0:49

Welcome back listeners to another episode of Music Ghost Stories. The podcast about music and its synchronicity in our lives. I'm Donny, your host most of the time we think of music as entertainment, something we play in the background while driving, working or relaxing. But every once in a while music shows up in a much deeper way. It shows up when words fail. Language is powerful, but it's also limited. We miscommunicate, we misunderstand. Even the word miscommunication reminds us that language doesn't always carry what we mean. Music on the other hand. Has a strange ability to bypass all of that and reach something more direct inside of us. In this episode, we explore that idea with musician and psychoacoustics educator, Casey Connor. I found Casey on YouTube while exploring some of our mystery sound segments, and our conversation moves through meditation, creativity, and the importance of listening. Honestly. But at the center of it all is a remarkable story about Casey playing guitar beside a man in India who was dying and realizing that music might be one of the most human ways we accompany each other through life and even through death. Alright, listeners, thanks for being here with me today and let's dive in.

Donny 2:21

Casey, welcome to Music Ghost Stories.

Casey 2:24

Hey, thanks for having me here.

Donny 2:26

Let's tell the listeners about who you are.

Casey 2:29

I'm Casey. I am, a musician. I live up in the Pacific Northwest and, I make, YouTube videos primarily about music theory and Psychoacoustics and other kind of audio related things.

Donny 2:40

What was the moment where music played a deep role in your life

Casey 2:46

I would describe it as a series of influences. I always remember my uncle Brian, I have a large, extended family, and Brian was kind of the musician. He was sort of the main one in my life. I just remember as a kid being at family gatherings and hearing him play guitar and sing I didn't grow up in a musical family. So having him as a kind of template to show you that, hey, this is a thing that humans can do and this is, uh, what it can feel like what it can mean to people. It was pretty formative. To this day, I really love hearing him play music. He has a beautiful voice and writes beautiful songs and is the troubadour of our family, then I got into piano as a kid. I was obsessive enough and kind of driven enough and kind of antisocial enough that, uh, it. It was a way I spent a lot of time, kind of obsessively, trying to figure it out. That was the beginning.

Donny 3:33

Through your endeavors with, psychoacoustics and sort of audio on a deeper scale, do you have any theories as to why music achieves this unique connection to our emotions and just our inner deeper selves?

Casey 3:48

I think that the evolutionary biology perspective is the one that resonates the most with me. Just the idea that. The fuel, the intensity of music is coming from Aspects of our evolutionary biology there's a theory that a lot of the energy behind music is mating ritual, social bonding or some kind of, primal instinctual, Signaling maybe it's some, components of our brain dedicated to language and communication get hijacked whatever the ancestral root is, I feel like It just gets. Strengthened and grows in this funny, weird way that if you're a Martian landing on Earth, it's gonna be hard to understand.

Donny 4:30

if you look at evolution, how would you say it relates? To more of the mystical spiritual sense of who we are as humans, where we don't know really, why we're here or where we come from.

Casey 4:47

I guess my reaction to it would be that, you know, if we think of spirituality as a, connection to the mystery of the world, Then I think things like music, connect us with that, it is the greatest thing to play music with people and to have that feeling of synchronicity and connection. I think it's, a channel that we can use to tap into that feeling to remind us of that you know, looking at the stars at night or I would imagine, looking at your newborn child when they're born or even the other side, being with somebody as they die or Connecting to life and the cycles of life and everything. Music is somehow tied in and, we resonate with it and, each other. So I feel it in that way.

Donny 5:30

It just makes me think like humans aren't meant to be alone. It's almost like our survival instincts are to be part of a team or like a tribe and music brings people together. In a unique way that fits, that idea really well.

Casey 5:52

I'll share this anecdote. I had a dear friend who passed away from cancer, a few years ago. And was a great musician. I was in a band with Lucas Hicks, was his name. You can find his music, online. Was just a integrated, vital part of our community, our friend group, our, our musical world here. And when he was passing away, he came home from the hospital to hospice in his house. This sort of, Community of musicians, gathered around him. And it was just a sort of a 24 hour party at his house for the last week or two of his life. His musical scene was largely built of, uh, old time musicians it's a big part of my musical community here. For me it was really moving. I mean, for everyone there, it was really moving, there's this kind of ongoing pulse of this music In his space. Towards the end, took on such a layer of, profound meaning in this context. I. I think one of the impressions it made on me was just the way that being a human and facing your awareness of your own mortality I have some Irish ancestry, for example, and there's this tradition of kind of laughing at death or not taking it seriously, and, that music just really felt like a profound defiance of mortality. a kind of, we are celebrating and it's also an honoring of this person and an honoring of our love for each other. And, a consecration of the moment, you know, The pulse of life that just came through that music in that space over those days was really beautiful and really imbued it with a new layer for me of, importance and deepened it. And, I think, I don't know, speaking as like A white American, we don't have, much of a rich tradition of dealing with death. And I don't mean to denigrate it too much. I think there's some nice things about it too, but I remember when a Jewish friend of, mine passed away, and, you go and have the funeral, and then the next day you come back and go to someone's house. Then you come back again to somebody else's house, and it kind of goes on for a little while. You don't just go to the funeral and cry and then move on. You attend to it in a more intentional way. And this kind of musical, Accompaniment for this person as they left this life, Felt really great. It felt really, appropriate and beautiful. I guess what I'm trying to say is music. There's so much potential in it, and it can be so many things. And I feel like, at least in the culture that I come from, we kind of forget that sometimes. So we think of it as, oh, it's pleasure. we listen to music for pleasure, or we listen to music for entertainment, or to pass the time and sometimes maybe to communicate a political message. It's just, it's too simple of a summary we forget that it can be so much. And, that's, important to keep in mind, I think.

Donny 8:24

That story that you had actually, is really similar to something I had with my mother. My mother passed away. From cancer. We had her on hospice and there was just people in and outta the house, family friends for like a week or two. It was just nonstop. I mean, we, we had big dinners every night, you know, we were like, what are we gonna do tonight? You know? And, uh. Dad was a Big Beach Boys fan, and when she passed away, a Beach Boys song came on and it was Sloop John B which was really interesting. When mom found out her cancer was terminal, the medical staff was like, how do you wanna proceed? She wrote on this whiteboard take me home. You know, and the song Sloop John B the theme is, I want to Go Home. That's what they keep saying in the chorus of the song. And I just thought how interesting it was to have that synchronicity. During her passing between the Beach Boys, being a group that played in our home, my parents had a lot of experiences throughout their life with the Beach Boys, and we were brought up in a home where the Beach Boys were a thing. And so not only was it synchronistic that it happened to be that song, but it was also that lyric that, really just made us look at each other. Like, that was weird, you know? It makes you wonder if these occurrences of synchronicity are sort of like they're the soundtrack to your personal life, they tie our experiences together. And with that said, I think I'm gonna pick him up here in a second. Look, I'm gonna get you buddy. Let me grab him really quick.

Casey 9:52

Hey buddy.

Donny 9:53

There he is. That's Mr. Casey.

Casey 9:55

Hi.

Donny 9:55

I say hi? You talking to him?

Casey 9:59

Hi.

Donny 9:59

He's like one and a half. So he's,

Casey 10:01

He's a born podcaster.

Guitar at Deathbed

Donny 10:03

It's so weird to see his wheels spin sometimes and how intelligent he is. And he's just a piece of flesh that came here. Like Amazon Prime or something. He just showed up and now he's smart. I don't know. It's really wild. But, Um, tying back into that part of the conversation, have you ever experienced, a coincidence that involved music or sound in some way where it was just really synchronistic maybe even, an experience where you felt like you were being sound tracked?

Unexpected Listening Power

Casey 10:50

I think the best one I could do is this, um. as a young man, I was traveling, in India. I went there to study er bahar, but the teacher, was not there yet. So I was waiting around and while I was in Calcutta I started volunteering a little bit at the Mother Theresa, hospitals and facilities they have there. And I was at this one, Site, I believe it was Prem on, It was a general, facility for, people to receive some very rudimentary healthcare and, just have a place to be for a while off the streets. You have to imagine A giant open room with metal frame cots, with a mattress and a sheet on them. This is not a hospital in any sense you would recognize in the states. I went and was just kind of working there, Mopping the floor or whatever for, for, a little while. And then they found out that I played guitar and they were like, quit mopping and bring your guitar in and, and play for people. So I did that for a day or two and was just going around it's a little awkward because I'm a western singer songwriter. Not an Indian musician. I mean, but it was entertainment of some kind. So I'd go around and chat with people and had some fun interactions with some folks. But there was a very old man there who was on his last, you know, I'm gonna estimate he was in his eighties, very frail. He was lying in a bed. And the nurse drew my attention to him and said, you know, this guy's doesn't have long, just so you know. And one day I went in and I was playing some guitar, and this guy was dying. The nurse believed he was, you know, a matter of minutes or hour from, from death. And they had him laid out on a mattress, with a sheet and, just his, head exposed, but his eyes were closed he was, just lying there but I went over and started playing guitar for him. And in the back of my mind was sort of nervous about it because I don't know this guy or if he even wants to listen to guitar while he has his last minutes on earth. But I took the chance just on the idea that, he's lying there alone in this room. Maybe it'd just be nice to have somebody near him, as he's passing. I took the guess that that would be the better choice and, I'll never know. But, I followed my heart in that moment and I was playing guitar for him. And, at the time I was playing a lot of guitar in a, style of Indian improvisation, or at least my sort of, Impersonation of it. I'd use a drop d tuning if that, means anything to a listener and, would just be improvising. And I was playing in D major. What they call the op in the Indian, Concert tradition that free time, slow improvisation and played for 20 minutes or something like that. And his breathing just kind of got slower and slower. Then he stopped breathing and I kind of flagged the nurse and the nurse came over I kept playing guitar and the nurse checked his pulse and everything and put the sheet over his face and said, you know, kind of nodded like, yeah, he's gone now. Right towards the end of this process, I thought to myself, what am I doing playing, the major scale here? They use the major scale, in Indian music, in, in various ways, but it's not like the common scale I was playing basically a much more Western style of music and I was kind of slapping myself a little bit, like, why did I do that? And regretted it, I was like, shoot this guy. not only is he somebody playing guitar, and maybe he doesn't wanna hear that, but he's hearing music that's not even from where he is In any real way. I played for a little while longer, just not knowing, he might still be conscious, whatever. I'm just gonna accompany this process and this moment and try to sanctify it as best I can and, kept playing and then, finished. I kind of thought, all right that's enough, you know, and I was focused on the guitar and I stopped and I looked up and he was breathing again. This is like 20 minutes after he had died, Or stopped breathing completely. He was breathing again. And I didn't know at the time that that can happen. Sometimes when people die, they don't just like take the last cinematic breath and then turn their head to the side and that's it. Sometimes they come back in and out a little bit. I was pretty surprised to see that. I flagged the nurse and I was like, Hey, he's breathing again. The nurse came back and then pulled the sheet off and his eyes were wide open and he was kind of staring straight up with his eyes open. So I was really, glad I had kept playing, just'cause he was, in fact still around in some way. But then I realized I had a second chance, this is why I'm sort of tying it into your question about coincidences. It's not a coincidence, but it was sort of a, serendipitous moment I. Realized oh, now I can correct my mistake. And I switched to a, indian style scale and start again. I'm, at that. point was not at all educated in Indian music really, but I did my best and switched to something that might be a little more, appropriate, and then Got this second chance to accompany him on the way out of life again he again stopped breathing, and he was actually gone that time. It, was easily the highest honor of my musical life, to do that. I wish I had asked him, permission or his thoughts on it while he was still conscious. I hope, if he's listening, he knows it was, done with good intentions and, and hopefully just the idea of having someone there meant meant something to him.

Donny 15:47

It sort of reminds me of when you go doremi fa latte and you don't resolve the scale, he's almost like, I'm not gonna leave.

Casey 15:56

I can't go out on

Donny 15:57

I can't die what about listening? Have you ever listened to another artist or another piece of music that moved you in a very unexpected way?

Casey 16:06

I've done a couple of Apasa retreats. It's a style of, meditation and, there's a particularly popular form of it, that involves doing 10 day retreats, where you go and just meditate all day long. It's in the, Essen Goenka tradition. There are these recorded, talks that he gives where he does a lot of singing and people like to laugh about his singing because it is unconventional as a musician, it's, it's kind of, uh, challenging because your brain is so trained to kind of hear things and figure out what key they're in and understand the scale and stuff. It's hard to turn that off, when you're hearing it in a different context. But, I was pretty deep in my second retreat and, his singing sort of, Pierced my soul in a way that was, kind of, mind bending. It's hard to Get into the details of that experience, but basically I think I was just in such a deep and vulnerable state, so deep into meditation that, pretty much anything I would've listened to in that moment would've done the same, you know? Okay, well here's one. I'm really interested in the way that music can be of a place. It's just really interesting how the specific kind of feel and timur and ideas that show up in a genre of music that is rooted in a geographical place really seem Like they connect to it, not just in a traditional way, but are actually kind of grown out of it. Music from really arid places kind of sounds a certain way. Music from really hot swampy places sounds a certain way. Music from the mountains sounds a different way I was doing some relief work in Pakistan after The South Asian earthquake in 2005. I was riding in a jeep in the Mountains in Pakistan. They were just sort of playing a cassette tape of some of the older, I'm gonna estimate like sixties era, seventies era, music and hearing the instruments and the, vocalization and stuff like in the context it reminds me of like, being in Appalachia and listening To bluegrass music or, you know, in New Orleans and listen to jazz. I know there's some musicological research about that, you know, like trying to an analyze like what kind of instruments with, what kinds of overtones come from, what part of the world and so on so as a listener, I've had a couple of those moments of feeling the music in a place

Meditation Fuels Creativity

Donny 18:09

the fact that the vocal is somewhat humorous, but then once you change your perspective through deep meditation, all of a sudden that same voice becomes very, different. I believe that these moments happen around us very often. coincidences that are right in front of us. We're just not as open to receiving that information. You know, our brain is taking all these cues and storing them and, and we, sort of prioritize what's important in our life, what's great about meditation and finding comfort in your consciousness is you start to become more open, to accepting new ideas. And when it comes to being a creative person, like ourselves, we could really benefit from that, especially for writing a new song or something like that. creative ideas. What would you like to share with other people that are, trying to be creative and tap into new ideas,

Why Every Episode Ends with "Keep Listening"

Casey 19:03

I agree that meditation is a pretty undervalued, wonderful thing in, in at least the culture I come from. There's a very direct correlation between the degree to which I can release myself from fear and anxiety and shame and all these negative things, and how creative I am, both how good my ideas are and how many of them there are, and how willing I am to explore them for me and my psychology that is the biggest hurdle. It's, it's just Fear Fear that you're gonna make something bad, fear that someone's gonna be disappointed in you or, It's very socially defined, you know? The times in my life where I'm my goofiest and my most whimsical, my most creative, my most clever are, are always the times where I am the least fearful, the least anxious. Going to your comment about, the driving nature of why we are grasping and attaching to things and seeking, soothing or dopamine I'm kind of, a jaded person in the sense that. Life isn't necessarily a bowl of cherries. As organisms we're designed to reproduce, we're not designed to be happy and at peace necessarily. And I, know that's at odds with some people's worldview, but that seems to be the case as far as I can tell. But we're so blessed to have this ability to Reason our way to, other ways of living. And we can say, oh, I, here's a tool meditation where I can realign my sort of deepest self to what's coming into my consciousness I can decide how to react to it, and I can train myself to not put these layers of fear anxiety and anger and reactivity onto my soul over and over and over again on a day-to-day basis. I can stop doing that and I can let my Natural, creativity and energy blossom I think that's a great way to go about it. My own journey on it has been imperfect. I've done some retreats and had amazing experiences My personal practice didn't yield a lot, but having integrated those lessons into myself, It has yielded a lot It's just fear that stands in the way. Meditation is certainly part of the answer. I think for me to not focus on the negatives, and to let my light shine to put it simply.

Donny 21:08

End every episode with, keep listening I found meditation, through my mother's loss of speech when she had a laryngectomy, she wasn't able to speak anymore. Just like you put yourself in that man's shoes when he was, in his last moments and you were trying to think of what would that be like? How should I perform to cater to that experience? I pondered what her final moments were like, not being able to speak. I said, what if my life was like that? What if I wasn't able to speak? And as I'm sitting in silence, everything just becomes very still and very calm. As my brain is shifting its perspective. I started to understand in a very unique way. That demonstrated to me almost like she was speaking to me or showing me something. Something was sort of speaking to me and saying things are different than they appear. Objects may be closer than they appear. It's almost like that rear view mirror. And, that's when I started to value things differently.

Meditation as Inner OS

Audio Placebo and Honesty

Casey 22:16

I love that moment you describe when you, you just get quiet for the first time. you snap through the realization like, oh, I've been pasting my own projections onto everything I'm experiencing and the world if I just stop and breathe for a minute and pay attention, I realize that I've been doing that. That insight is the beginning of hopefully lots of insights impression of the average person walking around in America is that they do a lot of that, they have a program running and they're projecting a lot, and they're not really stopping and, taking that time. I think if anyone's listening and they're interested in meditation, they should, look into it. But remember that there's a lot of different kinds some of them are profoundly different from each other, or have entirely different goals and, philosophies I guess I'm just saying that'cause I always have this fear that someone's gonna look up meditation on Google click the first link end up somewhere think this is dumb and get out of it. Like, there's a lot of different ways to approach it. A lot of different schools of thought, I think one kind of, very non woo way to look at meditation is just asking the question like, how important is my internal, operating system to my experience of my life? You could think of meditation as a sort of intentional, careful, compassionate way to, introspect and think like, how am I running my brain? How does this internal world work? And if you've never done it before, it can be pretty shocking to realize that you're carrying around a whole lot of assumptions and past traumas and patterns that are driving all of that and filtering everything that happens to you Then you ask the question, okay, I've noticed this, but now what do I do if something's wrong here, how do I approach it I think of it as like a top down or a bottom up approach where our traditional methods like therapy or um. Other kind of cerebral approaches to our, Inner world is very dissection based. It's very like, okay, I reacted this way. Because, my father and my mother did this when I was this old. And you're talking to your therapist and working from the surface level kind of stuff. Here's how I act, here's how I feel, here's how I behave, and so on. And I'm not saying that's not appropriate or useful Or even crucial for some people. Go for it. I'm in favor of it, also. But the meditation, has an attitude of just starting from the very bottom, the very root and not worrying about all the details and just saying, what's the fundamental of how you are going through your day and your life and what's going on inside how are you interpreting all this stuff that's coming into your world? You straighten that out through practice, through regular, tending of that inner garden. You kind of straighten out that stuff. And then the rest of it kind of unties itself. That's the Vipassana approach as I understand it so far. It doesn't sound like it would work to me, it sounds a little crazy or unlikely. I think that basic, posture of saying like, what's going on inside of me how important is it? What do I think about it how does it work? And really working on that is a pretty profound gift we have as a human species whether our consciousness is a curse or a blessing. I think it's certainly lucky that we have the ability to do some work on how it works. And to circle back to the subject music, is one channel into our inner core.

Donny 25:15

Have you learned anything interesting, involving audio

ABX Tests and Bias

Casey 25:20

the first thing that comes to mind is the incredible amount of, placebo effect that can be present in audio. I first encountered this as a recordist or, someone who is a geek about audio gear and microphones I learned early on that like, you know, and this will come it's no surprise to most of your listeners that there's a large contingent of people with ungrounded opinions about what's important for audio. People that are buying specific, quarter inch patch cables, with oxygen free copper and all the audio file kind of stuff. What's interesting to me about that isn't that there are people who are wrong on the internet, it's just the ability we have to hear things that aren't actually there is a really well demonstrated and very strong, effect. That comes up, in the audio illusion series. It comes up in a lot of different ways, all the ways that we can't quite trust what we're hearing, this is another kind of personal development, spirituality question or whatever. I And I think there's kind of a personal development that it leads to when you're exposed to that enough, especially if you've had the experience enough times yourself of misleading yourself. You just talked earlier about the importance of listening. And I think of listening in the context of honesty. You wanna see what is in the world. You wanna see what's real. You wanna perceive things, Without the filters, that you, have without the attachments one of the ways You can learn that lesson is to be able to hear honestly, like, did this plugin that I, just stick on this track, actually make it better or not? And to hear it without the motivations of how much you spent on the plugin or what you were hoping that plugin might do. There's kind of a profound spiritual lesson in that, we take things as humans, we're kind of sloppy and there's no boundaries between anything internally. So when we learn a lesson like that, it has a application in other areas of our life and our interpersonal relationships and I, think that's a, pretty awesome thing. I mean, if you're a musician, if you are a woodworker, if you are a lawyer, if you are, a dancer, you know, like you practice your art and it teaches you lessons all it requires of you is that you're honest with what you're perceiving. With yourself and your experiences and you integrate them and spend a little time reflecting on them.

Donny 27:24

there's a guy named Eric Valentine he had a salesman trying to sell him on these converters the salesman was demonstrating it. And he's like, doesn't that just sound so much better? And. Eric Valentine was saying that he couldn't hear the difference he said, I'll tell you what, come over to my music studio and we'll listen to it in a room that I'm familiar with and you can do your demonstration there. And that way I could hear the difference. And the salesman's like, yeah, sure, no problem. And what Eric did is a blind AB test. And then he asked the salesman which one he was hearing. Through a series of blind tests, the salesman then realized, oh, I can't hear the difference either. There was a bias in what he was hearing because he knew which one he was hearing. Not that the salesman was being dishonest, but his own brain was deceiving him,

If Music Could Send One Message

Casey 28:16

And there's so many stories like that. I wrote a program called Loss Auto, A BX, that you can, if any of your listeners wanna do blind testing of themselves or shootouts or other kinds of audio comparisons, they can, use that tool and in the process of developing that, I did it because I was so angry about the fact that people don't want to test themselves in that way. Again, we're coming back to the question of honesty, with yourself, it's vulnerable to listen to yourself, to meditate as vulnerable in a way. You are opening yourself up to all the things you might Have defenses against. You know, Listening or honesty in general is sort of inherently vulnerable because what if you learn something you didn't want to know? What if your product actually doesn't do anything useful? when you get into the world of like a BX testing, it is kind of wild to watch how people refuse to do it or do it wrong or draw. I mean, they're humans are also in a tally bad at statistics inherently. Like we're not really good at understanding when something is reliably demonstrated or, not. Or the way people move goalposts, as soon as we do a BX test and it is revealed that there is no difference between A and B, That anyone can perceive, the goalposts kind of move It's only after you listen to it for an hour or two, or it's only in certain rooms, it's constantly shifting. Or you get what's basically a publication bias. If you post two identical wave files on a forum and say, which of these are better ab test yourself and see if you can tell, like 300 people download the pairs of files and AB BX tests themselves. Most of them won't be able to tell the difference. A few by chance will get statistically significant results showing they can tell that a is better than B, or they can tell the difference between them at all. And then we'll post on the forum. Everybody else doesn't post because they didn't do anything impressive, but the people that did discriminate between these two things that are in fact identical, we'll post and say, I could tell I got, you know, eight outta 10. I, I got it right. And I just proved it, and so if you're not armed with enough statistics to be able to look at that situation and say, okay, but what's the publication bias here? Like, the people that couldn't tell did, you know? Like, you have to be able to think through those things. It's a, little wild, it's kind of a crazy world. And I personally, I don't think it'll ever be solved no matter how many, blog posts or, pieces of software are out there, because I think, like humans, we're just not, armed with, an inbuilt sense of statistics, or scientific method. It's something that you have to think through pretty hard.

Donny 30:42

So, to wrap it up, I have two final questions. One is, if music could send one message to the world, what would you want that to be?

Casey 30:53

Something about honesty. The older I get the more I really feel the virtue of, being honest by honest I mean. Vulnerable and willing to see the truth in yourself and in the world. That was the profound lesson that music really led me into. When I really got into music and started to think of myself as a musician, I was a singer songwriter, it revealed to me everything I didn't like about myself immediately. And that's why it was such an attractive form for me, because I could feel the, the, value in what it was leading me through. As painful as it was, I look back on the music I made in that period and it's extremely cringey, but I know what I got out of it in terms Of how I developed. So I think honesty is the, lesson I like to draw from music the most.

Donny 31:40

What would the ultimate episode of Music Ghost Stories podcast be for someone like you?

Casey 31:47

Maybe something that explores, Music and ceremony or, you know, I, the, we talked a lot about death and music and its connection to death and everything, and I, I, I feel like the way music can play really profound or important roles, maybe it's maybe it's'cause I grew up in a culture where music wasn't really serving that role. I'd like to hear an episode about cultures that have musical connections in birth, death, weddings, that kind of, other, other sort of intense ceremonial uses of, of music I'll never forget, here in the Pacific Northwest, the Lummi Nation had a potlatch. It's a gathering of local tribes on the West coast, and it's a traditional thing, but the Lummi Nation hadn't hosted it for a while. This one year they did, it was the first time they'd done it in a long time. All of these different native people, a lot of them, came up on the waterways on the coast. They gathered and, it was also open to non-native folks like myself I went and was, fortunate to witness this, um, dance. They had a giant hall where there were, Native dances happening, native music and drumming and dancing it was so profoundly beautiful to me just to see that happen is something that, can be revelatory to someone who has not witnessed it. So maybe an episode that covers those kinds of, integrations of music into deeper culture.

Closing Reflection Keep Listening

Donny 33:01

This conversation went from music and, you explained your experiences, on retreats and volunteering it really went into that topic of meditation, which comes up a lot on this podcast maybe when we conclude this episode with the whole keep listening, it will have more of a, a resonance to it than it usually does on the end of each episode. Cool. Well, this has been great, Casey. Thank you so much, I really appreciate your time.

Casey 33:21

Best of luck with the podcast.

Donny 33:23

All right, we'll be in touch. I'll talk All right.

Casey 33:25

Bye.

33:26

As we wrap up this episode. One idea keeps echoing through the conversation, the idea of listening, honestly, Casey talked about how difficult that can be as humans, we're full of expectations, assumptions, and biases. We often hear what we want to hear instead of what's actually there. That's true in music, our relationships, and even how we experience the world around us. But music has a strange way of helping us practice honesty when we really listen without projecting, without forcing any meaning. Something deeper can come through. Sometimes it's a feeling. Sometimes it's a realization and sometimes it's simply the presence of another human being in a moment that words can never fully explain. In Casey's story, music became exactly that. A way of accompanying someone through their final moments, even when language had nothing left to offer. Maybe that's part of the real purpose of music. Not just pleasure, not just entertainment, but connection. I wanna thank you all for listening and taking this journey with us. If you haven't already, please leave a review wherever you're streaming this episode. And now two kids later, there's another way you can support. You can buy me a coffee. The link is in the description. Help help me. Until next time, everyone, I look forward to the next episode. Keep listening.