Elise Hu

And that's it for today.

TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.

This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sangmarnivong.

This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.

I'm Elise Hugh.

I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

Thanks for listening.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

When was the last time you really listened to someone?

Not while checking your phone, not while waiting for your turn to talk, but actually let their words land.

It's harder than it sounds, and it might be the most important thing we've stopped doing.

That's Rishikesh Hirwe, creator and host of Song Exploder, the beloved podcast and Netflix show where musicians break down how a song was made layer by layer.

In 2021, he gave a TED Talk about what happens when you take that same kind of listening and turn it toward people.

It's a talk that stays with you, partly because of what he teaches and partly because of what he shares, including a beautiful song about his mom called Between Here and There featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

After more than a decade helping other artists tell their stories and helping us think about listening, he's made his most personal work yet.

a solo album called In the Last Hour of Light.

He describes it as a sort of memoir about losing his mother, nearly losing his father, and learning to let go.

We caught up with him earlier this month to talk about his ideas about listening and how they've evolved, what he's learned from hundreds of conversations with artists, and what it feels like to finally turn the key and welcome us into his own house.