Hrishikesh Hirway on Takin' a Walk: The Stories Behind Songs and the Healing Power of Music

Summary

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Takin' A Walk – Music History with Buzz Knight

Episode: Hrishikesh Hirway on Takin' a Walk: The Stories Behind Songs and the Healing Power of Music
Air Date: May 12, 2026
Guest: Hrishikesh Hirway (creator/host of Song Exploder; musician; new album: In the Last Hour of Light)
Host: Buzz Knight

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Episode Overview

In this introspective conversation, Buzz Knight welcomes Hrishikesh Hirway, renowned for his podcast Song Exploder, to discuss his journey from dissecting the stories behind others' music to releasing his own deeply personal album, In the Last Hour of Light. The discussion centers on Hirway’s creative process, the healing power of music, grief, collaboration, and how years of musical exploration culminate in a new chapter of vulnerability and artistry. The episode offers a heartfelt look at memory, art, intimacy, and the lessons learned from years spent unraveling the magic behind songs.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Song Exploder to Solo Artist

• Reversing Roles:
  • Hirway shares what it’s like to explain his own work after years of analyzing others’ music.
  • Song Exploder was conceived during a period when Hirway felt lost as a musician, prompting him to create the podcast as something he wished existed for deep, meaningful conversations about music (04:11).
• “I was sort of trying to empathize with potential future guests at that time.” – Rishikesh Hirway [06:01]

2. Early Musical Awakening

• Music became a core aspect of identity in high school, especially when playing drums in a band and sneaking into music rooms to practice (07:05).
• Fugazi’s “13 Songs”:
  • An influential album for him during his formative years.
  • “Brendan Canty...he's kind of my original drum teacher.” – Rishikesh Hirway [08:10]

3. The Art of Interviewing – Roots in Therapy

• Hirway attributes his interviewing style to lessons learned in couples therapy—listening deeply, asking intimate questions, and valuing meaningful connection (09:02).
• Notable moment:
  • “My therapist…was probably my most formal training.” [09:02]
• Family, especially his wife, influenced both his methods and on-air presence (“I was just listening to the sound of your voice, which was so nice.” – Rishikesh Hirway [10:47])

4. The New Album: In the Last Hour of Light

• Title Meaning:
  • Represents a tangible, visual metaphor for being present and conscious of finite time; it was intended to capture both mourning and gratefulness for the present moment (11:47).
• The word ‘in’ makes the title feel more immediate and lived-in—“It's not just talking about it with some distance. This is where I am.” [12:57]

5. Creating Through Grief

• The album was written amidst deep personal loss—the death of his mother and his father's hospitalization.
• Music became the only available vessel for processing and containing those emotions (14:40).
• “I don't know where else I would put some of those thoughts and feelings and I wouldn't know how to express them and I guess in some ways process them.” – Rishikesh Hirway [14:40]

6. Collaboration with Producer Phil Weinrobe

• Fifty percent of the album’s transformation came from working with Weinrobe, whose approach (recording live, no edits, no click tracks, all artists in one room) was radically different from Hirway’s usual meticulous editing and individual control (16:11).
• “Phil essentially took that part of my personality away…[he] made me confront what was underneath that.” [21:50]

7. Learning from Song Exploder’s Guests

• After years of studying world-class songwriters, Hirway internalized both concrete techniques and larger lessons in collaboration and vulnerability (29:11).
• Collaborating with others—previously avoided—became central to this record.
• “Learning about how songs changed and how songs were born through the unique configuration of two people together…just felt cool and I wanted to try it for myself.” [29:48]

8. The Making of “Stray Dogs” (feat. Iron & Wine)

• Written at a songwriting residency, using a prompt from Sam Beam (Iron & Wine): “Describe a street you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog.”
• The childhood memory of stray dogs in India fused with the feelings of freedom and nostalgia. Beam’s involvement was a direct result of his inspiring the piece (23:42).
• “That whole song came out because of that small phrase that he sent me.” – Rishikesh Hirway [26:10]

9. Sound & Style of the Record

• The blend of intimacy and Americana-sweeping soundscapes reflects both Hirway’s natural inclinations and his background in film scoring, with much of it emerging organically (27:02).
• “I think in some ways, the way that I sing…because of the way that I sing it, I have as much control over that as I do my height.” – Rishikesh Hirway [27:17]

10. Vulnerability, Grief, and Artistic Responsibility

• Hirway wrestled with the challenge of translating traumatic, deeply personal experiences into art without trivializing them.
• “Am I somehow diminishing the magnitude of my mom’s death by trying to turn it into art?” – Rishikesh Hirway [33:10]

11. Dream Walk—A Touching Closing

• Asked the podcast’s signature “dream walk” question, Hirway chooses his late mother:
  • “She was a music lover…and it always meant something to me when she would say something about my songs. . .that was the closest thing to parental approval around my music that I ever got.” [34:52]
  • He imagines walking with her near his home in Los Angeles, a life stage and environment she never got to experience.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Creating Song Exploder as Self-Therapy:

  • “I just didn't know how I was going to sort of make the leap to the next next point in my career…I got quite depressed about what had happened and more importantly, what hadn't happened.” – Rishikesh Hirway [04:11]

• On Interview Technique:

  • “Just the principle of listening closely and asking deep questions and follow up questions and trying to dig as much intimate information out of the person you’re speaking to, from that experience.” [09:02]

• On Collaboration:

  • “Let me try letting somebody else's brain in and see what happens and see what surprise might exist for me in my own songs.” [30:24]

• On Grief and Creativity:

  • “Was I doing her a disservice by trying to, you know, find four chords that would go along with the experience or something like that?” [33:26]

• On Artistic Intention vs. Instinct:

  • “In some ways, it didn't feel like a choice so much…That's what I got.” [27:17]

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Segment Timestamps

• Song Exploder’s Creation/Personal Background – 04:11–06:49
• Early Musical Influence – 07:05–08:45
• Interviewing & Therapy – 09:02–10:17
• Album Title & Meaning – 11:47–13:45
• Music as Processing Grief – 14:40–15:51
• Collaboration with Phil Weinrobe – 16:11–18:58
• Differences Between Making a Podcast and Making Music – 21:50–23:11
• Writing “Stray Dogs” – 23:42–26:43
• Sonic Landscape of the Album – 27:02–28:57
• Lessons Learned from Song Exploder Guests – 29:11–30:58
• Writing About Grief & Artistic Responsibility – 33:03–33:52
• Dream Walk with His Mother – 34:12–36:25

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Conclusion

Hrishikesh Hirway’s episode is a heartfelt examination of what it means to search for meaning, healing, and identity through music, both as an interviewer and an artist. The journey from self-doubt to expression, the importance of collaboration, and the challenge of framing grief with honesty and care are brought to life with openness and humility. The episode offers inspiration for creators, listeners, and anyone who finds solace and connection in music’s ability to tell our stories.

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For more musical journeys and personal stories behind the songs, find "Takin' A Walk" on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcript

[Buzz Knight]

Taking a Walk I'm Buzz Knight and this is the Taking a Walk podcast. Now, music has a way of finding us exactly when we need it. And sometimes the people who spend years helping others tell the stories behind their songs discover they have their own story that needs to be told. Rishikesh Hirway, better known to millions as the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast song Exploder, has spent over a decade pulling back the curtain on how great music gets made. He sat with artists from Beyonce to Yo Yo Ma, asking them to break down their songs piece by piece. But now, after more than 10 years of telling other people's musical stories, Irue is stepping into the spotlight to tell his own. His debut full length album, in the Last Hour of Light is out now on Keeled Scales. Produced by Phil Weinrobe, known for his extraordinary work with Big Thief and Adrian Linker, this is a deeply personal record born out of one of the most difficult chapters of his life, the death of his mother and his father's hospitalization. The result is 11 tracks that move between quiet intimacy, wide open Americana, hinted soundscapes, a musical memoir about loss, love, and the hours when everything feels most fragile and most real. The album's first single, Stray Dogs, features iron and wine, and if that pairing tells you anything, it's that this is not background music. This is music that asks you to sit with it. I'm so glad on taking a walk to be talking next with Rishikesh here

[Julianne Moore]

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[Rishikesh Hirway]

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[Buzz Knight]

Taking a Walk Rishikesh it's an honor to have you on Taking a Walk.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

[Buzz Knight]

So you have spent over a decade as the person asking artists to explain their music on this amazing podcast, Song Exploder. What was it like to finally be on the other side, making a record that now you have to talk about and explain to the world?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I mean, it feels great because Song Exploder started after I had been, you know, after I'd spent a decade on my own music career. I'd put out four albums, and after that fourth album, I really felt like I had kind of hit the rocks, you know, and I didn't know what was going to happen next with my my music career. It felt like it was moving slowly but just so incrementally that I think looking back, I can now say, like I got quite depressed about what had happened and more importantly, what hadn't happened. And I just didn't know how I was going to sort of make the leap to the next next point in my career. And I was comparing myself to a lot of other people and just feeling like really unworthy of the work that goes into making music for the first time in my life. And Song Exploder came out of that period when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do and just sort of taking a step back for the first time from my own music. And I made the show kind of as a daydream for what I wanted to be asked if I ever had the chance, if I ever got to the place where my, you know, in my career where I got to do the kind of interviews that I daydreamed, what would that show look like? And I thought, oh, I. I'd want to ask people about their work as it connects to, like, the actual pieces of the song and how those pieces got made. And so the whole podcast really came in a way out of imagining an interview that I might do someday, because I was sort of trying to empathize with. With potential future guests at that time.

[Buzz Knight]

So what you're telling me that I'm not the only one that uses doing a podcast to have our own therapeutic feeling? I feel better about myself already.

[OnDeck Representative]

Thank you.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I definitely didn't recognize it at the time that that's what I was doing. It was only really, in retrospect, many years deep into the process that. That I sort of realized that was what I had created for. But, yeah, in answer to your original question, it does feel great to finally come back out the other side of all that writer's block and be able to connect with music in a different way, because now I've had the chance to learn from all these other people who I've interviewed.

[Buzz Knight]

So what was the first moment you remember seeing that music was going to be part of or your life? How old were you? And what was that experience that first. Was that light bulb moment about music?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, I played music growing up. You know, I had taken piano lessons as a kid, and I played in the school band. But I think it was when I got to high school and started playing drums in a band that I just felt. I felt something different. You know, it felt like not just an extracurricular activity. It felt like I was connected to it in a way that felt, I don't know, important to my identity. That it was a way that I started to define who I was, the music that I listened to, and also the fact that I played music myself and, you know, and I would carry my drumsticks in my. My backpack so that, you know, if there was a free moment, I could sneak away to the music room. And there was a little drum practice room in the music building. And if it were free, then I had a key. I could sneak in and just, you know, play a little bit. I found it really addictive to just sit at the drum it. And. And play around.

[Buzz Knight]

Who were those artists? Who were those songs by those artists that impacted you?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

At that time, when I was sort of teaching myself how to play the drums, you know, I was still taking piano lessons, and I was Playing piano in the jazz band. But. But through my jazz piano teacher, he'd gotten me this key to the drum room, and I would listen to tapes of bands and try and play drums along to them. And so one of the albums that I played along to a lot was 13 songs by Fugazi. And so I, I've never gotten to meet Brendan Canty, but in my head, he's kind of my original drum teacher.

[Buzz Knight]

And did he ever get upset at you for not following the rules?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Yes. Well, I definitely let him down many times as I was learning.

[Buzz Knight]

And who influenced you on your style as a great interviewer?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, I had never done an interview before I started Song Exploder, and I was really just kind of feeling my way through it. I think probably the person who influenced it the most was my therapist. My wife and I decided to do couples therapy before we ever got married as a sort of preemptive preventative medicine. You know, kind of just way to jumpstart getting to know each other in a deeper way and kind of trying to find things. We, we had lived together, we had been living together. We got engaged very quickly, and then we'd been living together, and we were trying to just navigate that and understanding how different we were. Our personalities were so different and our ways of communicating were so different. So we started doing couples therapy, and I feel like I really learned about the. Just the principle of listening closely and asking deep questions and follow up questions and trying to dig as much intimate information out of the person you're speaking to from that experience. That was something that I had been doing, you know, before I started the podcast. And I think in some ways that was probably my most formal training.

[Buzz Knight]

Are you sensitized differently when you're just having informal conversations with people and you're in the middle of explaining your case about something or telling a story, and you're able to look at them and go, you're not listening to a word I'm saying, are you?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I probably am, much to my wife's chagrin.

[Buzz Knight]

They know, don't they? They know the deep, the deep secrets, for sure.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I have to also give some credit to my. My wife, though, because she was the early, early in our relationship, when we were first dating, there was a moment where I was, I was talking to her and I kind of got the sense that, oh, I don't think I realized that she wasn't listening, but she admitted it to me. She said, you know, I have to say I wasn't really paying attention to exactly what you said. What you were saying, I was just listening to the sound of your voice, which was so nice. And it was the first time that anybody had made a comment on. About my speaking voice. And so it was a foreshadowing of a couple of different things.

[Buzz Knight]

I like that. That's very sweet.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Yeah.

[Buzz Knight]

Congratulations on the album titled in the Last Hour of Light.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Thank you.

[Buzz Knight]

It's such a vivid, emotionally specific image, which I love. Where does that title come from? And what does that phrase mean to you personally?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Thank you so much for saying that and for the question. I was trying to find a way to talk about where I am in my life because the album is all of these very personal stories, and a lot of them are looking back at my life in memory. And also a lot of them are about just the idea of remembering and trying to hold on to memories where I am now, you know, in my. My mid-40s, I feel like I have a different relationship to time than I ever did before. And certainly since the last time I was writing music and all these songs came out and they. They all had this connection to this feeling of time as this tangible quantity and how it was running out. And that image, for me, felt like a visual way of representing the way I feel, knowing that there is a finite amount of time and. And not only mourning it. Not mourning the sort of the. The future passing of that time, but also trying to bask in whatever time there is right now. So it was. I had originally had the. The phrase the last hour of light, and something about that phrase felt beautiful to me, but also quite sad because there were. And there was a remove, you know, some distance, talking about this idea that, yeah, time is running out. But then later, while I was recording the album, I thought if I just added the word in, it would feel closer to what I was feeling, which is. It's not just talking about it with some distance. This is where I am. I'm talking about it in the middle of it while it's happening, while you're watching the last rays of the sun kind of pass over the horizon.

[Buzz Knight]

So visual. And I love that aspect of it. It actually also made me think about a recent discovered favorite song by Van Morrison, the song called Remembering Now.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Oh, wow. I don't know that song.

[Buzz Knight]

It conjures up some of those same moments of the past. But here's where it is right at this moment in time, and let's deal with it and maybe even enjoy it.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Yeah, I mean, it's a great title. I feel like I get so much from Just those two words.

[Buzz Knight]

Definitely. Yeah. The record was written in the wake of your mother's death and during your father's hospitalization. How did you know that music, rather than any other form, was the right container for what you were going through?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I don't know that I knew it so much as it just felt like a compulsion. I'm grateful that I had music because I don't know where else I would put some of those thoughts and feelings and I wouldn't know how to express them and I guess in some ways process them. I feel like by writing songs, I could take some of that feeling and some of those ideas out of me and put them in, you know, a kind of bell jar or something like that. And. And then say, like, well, what. What is it that I'm going through and what is it that I'm feeling and can I put words to it? And. And I'm really grateful that I was basically out of the writer's block at the time when this was happening, because it meant that I did have an outlet for that, but I don't know that I had really any other. Any other choice if I were going to try and express that.

[Buzz Knight]

Well, sometimes just releasing that fact and realizing I don't have any other choice, let me go with the flow is the best decision, right?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Buzz Knight]

Phil Weinrobe, he produced the album. Someone who's worked with Big Thief and Adrian Lenker. He carries a very specific emotional intimacy. Certainly. What drew you to Phil and how did that collaboration shape the sound of the record?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, I originally wanted to see if Phil might be interested in working with me because of the work he did co producing Adrienne's solo albums. I love her music and I love her songwriting. And, you know, when you're looking for a producer, there are. You don't really know what you're going to end up with. You don't know who. What the personalities are or anything like that. But you have to start somewhere. And so I thought, well, let me start with one of my all time favorite albums of recent history and maybe my life, the Songs and Instrumentals album double album by Adrian Lenker. And I knew Phil's name because he had also recorded Big Thief's interview for Song Exploder when they did the podcast. So I'd already had his email in my inbox, you know, from when he sent the files over. And his name had come up a couple other times too. I remember Feist did an episode of Song Exploder and she also mentioned Phil for having started this Club, maybe you'd call it during the Pandemic where, where he would organize a group of songwriters to write a song a day for a week. And he kind of set these parameters where everybody had to send their music to. To him before he had his coffee in the morning, from the night before. And then he would collect everything, put it in a playlist, and send it out to everybody. And he made rules that once he sent it out to everybody, no one could make any comments about any of the songs. But if you didn't contribute a song, you were out, you got kicked out of the group, so you had to submit something. And also no one could say anything about it. He was just an interesting figure, and I really loved that album. So that's kind of where that first began. And then in terms of shaping the album, he shaped it, honestly, more than I could have ever imagined when we first started speaking, because he has a very particular way of making. Making music. And it is so opposite from how I'd made music my entire life, which is that he records everything live. Everybody in one room, no isolation in the tracks, nobody wearing headphones, no click track. Just let's play, like, basically let's make the recording of a. Of a live performance and that'll be. That'll be it. You're not gonna be able to go back and edit things or retake your vocal or anything like that. Everything is just gonna happen live. So that completely changed what this album was gonna be.

[OnDeck Representative]

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[Julianne Moore]

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[OnDeck Representative]

Welcome back to the Taking a Walk podcast.

[Buzz Knight]

What are the elements that are completely different on how you approach song explosion exploder and how you approach creating this. This music?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Song Exploder is a place where I get to engage with something that I feel quite close to in my personality, which is, you know, editing, going back and saying, like, okay, I'm going to re reorder this story. So this piece of the story feels like an important place to start. I'm going to start here, then we're going to play this music. Like, there's so much thought and consideration that goes into making every episode of the podcast. I spend hours and hours and hours and days editing every episode and then re editing both the words and the artist's music. And that feels very core to who I am. That level of just sort of like careful, you know, zoomed in kind of inspection. And Phil essentially took that part of my personality away. In the making of this album, I could not engage with that, that part of me, and it ended up making me confront what was underneath that and what was it that I was holding on to and what I'd seen as positive aspects of that way of working that might actually be disguising negative aspects of that way of Working.

[Buzz Knight]

Thank you for sharing that. That is a fascinating look inside the mind of a brilliant creative on two fronts, on a music front and on an interview podcast front. So thank you.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Thank you.

[Buzz Knight]

Stray Dogs features Iron and Wine's Sam Beam. I love that title. We've all been stray dogs. How did that collaboration come about, and what did that bring to that song that you couldn't have anticipated?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, that's a song that wouldn't have existed were it not for. For Sam Beam, because I was going to a songwriting residency in Texas for a week, and I'd never done that. I never turned my life off in that way and just focused on music. I'd always tried to fit it around, and especially during the days of the podcast, you know, I would try and make room for. For music where I could. But this was a rare opportunity for me to just say, all I'm going to be working on is music. So that was exciting. But I felt a lot of pressure. And before I left, because I was worried about squandering that precious time, I reached out to some folks to say, if I run out of my own ideas, you know, if I look through my entire notebook and I feel like I've gone through everything, I've tried every song, and it's not working, and I still have time left, what am I going to write about? Can you give me a homework assignment? Could you give me some kind of prompt that I could turn to in that moment? And so I reached out to a few friends. One of the people I reached out to was Sam from Iron and Wine, and. And he sent a few prompts over, and one of them was. Was a prompt that went, describe a street that you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog. And that phrase just made me immediately think about the first time that I ever saw stray dogs, which was in India. It was on the street in India. It wasn't my street. It was a street where my. My great uncles lived, my grandfather and his brothers all lived on the same street in this small village in India where my mom had grown up. And I was there visiting when I was eight years old, and. And I saw stray dogs for the first time. And I saw how they. How they ran down the street and how they just were playing with each other. They just seemed to be living in their own world. And I don't know that I'd thought about it that way, but that phrase just sparked that memory and sent me back. And the song just kind of started tumbling out right then, and There and then I started thinking about how that feeling that those dogs had reminded me not just of that moment when I first saw them, but it reminded me of what it used to feel like for me when I was. When I was with my friends and we would just be care. That kind. That level of carefree. The song I ended up writing, I think the entire song that same day. I hadn't even gotten to the songwriting residency yet, which was. Which was funny because I was meant to be saving ideas for that, but really, that. That whole song came out because of that small phrase that he sent me. So then when it came time to record, I asked if he would be willing to sing on it, because I felt like it would be a nice way to kind of honor his initial contribution.

[Buzz Knight]

The record is described as balancing quiet intimacy with spacious Americana tinted soundscapes. Was that contrast intentional from the start, or did that sort of emerge naturally as you were writing and creating?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, I think that the intimacy was always there, partly just because of my taste. And I think there are certain contours of what you make that are just shaped by. I feel like genetics. You know, I. I think in some ways, the way that I sing and the way that my music sounds because of the way that I sing it, I have as much control over that as I do my height. You know, it's just. That's. That's what I. That's what I got. And so in some ways, it didn't feel like a choice so much. And then I think in terms of the soundscape part, you know, I moved to LA because I wanted to score films. And I think that my interest has always been an intersection between music and visuals, whether it. Whether or not it's actually a film or just the way that it feels to be alive and take in the things that you see and you hear, and you're sort of creating the soundtrack for your own life, or you're creating the visual soundtrack for what you're hearing. I think that I've always loved the idea of, you know, again, it's. It doesn't feel like a choice, but I think the instinct to turn whatever's happening into the miniature movie that's playing right in front of my eyes. I feel like that's something that's been with me for a long time. I'm. I think that the music ends up being a combination of those two things. And I. I can pinpoint to the history that they've had in my life, but I'm not sure that I can pinpoint A specific concrete decision that went into it. It's more like leaning into the things that I already feel happen naturally.

[Buzz Knight]

Song Exploder has featured some of the most celebrated artists of our time. Did spending all those years studying how other people make music change the way you approach making your own?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think in big ways and small ways. Small ways, like just here's a production technique that you might to try, or here's a way of writing, or here's just a way of thinking about a specific part, you know, that I. That I might try to incorporate in my own writing. But I think in much bigger ways it affected me because I learned about collaboration in a. In a real way through the podcast. You know, the world of co writing and working with producers, things like that. I of course know that those things are a big part of music and so many artists music, but they weren't things that I had engaged with myself. I used to make everything where in a way where I tried to be the sole creator as much as possible. Let me record every single part, let me write every single part, let me do the arrangements, let me, you know, conceive everything and write every lyric. That was something that was important at that time. But I think learning about how songs changed and how songs were born through the unique configuration of two people together or three people together or an artist and a producer, it just felt cool and I wanted to try it for myself if and when I ever got back to making music. So when I did, that was a big reason why I reached out to Phil as well, as opposed to producing it myself. I thought, like, let me try letting somebody else's brain in and see what happens and see what surprise might exist for me in my own songs.

[Buzz Knight]

Is there a conversation that you had on Song Exploder, like a moment with an artist that you found yourself thinking about while you were writing or recording the album?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

I don't know that it's a specific moment as much as it was an aggregate of moments where an artist was telling me about a song that meant something very, very deeply personal to them. I always found that really gratifying as, as an interviewer, just to be able to have that kind of depth of connection with someone and it felt, and I felt, felt as a listener, that it was really gratifying. But I appreciated how much an artist was willing to put of themself into their work, to expose raw feelings and experiences and then transmute that into something really that has happened. I would say many times on the podcast, certainly not Every episode. But those. Those episodes kind of just ring out in my. In my mind all the time. And when it came to writing, I wanted to feel that same kind of connection with the music for myself as an artist and imagining other people hearing it. I felt like, if I'm gonna do this again after so long, I. I know it's going to mean a lot to me. So let me put all of that meaning into my own work, too. Let me just really rip something out of my own experience, as hard as it might be to talk about or write about, because those have been the songs that have felt the most profound to me as a listener and as a maker of that podcast.

[Buzz Knight]

Writing about grief is one of the most personal things, obviously anybody can do, any artist can do. Were there moments in the process you questioned that you wanted to share something so intimate?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Sometimes I wondered if I was somehow being self indulgent or. I think the most brutal version of the question that I would ask myself is, am I somehow diminishing the. The magnitude of my. My mom's death by trying to turn it into art? You know, like, is it too big and too important to then look at in this way or share in this way or, like, to try and transmute it into something else? Yeah. Was I doing her a disservice? Was I doing her memory a disservice by trying to, you know, find four chords that would go along with the experience or something like that? That was the hardest part, I think.

[Buzz Knight]

Well, in closing, we call this podcast Taking a Walk, and we like to ask what we call our dream walk question. If you could take a walk with someone, anybody, living or gone, who would it be and where would you take that walk and what would you talk about?

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Well, I mean, it might be because of the question you just asked me before this, but certainly the first person I think of is my mom for many reasons. Obviously. It would be amazing to be able to see her again and talk to her again. The last several years of her life, she wasn't able to walk or talk, really. She had a neurological condition that was degenerative. So she. She spent most of her last years of her life in a wheelchair and with a sort of diminished capacity to speak. But I used to love, love just hanging out with her. She was so funny and. And she was someone who I think really tried. Not even so much tried. I feel like she appreciated something about my music, even if my parents didn't always sort of approve of the career choice. She was a music lover, and it always meant something to me when she would say something about my songs or really more, more often, you know, I just hear her like singing one of them or she would say, I like that song, the one that you did. This one that goes like this. I like that. That always felt really, you know, that was the closest thing to parental approval around my music that I ever got and it was very precious to me. And nowadays I live in a really beautiful part of Los Angeles and one of the things I love doing is taking a walk outside of my front door and walking up to the Griffith Observatory, which is about a mile and a half walk. And my wife and I do that pretty frequently. It's a really just, it's a beautiful, beautiful walk and we feel very spoiled by having it so close. But my, my mom passed away before we ever moved here to this house, so she has never really seen this entire chapter of my, my life. Not just the music, but yeah, even just the physical surroundings. Being able to go on a walk with her, being able to have a conversation with her, those are things that I lost more than a decade ago, maybe over 15 years ago at this point. So to be able to have that chance would be really, really special.

[Buzz Knight]

This has been special. Rishikesh Hirway Song Exploder Congratulations and Keep it rolling and in the last hour of Light. Congratulations on that. It's really amazing to talk to you and I'm grateful that you came on Taking a Walk.

[Rishikesh Hirway]

Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking to you too.

[Buzz Knight]

I'm Buzz Knight and thanks for listening to the Taking a Walk podcast. Now please check out our companion podcasts produced by Buzz Night Media Productions with your host Lynn Hoffman. Music Save Me Showcasing the healing power of music and comedy, Save Me Shining a light on how laughter is the best medicine. All shows are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and are part of the I Heart Podcast Network.

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