SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Naz Riahi & Rahill

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.

Indie musician Rahill noticed that her bandmate was acting weird. Their band, Habibi, was in the middle of a West Coast tour, and they had gone to see some friends play at a local club. Rahill, who loves talking to strangers, had started chatting with a man standing nearby after the show.

“I looked, and my bandmate is, like, staring, just suddenly mute,” Rahill says. “Halfway through a sentence, I was, like, ‘Oh my God. You’re Beck.’”

The two struck up a friendship, and later collaborated on Rahill’s song, “Fables.” Rahill is a big fan of artistic collaboration, which was one of the reasons she was excited when filmmaker and author Naz Riahi asked her to take part in an episode of SongWriter.

“I came to Rahill’s music initially through Habibi,” Naz says. “And I just thought, ‘This is this cool Iranian woman who’s leading this awesome band.”

Naz, who is also Iranian, wrote an essay for SongWriter about grief and empathy. Inspired in part by the loss of her beloved dog Hugo, Naz writes about how the pain was at once overwhelming and yet felt trivial relative to the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon.

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“You ask yourself as you scroll through Instagram, seeing pictures of babies wrapped in white sheets, their bodies carried in plastic bags, their bereaved mothers and fathers holding them tightly, if empathy is a choice, if compassion is a decision,” Naz writes.

Psychologist and social neuroscientist Dr. Meghan Meyer has done a lot of work investigating this question. At Columbia, Dr. Meyer works with fMRI imaging to map where and how the brain responds to different situations and stimulations.

“While people like to think that they are very empathic across the board,” Dr. Meyer says, “there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we’re pretty conservative with who we empathize with. People are much more likely to have a strong empathic response to someone who is in their social network.”

Interestingly, Dr. Meyer’s research also shows that a particular subset of people tend to feel empathy more strongly than most: artists. In a recent study, Dr. Meyer and her colleagues show that creative individuals are on average better able to simulate the emotional reality of distant people and events. While this might seem like a potentially nightmarish talent, Dr. Meyer points out that creativity itself seems to be a mechanism for processing pain.

“Researchers have found that expressive writing actually looks very similar in the brain to when you’re explicitly instructed to try to regulate your emotions,” Dr. Meyer says. “There’s evidence that after people have experienced a traumatic event—to the extent that they go through this creative writing process—you do see that it corresponds with less depressive symptoms.

Rahill’s new song, “A Saving Grace,” was partially inspired by her father, who has recently gone through a health scare. Rahill’s father was a significant influence not just in her upbringing, but in her deep connection to music, poetry, and art. Happily, he is well on his way to recovery, but Rahill was shaken by his illness.

“It really does put some perspective on life for you,” she says.

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