, whether it was listening or going to concerts when I was old enough, and eventually ending up at the Omega Institute in upstate New York as a student of Dr. Izai Maria Barnwell, who sang bass for Sweet Honey and the Rock. And it was her first ever vocal ensemble class. It was a seven-day workshop, and I was a huge Sweet Honey and the Rock fan. That music was so healing for me. So there I was in her classroom, and I just became an absolute sponge and a student of not only her method of teaching, but her music. And, you know, she really set the stage for the work that I do today. And it was a life changer.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Your music career, your teaching career, has that kind of been in parallel with your acting career?

SPEAKER_03 6:22

I think as a young person, all I wanted to do was be an actress. The music was my soul food. The music was something that I had been steeped in by my years at Camp Killelite in Hancock, Vermont, which still exists, you know, singing around the campfire and learning all those songs and having this soundtrack to my life and these songs of lament and songs of joy. And so, you know, folk music, some folk music is very, they're very sad songs. But, you know, I that really that really fed me as a young teenager to have so many sad songs to sing. So I had the music as my, you know, my kind of regulator. And then I had my dreams of acting. And I spent a lot of energy taking classes, being in in companies, doing summer stock. I made it through a year of college before I dropped out and said, no, you know, I really need to go for this. And so, of course, that journey is not a straight line. It's a wild, insane, circular, windy road with tons of rejection. And through all of that time, I had music, the ways in which I could find it, make it, study it to keep me whole. I didn't say, oh, yeah, I'm gonna be a teacher, and alongside being an actress, I'm gonna, I'm gonna teach. No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I said that I would not do that. Um, that my singing was for my soul, I acted for my supper, and I sang for my soul. And that's how I divided the two. And then I was in an ensemble in New York called Sons and Daughters, a performing ensemble with five other people that had been in that first year with Isaiah Omega. And we performed, we sang, we I loved working with them, but my acting career was polling, and I had to get out to LA because I had an independent feature that was going to come out. So I left those folks and I came out to LA, totally focused on my acting career at that time and kind of lamenting not having this music family to be with. And then I met Daniel. I met my my future husband. One of our first deep conversations was about music, and you know, it wasn't too long before he heard my story and he knew where I had been and he knew what I was doing in LA. And he said, Why don't you teach? And I thought, oh God, no, you know, I'm not gonna do that. And he said, But you know, he's he was an artist, and he said his gallerist would probably lend me the space and I could just get people together, et cetera. So that was 36 years ago, and I did do it. And I started with a yellow pad, and just every time I ran into somebody I uh that I felt connected to in any way, I'd say, Do you like to sing? Can I take your number, whatever? And then I would make a million phone calls, and some Sunday once a month, people would show up at this gallery. I put a basket out and I let people donate money to help me rent chairs, and I just did that for a bunch of years. That's kind of how I started my teaching life. More than teaching, right? Yeah, it was creating a space where people could gather, and it was introducing people to this idea that by gathering together and singing and experiencing the feeling of multi-part harmony, whether you think you're a singer or you're not a singer, whether whether you're scared or you're bold, you know that there are so many things that come out of that culture. And I had certainly lived them and experienced them and I understood the gift. But going back to how hard it is to claim your own voice and find your own voice, I was terrified to really take responsibility and say, I'm going to be the host. I'm gonna create this thing. It wasn't the ensemble I was working with in New York where we're we're bouncing ideas, we're checking to see if we like what's happening. If somebody loses something, somebody else picks it up. It was all on me. And I prepared and prepared and over-prepared and you know drove myself crazy. And in those early days, I would do two and a half hours of singing, and at the end, I would have no voice. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

So you you finally found your voice and then you would you would lose it by the end of your losing by the end.

SPEAKER_03 10:01

The emotional lift to stand in the center and be that person and have the confidence to do it took a toll on me. Of course, at a certain point, I thought, you know, why am I not using a mic? And then of course, once I made that move, I never turned back. But it wasn't just the mic, it was this profound process that I went through because, you know, you only sing if it looks like this or it sounds like this, or it's as good as this, or you've studied that. And I'm not that guy. I am a very intuitive music maker. I barely read music. I don't use sheet music when I teach. I don't have that brain. I don't have that kind of math-music connection. And that shut me out of music when I was younger in certain ways.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

You you've referenced a few times the feeling, right? So you went to music camp when you were seven, and what kept bringing you back and what you kind of kept chasing was the feeling of what it feels like to be around a community with people singing together. And I wonder if you can describe more what that feeling is.

SPEAKER_03 11:00

Yes. A lot of people speak so eloquently about this science, the alchemy, you know, of the thing that happens. What I can say is that the experience of creating harmony, the experience of groups of people creating that vibration together makes us instantaneously interdependent. So in this very kind of solipsistic individual culture where we're all just sort of checking ourselves and looking at ourselves, where do I begin? Where do I end? Where does that person begin? You know, how do we get from here to there? Can we connect? All of that stuff. That when you're in that room and you're all creating from nothing, from the silence of nothing, we make this thing of beauty together and it changes us. It unites us, it makes us, as I say, interdependent. We know that what we made took each one of us to make it. And as the science has shown, we're breathing together, our hearts are beating in sync. It's this experience of unity that is very hard to recreate in life because of everybody's ideas and everybody's beliefs and everybody's trials and everybody's troubles. It's a place where all of that gets put down. Even if you carry it in the room and you're carrying something heavy, often what happens is that the music kind of washes you of that and you experience elation, you experience joy. You know, if you're a person who relates to the divine, it's kind of like an instantaneous bypass of your intellect to get you into whatever you might call that, the collective consciousness. I'm spitballing an answer to your question because I feel like it's the thing a thousand names.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

And you found it when you were seven, and you kept coming back to it as your career unfolded because it was such a profound experience for you at such a young age.

SPEAKER_03 12:48

Yeah, such a place of peace. It was such a home.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

The choir that you just talked about, that was Golden Bridge that you were talking about, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:55

That was just me doing vocal workshops once a month. Every month it was different people. It started out with 30, it'd be turned into 80, people came, people didn't, and I never knew how many people would show up. I kept trying to control it. I don't know. Have you ever heard that beautiful? I think it's Pema Chodrin who talks about women being frog tamers. It's my favorite. It's this idea that women would feel like everything will be right when all the frogs are in the bowl. But of course, as soon as you get them in, one is gonna jump out, and the only way they're only gonna all gonna be in the bowl is if they're dead. So, you know, it's like this pursuit of the impossible, how to get to the peaceful moment. So at first I wanted to control those kind of open Sundays with that at the gallery, like how many people are gonna come, how many chairs am I gonna need? What do I, how many songs, you know, all of that stuff. But no, it was just a community sing and it shifted every month. And then I stopped when I got pregnant with my first child. She's 30 now, and I kind of took a break from doing that. And then the community sort of called me, you know, right after my second child was born. And then 9-11 happened and people started saying, please, we need to sing. So I started coming out and doing just singular events. And then when my kids were six and ten, I took my first break. I went to Hollyhawk in Canada to take a week to sing with Izai. And I hadn't done that in many years, and it was like just my gift to myself from you know, some hardcore mothering to try to take five days and do something for myself. And everything changed. It was singing, to sing to sing with my mentor with self-care was to go sing. To go sing. And it changed my life because I met all these incredible people from Canada, including Siobhan Robinson, who was the co-founder of the Get and Higher Choir with Dennis Donnelly in Victoria. And all these people kept saying to me, You need to come. You know, they do a training, they do a community choir training. You should come, you're like perfect, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought, oh, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm going home to my kids and that's cute. But no. And then on the last day, this woman named Gloria came up to me and she said, You know, I just want you to know that, you know, there's a quote by Balzac who says that those who for those who don't follow their soul's vocation, it just bleeds like the colors of paint through the rest of their lives. And that's me like sort of shredding the Balzac quote because it's not exactly that. But and I got back to LA and I was like, shit, do I have to go to Canada and do a choir training? I don't think that's me. You know, I mean, I have to read music and no, I can't do that. Everything choir meant, it did not feel like where I was going. And yet there was something so scary about it for me. And I think that comes back to the question of belonging. What kind of a voice do you have? Are you useful in this choir? Do you know enough to be good, all those things that stop people from singing? So I applied and I got in and I went to Victoria. And that is where I was able to sort of be in the presence of a lot of people who were running a really beautiful, rich community choir culture, non-auditioned concert proceeds to go to go to charity, just a really beautiful template for how to do it. And then they gave us some time to kind of dream up what it would look like for us. And that's when I conceived of the Golden Bridge Community Choir that would be not intergenerational, non-auditioned, because I had kids, and so I was like, I'm not gonna do it unless my kids can come. So I imagined that I would have an art corner full of really fantastic supplies and projects, and I'd have somebody fun hanging out, and people could come, and if they had kids, their kids could come, but they didn't have to sing, they could just be creative in the space, and if they wanted to sing, they could. And eventually I began to fold them in, you know, like one song per session, and I would invite them into the center and like get them to lead a song. And it just grew and grew, and my kids grew up in it, and many kids grew up in it.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

It did kind of manifest the way that you had envisioned it.

SPEAKER_03 16:37

It did.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

That's amazing. You're talking a lot about your own insecurities that sort of came out like you felt them, you overcame them, but in some ways you overcame them by like obsessing over all of the details or like the frogs, right? With your music, you were just kind of raw, pure, exposed to yourself. And so when you were doing that, people were seeing you as the person, but recognized you as the actress.

SPEAKER_03 16:58

Both because I had people that were in choir for three years before they figured it out. Yeah. I mean, one woman was like three years in. She said, Oh my God. I just realized there, but there were both. I had a wonderful, wonderful co-facilitator for many years, Emil Hassan Dyer. He we were just a team, and he was a great vocal improviser. He's here, he's there only was because we're not doing that together anymore, but great vocal improvisor, fantastic percussionist, so much fun to work with. We had a great, great time. So, like at the beginning of a session, he would say, I just want you to know when Maggie called and asked me to work with her, these were all the things I thought. And so, you know, I just said, You gotta just get it out of the way. So I would say, All right, oh my God, let's just do it. We did it. Okay, now we're moving, you know, just give everybody like, you know, just burst the bubble and get to the fun part. Um, not that I don't love Janice.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

I mean I hear that. I feel like I've just hit the point in my life where I'm like, I finally sort of feel like I've settled into my skin, right? I've got two young kids, I've been through some shit, and I'm finally at the point where I'm just like, I'm owning my life. I'm doing what I want to do regardless. But I wonder if there was just a process for you where like those worlds had to like merge for you to feel really competing in what you were doing as the choir director and also as like a public figure.

SPEAKER_03 18:10

You know what's interesting about that is that no matter how competent I am as an actress, I do not have the power to employ myself. So I am powerless to some degree. It's a game of mother may I. The beauty of the choir leading, the song leading, the work that I do in that realm is that I don't have to ask anybody. It's my work. I carry it on my back into whatever room, whatever community, whatever setting I'm in. It's mine. And maybe that leads to more insecurity because it's deep, it's profound. I'm not reading somebody else's lines. Someone is not directing me and telling me when to walk across the floor. To be the person who's holding the space and wanting to lead everybody and wanting everybody to have a beautiful experience, the whole thing, all that, all the things that go into that. I don't know that I'll ever be a person who cavalierly walks into that calling. I'm sure there's like some kind of, you know, it's probably on some page in some book about the psychological makeup of human beings. I have like beginner's syndrome every time I set out to do something new, even if I've done it before, I feel like I'm I'm a beginner. And I have to kind of go back in, remind myself, just re-acquaint myself because for me, music lives in my bones. It lives in my blood. It's not on a piece of paper. So I really have to embody it so that it lives in me and then I can tell you, I can invite you, not tell you, but invite you. It's that same place and same feeling. So sometimes I'm a little envious of people who can just you know lick their finger and open to page five, you know, and they're like, I, you know, here's the code. I know how to crack it.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

But there's a barrier still. Like, like I tell you, I'm like a classically trained pianist. When I sit down, I can read anything and play it, but I don't own it. It's the same thing. It's not my music. But opportunity is the closest thing I've come to creating something that's mine. So it's very, very different. As you do it though, it probably feels pretty empowering.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

It is those things. There's a lot of power in it. There's a lot of power in what you're doing. You know, what I used to say about the choir is that it had happened inadvertently because it's not what I thought I was doing, because I thought I was like, oh, there's such an absence of community here. Like, and I ended up building it. Uh, I ended up building the fire that people gathered around. And as a result of that, my world became richer. My connections to other people that I never would have met otherwise became richer. My experience of the world in a less curated way became my experience of the world. Like so many gifts came to me because I built the fire, the fire that I was looking for outside of somewhere else. So, yes, I think there's a lot of power in that. And you're doing the same thing. And like, you know, when you sent me questions for this, I'm like, oh my God, these are such beautiful questions. Like your fire is beautiful, the fire you're building to invite people to come sit around it and talk. And to me, that is akin to finding your voice, who I am, the way my mind works, what I want to talk about, what I want to sing about. That's that's it.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

It's so interesting how the universe works. I attended a meeting the other day. It was like the Greater Worst Community Foundation annual meeting, and their keynote speaker he talked about how to build community. And the image that he used was the campfire. I've never in my life sat around a campfire where people didn't walk away feeling really good because they've been connected and they're close and it's peaceful and there's no distractions, the phones are put away, everyone's just there to be together. But you take it, the campfire experience with song is a whole other level because you're there, you're intimate, you're together, everything's stripped away, you're focused, and then you're singing, which like brings you into its core. Just want to segue into Mary Cohen because that's how you and I got connected.

SPEAKER_03 21:50

Amazing Mary Cohen and amazing the way that music connects us and opens up these doors to people that we wouldn't know otherwise. It's part of the magic.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

But you also have to be willing. I don't know you, but you come across as a really generous human.

SPEAKER_03 22:02

It's just an incredible journey that you've been on. I'm very fortunate, obviously. My career has given me an opportunity to do these lasting things that have brought a lot of joy. That's such an incredibly wonderful gift that I if I if I do get recognized, I hear from fans and I hear we go to sleep to the show every night. I learned English, all the different things that friends in particular has brought people. It's not the only funny show I've been on because I've been lucky to be on a bunch of them, but I feel very blessed to be part of something that has brought so much joy and continues to bring so much joy. How wonderful is that to be able to carry through the world. And then also on the other side of my seesaw, because as I said, you know, that is the life of a professional gambler, and I have won, you know, uh several games. But on the other side, I don't have to gamble and I still can seek the same satisfaction of bringing joy, but it's immediate. And I'm not waiting for something to show up on a screen and somebody to tell me sometime later or to read a review or to see a rating. I'm in the room. We're in the room together, you know. And I can when I think back to the choir and how, you know, we did it every Sunday for 17 years. We took breaks a couple times a year, but and Mary, the way all of that happened, at a certain point, I started writing music. And really, the music came, the songwriting came when I finally did decide to go to Canada and take the community choir leadership training with Dennis Donnelly and Siobhan Robinson. It continues. I think it's called still CCLT Community Choir Leadership Training. And all the choirs that go through that training are part of something called the Ubuntu Choirs Network. And it's just really a lot of community choirs across the country and in Canada and and and also internationally that really kind of hold this open belief that everybody can sing and everybody is welcome and it's call and response and there it's there's no sheet music, and you know, people who do concerts, do concerts and and and and give to charity, etc. So there's a whole bunch of things that kind of fall under the heading. But I went there, I left my children for two weeks. It was radical for me. I was a very hands-on mother. I still am, you know, even with my big people. And it was a big deal for me to leave for two weeks. I couldn't believe I was gonna do it. I grew up in in New York City with a mother who was constantly saying, Oh, I know I'm leaving the country. I didn't tell you, you know. So I was determined to be the opposite. And here I was following something that was loud enough that it felt critical to me. And I could also feel that I was losing a part of myself to motherhood that I didn't think was going to serve the whole down the road. I was out of balance and and so I just took this huge risk. And of course, it was great for my kids, it was great for my husband, everybody did everybody did fine, you know, everybody survived, everybody got better at a few things in my absence. But I had two weeks not only of singing every day, which was magic, not only of learning new songs and leading songs and being challenged and watching other people navigate this passion, but I also had time to think and time to sleep and time to dream, and I began to write songs. So I wrote my first CD, uh, which is called Sweet Time, I wrote during those two weeks in Canada. And the song that Mary picked up out of the blue, I believe I wrote the following year or two or a year or two later, because every two years there's a CCLT reunion and choir directors from however many cohorts that come together and sing for a week. And it's it's pretty magical. And and I I believe How Shall We Come Together, which is the song that made its way to Mary. I think I wrote it at that first reunion. And there's a woman named Greshen Sleiker, and she has a website called uh Songs for the Great Turning that is kind of in honor of and supporting the work of the late Joanna Macy. And Gretchen put my song, How Shall We Come Together, on her Songs for the Great Turning website. And I sort of let it go. You know, I think I wrote it for the group while we were all there, and I think I taught it to them, and I think we sang it, and then I think I made a recording of it and uh, you know, just on my garage band and I maybe I shared it with everybody. I don't remember. But Gretchen said, Can I include it? And that's where Mary found it. And by the way, once that portal opened, I just continued to write and I continued to write, and I started to write more for the choir and more for the kids, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

It just kept coming through you.

SPEAKER_03 26:24

Like you just kept it. It did. I mean, you know, I I mean I leaned into it more. I started paying attention to it more. And I have, you know, I have a lot of things that I would say about that process. But the lovely thing about community song is that songs travel. But anyway, Mary reached out, you know, I found this song on the Songs for the Great Turning website, and I'd love to sing it with you know the prison choir. And, you know, do I have your permission to do so? And I said, Yes, absolutely, without a doubt.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

She didn't know who you were at that time, is what she had said. She just thought I don't know. Yeah, she said I didn't know that she was an actress. I so she reached out to you, and um, you had had you ever been in a jail prior to that?

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Like I had never been in a jail, and I didn't know that I was gonna go. It sounded interesting to me. You know, I wondered about it while we were talking about it, and then she said, Oh, and by the way, the Soweto Gospel Choir is coming, and um, they're going to be singing with us as well. And I just thought, oh, I can't, I can't miss this. I had uh a great love for the music of South Africa, and I had always wanted to go. I had been listening to the Soweto Gospel Choir for years, and eventually, not long after, I mean, you know, actually a little bit long after, just a couple of years ago, I did make it to South Africa finally, which was a dream come true. But anyway, all the pieces started coming together, and then I spoke to my friend Sarah Thompson, who's a great singer, songwriter, choir director, song leader from Duluth, and I told her about it, and she said, I want to go. So I said, Okay, let's do it. So she met me. We did a community sing with one of Mary's outside singers. We had a great time singing with the community, and the next day we went into the prison, and it was an education from the moment of arrival. Just the experience of giving everything up, handing everything over, having everything locked, and then you know, going through the various kind of levels of locked doors, you know, further into the prison and really not knowing what to expect. My recollection is I walked in and they were singing. Your song. They were singing my song. And I was absolutely floored. First of all, you're removed from all everything familiar, so your senses are heightened and you're a stranger in a strange land, and you don't know the rules, and you're not in charge, and you know, you're I was floating on this current into the room. And here were all of these men singing my song. Incarcerated men, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Of them are life sentences, I think.

SPEAKER_03 28:48

So singing, How shall we come together? We shall come together singing. You know, when shall we come together? We shall come together now. And I, you know, I I I wept. I was just so taken aback and so moved.

SPEAKER_02 29:04

How shall we come together? We shall come together singing. When shall we come together, we shall come together now.

SPEAKER_03 29:18

How and that was just the beginning of our experience there because we sang with them. The Soweto Gospel Choir came and they sang with us, and we sang with them, and it was just one of several events that took place over the next few days, where I also got to come back and learn a little bit more about their songwriting. I remember meeting people and meeting their families and and what a radical act it was for an event to take place in a prison where family members could come and sit and watch and see what people had created and see see the transformation uh taking place. And you know, Mary just Mary is such a maverick.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yes, idea, she just generates ideas and ideas. And I said to her in listening to her talk about it, like her choir is like a beacon of like what community music making is, right? The idea of taking outside uh individuals and bringing them into the jail to sing with people who are incarcerated. I mean, that's a whole other level of like community music making. But again, the idea behind it is the same as the idea behind what you were doing in California or still continue to do and bringing people together to heal and to sing. I mean, opportunities that we don't we're not a choir, but it's the same idea. It's it's this understanding that music just strips down layers and powerful things happen when you do that. But I imagine for you, if that was the first time in a jail and you saw this like like a piece of music that you wrote and you you haven't been writing music your whole life, like this is something that just kind of opened up for you. I mean, I just imagine that that just was a powerful moment to see.

SPEAKER_03 30:50

It was a absolute peak moment for me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

How shall we hold the suffering? We shall hold the suffering singing. When shall we hold the suffering, we shall hold the suffering now.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

Meeting all of the um incarcerated men, meeting the choir, having that exchange, there was lots of time to talk. Um, there was also lots of time to observe and watch Mary and watch her process, um, and to and to watch the whole kind of songwriting prompt structure that she had set up for them, where she had like strips of paper on the piano, which had various and sundry ideas that people were sort of taking away and writing from. She was so thoughtful about like keeping it fertile and keeping it alive and inviting everybody to stay in this creative process. It was magnificent. And then to meet the singers from the Soweto Gospel Choir and to be in the the prison the jail with them, to be singing with them, you know, to have them singing my song. I I because I taught some songs as well. Sarah did, we both did. So we taught some songs to the audience and and the family members and everything. It was just extraordinary. And then just to be sitting next to those singers in the first two rows and and having my voice blend with their bl voices and and the men's voices blend with our voices, it was very magical. And then then uh Soweto Gospel Choir did a workshop for us at the Hatcher Auditorium and then and a concert. So we had that extra experience. Mary took me to the university. I ended up doing a talk with a bunch of um performing arts students. So it was a full, I don't know. You were involved. You were involved. All in. We were all in, and then I had a chance to go back um to the jail with Mary a second time and teach a workshop. Um, cool. So that was or sp you know, spend a little time uh uh just singing in some of my songs. Really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Yeah, you left your mark on each other.

SPEAKER_03 32:51

Yeah, we did, for sure, for sure. Continuing. And I do think that it just kind of always harkens back to this idea that what we've lost in in many ways in our culture is the technology of using music as medicine, the technology of the idea that music lives in everybody, that we all, it's not owned, it's not reproduced, it's not all these things. It's right here. It's like in the air, it's behind your head, it's in your ear, it's it's in the wind that just moved the tree. It's right here, like so close to us. And we all have it, every single one of us, if you call yourself a singer or you don't, or if you've ever been trained this way or not, it's part of being human. That's how I feel about it. It's its own life force, is what I say. It's its own life force. And if you are willing to get past the cultural definitions of it, for me, this is my experience. It's it's with me all the time. And that's what, you know, honestly, the first time this really cracked open for me was after that seven days with Izai at Omega, all those years ago. Because after singing for seven days, singing music uh out of the African-American tradition, singing sacred songs, songs of protest, singing African music, singing chants, singing, you know, just all this incredible music, night and day and night and day and night and day. I walked away from that all those years ago. And what I what I felt had happened to me was that I had been given a vocabulary of song that felt like prayer. I felt like I understood song as prayer, and that it didn't only rely on the songs that I'd learned, but that, you know, because those songs were born out of a necessity, born in a moment, born out of struggle, born out of trial. And so it's not like somebody had a degree, and that's why they wrote that song. They wrote that song because somebody next to them needed that song or they needed that song. And that's what changed my relationship to music because I walked out of there singing. Whether I held on to those songs or not, no, I didn't most of the time. It was years later that I started going, oh, you know what? Maybe I should put that on my phone. You know, maybe that's the birth of something. Maybe that's an idea I want to come back to. But for the most part, it was just like, I'm just gonna, it allowed me to start singing my way through life.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

It sounds like uh like a seven-day like what people might say when they leave like a meditation retreat after seven days or something. It's a similar kind of effect, but it was through music. The interesting piece in that is that Mary, when when she talked about the experience of having you come to Oakdale and participate, that was a highlight of her life. She didn't say her, she said her whole life. For you, it was a highlight. So I think it's so fascinating that for you singing, it's like such an organic thing. Like you're really keyed into that life, or it's just kind of going through you, and you're really focused on bringing people together through that process. And she is the same. She's focused on bringing people together in that process, acquired her, but she's trained this way. Um, and you're kind of trained through life. And you both came together at a moment and changed each other's lives in that way. The way life works, it's just so amazing.

SPEAKER_03 36:05

And you know, during the pandemic, I feel like many of those kinds of roadways were opened from a distance. I made really incredible connections with people because of music during that time, because suddenly there was a way to do it. I could write to somebody and say, I just heard this song of yours. I want to teach it to my choir online. You know, I can't, I'd love to meet you, whatever. Suddenly there were, we were meeting each other and finding each other and singing together and in separate boxes and doing all the amazing things we did during that time. And what happened with Mary was like, you know, it was that bridge building in real life, which I've also had the experience of as well. But, you know, those moments are really rare and really sparkly and really amazing. Like you found a song, you reached out to me and said, Can I sing it? I say yes, and the next thing you know, we're all together. And that's happened to me, you know, a number of times where I've been the person reaching out to Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

You're writing still.

SPEAKER_03 37:01

You know, during the pandemic, I wrote constantly because I was hosting an event every week and it reached people all over the world. And I was running my online choir, and beautifully, not long before that, I teach at the Omega Institute in upstate New York every summer, the place where I sat at the feet of my mentor. I teach there now. And several of my students, this is pre-pandemic, had reached out to me to say that they would they wanted a little song leader training. And one of those people is an alternative medicine practitioner, and he used Zoom with patients, I guess. And so he said, Well, I have this thing, you know, we can do that. I had no idea what it was. So we did that, and I taught this course for them. Certainly, none of us had ever been on Zoom before, except Jeff. And so when the pandemic hit, I was like, Oh, I need that thing. What that thing. I got that thing. We got what was that thing, you know? So I called my friend Debbie and I'm like, you need to come help me get Zoom, like whatever where Zoom lives, we got to get Zoom. So I took my choir online and I kept doing that, inventing as I went along. And because I created sound files for my choir to listen to and to kind of practice with, I had a lot of files on GarageBand. I could play them on my side. I, you know, I thought, oh, how will I do this? Okay, well, they'll be muted and I'll play the sound files and whatever. We made it up. And eventually we got pretty damn good at it. But in the meantime, I posted something on Facebook of our one of our first little choir gatherings. And in the background is a sound file in multi-part harmony of a Haitian song. And I was singing it, and I put it on Facebook, and all these people who were trapped in their houses said, I want to do that. Can I do that? How do we do that? So I thought, oh, well, maybe why can't we? You know, I'll do something that's public. So I created Together in Song. All I will tell you is that that container, being with people every week, w when the collective was going through something so similar, was a kind of portal to my creativity that I had not yet experienced. I began to write for the collective and I wrote what I needed to sing, but it was with this sort of deep and immediate understanding that everybody else needed to sing it too. I might write a song about something that I feel like I need to sing, but it might not be for you. You know, it might not be your medicine. But in that case, during the pandemic, it was just this universal need. So I wrote a lot, a lot, a lot of music during that time. And yes, I'm still writing, and it doesn't, it's not like that. I'm not writing every week, but but I it comes when I need it. Um I think I just love to tell you what's coming up. Do that. I'd love to hear what's coming up. There's several things. There's a couple of new playlists of my music that are up and out. So I have a playlist called The Crow Calls that's on Bandcamp, and then now recently on Spotify as well. And all my music is for community. Some of it is maybe a little bit more a solo voice with some harmonies, but it's really all for community singing. So um anybody who's interested in that might find songs to share with their community on that. And then I recently put another playlist on Bandcamp called The World Is Turning, and that's all but one. It's all songs that I recorded at home on a garage band that I thought I would wait until I had time to do studio recordings to release them. And then I got to this point where I thought, really, I want people singing these songs more than I want to wait for everything to be perfect. So I'm just gonna set it out there on Bandcamp. So there's there's music there, which is nice, and I'm also in the middle of a somewhat longer project with uh my friend Mick Kylie, who's in Ireland, and he's been orchestrating a bunch of my songs. And so at some point in the next year, I'll probably release that, and that'll be really, really new and different and quite beautiful. There's a couple of the songs that we've worked on together that are available as singles on my website, and uh there's a song called Until We Meet Again that I wrote during that pandemic time. It was time for me to sort of step away for a little while, and I felt this intense connection to everybody, and I also felt like a responsibility for their well-being, and out of that came this song Until We Meet Again.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

We have made a tapestry of love. Together we have woven it with threads from the up above, with every song in harmony. We've pulled a color through. One thread is us, one thread is me, one thread is you, and so we're leaving something beautiful and nobody knew before a rap.

SPEAKER_03 41:26

And so Mick created this sort of beautiful sweeping orchestration. So that's available on my website. And then in July, as always, I'll be at the Omega Institute in upstate New York, and I'll be teaching my workshop singing in the stream. And this year, my co-facilitator will be Carisha Longacre, who is one half of the duo of Mom You's, who are so amazing. Their music is so, so beautiful. And Carisha is such, she's just a phenomenal spirit, incredible musician, wonderful singer. And then in September, I am doing my second Omega Songfest where I bring about five song leaders together and we just, you know, we just swim in it. We just go as deep as we can and we give as much as we as we can. And so I'm just so excited that we're all going to be together in September for Songfest. And I've been going there since I was 19 years old. That's where my kind of music education really began, was at Omega. So it's sort of beautifully poetic justice that I teach there now. And the the July event I teach during Family Week. It's the one week at Omega where there's kids on campus. My kids grew up attending because I was teaching. So they are really, they were really informed by their experience at Family Week because the programming for kids is just phenomenal. And then every other year these days, I end up in the Bahamas at uh Shivananda Yoga Ashram, and I'll be there again next April. That's a magical place to sing. And goldenbridgechoir.com is how you get on my mailing list. And this has been great. Thank you for being interested in this whole side of me and you know, wanting to know more about it. I I really appreciate that. And I appreciate the Mary Cohen portal. It's so nice to get to know you a little bit. Melissa, what a pleasure. Thank you so much. It's so nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

I want to take a moment before we close to just sit with what happened in this conversation. I started my morning with Travis. Some of you may have heard me mention him at the top of the episode. Travis was inside the Worcester County House of Correction in 2019, one of the original participants in our songwriting program. And what he told me before I ever logged on to talk to Maggie was that singing was the most therapeutic a thing he had ever experienced. That when he was actively using, something cut him off from it. But when he was incarcerated, sitting in a cell while his cellmate went to class, he sang. Walking the halls, he sang because it was the only thing that made him feel whole. And then I got on a Zoom call with Maggie Wheeler. And she told me about being seven years old at a summer camp in Vermont. Run by Pete Seeger's brother John, sitting around a campfire learning songs that she said still live with her today. She described it as finding home, not a place, a feeling. And she spent the next several decades of her life chasing that feeling. Through gospel music, through African music, through folk music, through seven transformative days singing at the feet of Dr. Yasai Banwell at the Omega Institute. Until she finally built her fire herself. She started gathering people in a Los Angeles art gallery once a month with nothing but a yellow legal pad and a basket for chair donations. And she just sang with whoever showed up. And then came the Golden Bridge Community Choir, 17 years of Sundays. Somewhere along the way, she wrote a song, How Shall We Come Together. She taught it, she recorded it on Garage Band and let it go. And it found its way to an Iowa prison choir because Dr. Mary Cohen reached out and said, Can we use this? And Maggie said yes. And when she was told the Soweto Gospel Choir was coming, Maggie got on a plane. She walked into that prison and the men were already singing her song. She wept. Of course she wept. What I keep coming back to is this. Maggie Wheeler has spent her career using her voice in two very distinct ways. On one side, she has brought the world Janice, that laugh, that character, decades of joy delivered into people's living rooms, their commutes, their hardened nights when they needed something to make them feel lighter. That is a profound and lasting gift. And on the other side, quietly, she has been gathering people around metaphorical campfires, teaching them that their voice belongs to them, that you don't have to read music, that you don't have to audition, that the song is already in you, it has always been in you, and all you have to do is open your mouth. She said something that really landed for me. She said that what happens when people sing together is that they become instantaneously interdependent, that in a culture where we are all so isolated, so turned inward, so caught up in where we end and the next person begins, music dissolves all of that. Hearts beat in sync, breath aligns, something that took every single person in the room to create gets made from nothing, from silence. She called it the thing with a thousand names. I think the word I was used is love. I think that is what she has been building all along, in both directions, through laughter and through song. A way of saying, You were not alone. I see you. Come be with us. Travis knew that sitting in a cell in Worcester. Those men knew it singing in Iowa. And I felt it this morning and again this afternoon, which doesn't happen very often. And I want to say one more thing, because I think it matters. Maggie Willer did not have to do this. She did not have to give me her afternoon, her stories, her vulnerability, her time. And she did it with a generosity that I have felt from the very first email she sent back to me. When we had technical difficulties that ate up nearly half an hour before we even started recording, she laughed it off and showed up fully anyway. And then for the next hour and a half, she just gave. Her words, her memories, her music, her heart. There was no performance in it, no calculation, just a person who was genuinely constitutionally warm, whose energy itself is an act of generosity. I think that is who she has always been. I think that is why a room full of incarcerated men in Iowa felt safe enough to sing. I think that is why people kept showing up to the gallery on Sundays for 17 years. I think that is why her song traveled all the way to Mary Cohen and then all the way to me. Some people light the fire, and some people make you feel like you've been sitting beside it your whole life. Maggie Willer is both. Thank you, Maggie, for sharing with me. And thank you all for listening. Each episode of Intune includes a segment called The Pulse, where we step back from the conversation and offer something practical for the educators, teaching artists, and advocates listening. Today's pulse was inspired directly by Maggie Willer's work and by the values that sit at the core of what we do here at Opportunity. So here are three practical strategies grounded in what Maggie shared for anyone building community through music. First, lower the barrier to entry. Maggie builds Golden Bridge on a single belief. Everyone can sing. No auditions, no sheet music, no prerequisites. If you are designing a music program in a school, a jail, a community center, anywhere, ask yourself what conditions might be making people feel like they don't belong before they even walk in, and then remove them. Second, use call and response as a tool for connection, not just instruction. Maggie described call and response as one of the fastest ways to create the feeling of interdependence in a group. It requires listening, it requires timing, and it requires you to pay attention to another person. For populations who have experienced disconnection or trauma, that structure can be quietly transformative. You don't need a curriculum. You need a song and a willingness to begin. Third, let the music travel. Maggie wrote, How shall we come together? Recorded it on Garage Band, and released it into the world without knowing where it would go. It ended up in an Iowa prison choir, and then it found its way to this podcast. Think about how you were sharing the music your communities make. Recordings, even simple ones, performances that invite family members in, songs taught to one group that get carried into another. Music moves. Let it. The research backs all of this up. Studies on community music making consistently show reductions in cortisol, increased oxytocin, and stronger feelings of social cohesion among participants. Effects that are amplified in group singing specifically. What Maggie has known in Tua release since she was seven years old sitting around a campfire in Vermont, the science has spent decades catching up to. Build the fire, invite people in, and trust that music will do the rest. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If this conversation resonated, please subscribe, share, and leave a review. It really helps others find the show. You can also send me your questions or coaching topics at opportunity music.org slash in tune, and I might feature them in a future episode. That's O P P O R T-U-N-E-I-T-Y-Music.org slash in tune. Until next time, stay inspired, stay connected, and keep making music that brings people together.