SongWriter Season 7 continues with Isabella Rossellini & Sharon Van Etten

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.

Filmmaker and actress Isabella Rossellini was in a wheelchair. Isabella was born with severe scoliosis, and she had a second surgery for it when she was 60 years old. Still, determined to stay active as she recovered, Isabella arranged to see noted ethologist Temple Grandin speak at Hunter College.

Ethology, the study of animal behavior, was Isabella’s lifelong passion. In fact, ethology was what Isabella had imagined studying when she was young, but there were no universities offering degrees in ethology in Italy at the time. After Temple Grandin’s talk, Isabella noticed that Hunter College had recently opened a graduate program in ethology.

“There were people handing out pamphlets saying that Hunter College just opened animal behavior and conservation,” Isabella recalls. “I said, ‘This is what I’ve always wanted to do all my life!’”

She signed up, and the next week, still in a wheelchair, Isabella went to her first class. Since then, Isabella’s studies have led to a series of creative and educational projects, including her long-running video series “Green Porno,” and her one-woman shows “Link, Link, Circus” and “Darwin’s Smile.” These projects were in part creative refractions of what Isabella learned in class, especially those taught by Dr. Diana Reiss.

“I always said to Diana that ‘Link, Link Circus’ is really [her] class, translated into a theatrical form,” Isabella says. “There was so much information that [she] taught us that I’ve used.”

Diana has spent much of her life exploring interspecies communication. A professor, a scientist, and an advocate, Diana underscores that while conservation is important, so is animal welfare.

“People often get this mixed up,” Diana says. “Conservation is a numbers game, based on how many individuals do you need to keep a population healthy. Welfare is concerned for the individual animals.”

One of the strategies Diana uses to activate collective political engagement is to elicit empathy for individual animals. She points out that Humphrey, a humpback whale who she helped rescue in the San Francisco Bay, was wildly successful in attracting both media attention and political action. Diana is particularly passionate about preserving The Marine Mammal Protection Act, which allowed populations of whales and dolphins to stabilize.

“We’re getting threats to eviscerate this act,” Diana says. “It’s up to the public to start writing to senators and congresspeople to say we don’t want this eviscerated.”

The song written in response to the narratives from Isabella and Diana is by Sharon Van Etten. Sharon, who is an actor as well as a rock star, is a longtime fan of Isabella’s work. “Isabella takes on very challenging roles and says so much with so little, from very flawed-yet-vulnerable characters,” Sharon says.

The song—titled “for Isabella”—was written as a tribute and as a kind of emotional purification ritual. Sharon often engages dark emotions in her songs, as an act of unburdening and release.

“Because I’m able to get it out, because I’m able to connect with other people, it helps me feel less alone,” Sharon says. “It’s a catharsis, an exorcising.”

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

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