SongWriter Season 7 continues with Bruce Holsinger and The Golden Hours

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, and Steve Earle.

Author and professor Bruce Holsinger is widely known for his bestselling novel Culpability, as well as his extensive research on medieval vellum. He rarely writes short stories, but for this week’s episode he made an exception. The story was inspired by a difficult family pet, and an offhand comment by his father.

“I had not been getting good sleep because [our] cat started to yowl at three or four every morning,” Bruce said. “I was complaining to my dad, and my dad goes, ‘Bruce, sounds like a river cat to me.”

The story also engages ideas about AI, which was at the heart of Culpability. The story darts down a paranoid and anxious alleyway in the last few moments, asking more questions than it answers.

“[The story] gestures towards this notion that we might be in a simulation,” Bruce said. “I was thinking about the cat almost as an agent of AI. It’s the speculation that cats are in charge of us all.”

The story was particularly compelling to Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, who is not only a veterinarian and a former CDC official, but also a novelist herself. Dr. McQuiston explained that she knows only too well what it is like living with an unhappy cat.

“This man knows cats!” Dr. McQuiston said with a laugh. “The visceral imagery he evoked about the stenches and the damage, it really rings true to me as a person who lives in a household full of cats.”

Dr. McQuiston underscored that these sorts of behaviors are not harbingers of a bad pet, but instead an animal communicating in the best way that it can. Animals and humans have lived together for many thousands of years, and our lives—and our health—is intertwined with our animals.

“My work at CDC primarily focused on a concept called ‘One Health,’” Dr. McQuiston explained. “The health of animals and the health of humans and the health of our shared environment really come together to influence infectious disease outbreaks, our mental health, our physical health. All of it is interconnected.”

At a live performance at The Guild—a new venue on the downtown mall in Charlottesville—Bruce and Dr. McQuiston listened to a song written in response to the story. The song was by The Golden Hours, a newly formed super group combining David Wax Museum and Lowland Hum. The band came together organically during collaborations during a live performance series called “Golden Hour” at the home studio of David Wax and Suz Slezak.

“Daniel and I have been working together for so long; they’ve been working together so long,” Lauren Goans said. “Writing [together] has been one of the greatest creative joys of the past couple of years.”

The band wrote a song called “One More Photo,” a wistful pastoral about a post-human landscape. Though the lyrics paint a dark picture, the audience heard something lighter. During the discussion onstage, Bruce suggested  the song could be labeled “gently apocalyptic.”

“That’s our band’s tag line,” Daniel Goan said.

Lauren agreed, “We are totally taking that.”

Season seven of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.

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