SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Ina Carino & Alex Wong

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

Poet and musician Ina Cariño’s first winter in America was hard. Having grown up in the temperate mountains of the Philippines, they had never experienced a snow storm. In a new poem that Ina wrote for SongWriter, the memory of that chill connects with the ways they first experienced America.

“People were cold to me, perhaps for being brown, or other, or different,” Ina says. “The Filipino culture is known to be more friendly, hospitable than a lot of other cultures.”

Ina recalls that it was their grandmother who taught them how to connect with, and care for, others. Ina wrote the new poem, “Words That Don’t Have to Be Spurious,” as their grandmother was dying, and it is in part a tribute to her.

Researcher and singer Sarah Nila was close to her grandmother as well, and similarly credits her with teaching Sarah about caring for others. But Sarah’s experience of empathy in the West was different than Ina’s. Sarah studies how empathy is learned and taught, and says that the people she met in the United Kingdom were no more or less empathetic than those back home in Indonesia. The difference, as she sees it, is more related to cultural ideas of privacy.

“I learned that people in the West really need space, and I need consent before I help them,” Sarah says. “The definition of ‘empathy’ is to understand other people’s feelings.”

Like Ina, producer and songwriter Alex Wong frequently experienced the ways that American culture can reject otherness. He recalls that in the early days of his music career people discouraged him from writing about his specific Asian American experience, arguing that these kinds of songs weren’t relatable. In hindsight Alex regrets buying into those ideals

“Years ago I co-wrote a musical but I had unwittingly written all the characters, who were expressing my story, to be white characters,” Alex says. “When I realized it, I was like ‘Why the fuck did that happen? Why didn’t I catch that?’”

Alex’s recent album Permission is a broad examination of these kinds of internal and external blindspots. To celebrate the album’s release. Alex organized The Permission Parties, which showcase emotional stories connecting music, food, and cultural identities.

For the song that he wrote for this episode, Alex was influenced both by Ina’s poem and the suffering in Gaza. Using his prolific experience as a producer, Alex organized a remote collaboration, with Ina on violin, and Sarah singing. The resulting track, “Murmurations,” is only available on Bandcamp, and is a fundraiser for World Central Kitchen.

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