Ian Brennan Interview Part 2: Recording Music in Remote Communities | Ghana, Bhutan & Oakland Stories
This transcript is linked to the Podcast, Video and show notes with important links.
Ian Brennan:
This was someone who was sleeping on a couch, broken couch, underneath an overpass, and got up and sang a really heartbreaking song about her mother. (singing, clip "Mother in My Heart" Homeless Oakland Heart Collective, album linked in show notes)
Ian Brennan:
This is a photograph of her while she was singing.
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear my second conversation with Ian Brennan. I feel he's making the world a better place in all aspects of his work. If you missed Part 1, it's linked in the show notes. It's so inspiring to learn about how Ian records music with such dedication in some of the world's most remote places. Today, you'll be hearing about his travels in Ghana to record in the witch camps, in Bhutan and also in the encampments of the unhoused in Oakland, California, near where he grew up. This series with Ian continues to explore over 50 of his albums, which have resulted in many musicians being able to travel and perform music outside their nations for the first time. Besides being a GRAMMY-winning producer, he's also respected as an author and expert in nonviolent crisis resolution, and in this episode, we also talked about his book, "Peace By Peace". You'll be hearing excerpts from three albums today and they're linked in the show notes for you.
Leah Roseman:
Hey, Ian, great to see you again.
Ian Brennan:
Great to see you. Thank you for speaking again.
Leah Roseman:
So you were just back from a recent trip.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. Yeah. It was a trip that was disrupted by the war, like so many things have been. And it was kind of interesting to be traveling during that time and comforting in a way to see so much peace. In other words, if I didn't know about the war, I would've never known about the war. Yet I had to circle the globe ultimately to do this trip because the flights through the Middle East were all canceled and disrupted and something that's already a pretty hard trip became much, much, much more difficult.
Leah Roseman:
So which continent were you traveling to?
Ian Brennan:
I was traveling to Australia, but then going out into the Pacific. And so I was scheduled to already be in Australia. And sadly, the Bhutan Balladeers were going to be there for WOMAdelaide. The first group I think ever from Bhutan that would be there, and it had to be canceled. At the very last minute, they were at the airport in Bhutan. And they have to travel by national airline to get anywhere. So no international airlines go into Bhutan because it's too dangerous, the landing and taking off because of the mountains. And so they were about already checked in at the gate and about to leave when it got canceled, which in a sense was a blessing because otherwise they would have ended up in India with no way back.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, maybe we should talk about your first trip to Bhutan. So I really enjoyed that album that you made with them. So this is music, it's several centuries old. It's like a classical music. It's interesting because when I Googled it, there was some references on the internet calling it folk music, but it's actually more of a classical music, right? Zhungdra ? How do you say it?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah, Zhungdra Yeah. I'm probably not saying it right either, but yeah, it's close to that.
Leah Roseman:
And the language they're singing in is related to Sanskrit, but it's not spoken colloquially.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. It's kind of like Latin, meaning it's a language that's basically only used in, in their case, only in religious circles. And so it's a foreign language to the average person in Bhutan when they hear those songs.
Leah Roseman:
So when you went to Bhutan, did you know about this specific music?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. In this case, I did. I didn't know ... It's a starting point when we go somewhere. It's nice to have this sense that, okay, we know what's there or that there's something there specifically. It doesn't always end up being the thing that we record or that we would release. But in this case, it was very focused on that. And we recorded 15 people. I think it's more than ... I don't want to put a time on it, but it's many hours and hours and hours of music because the songs tend to be quite long. And I'd say that, for me, the mark of a really strong record is when you can leave off a lot of stuff that's maybe as good or even better in some cases potentially than what's on an album. And that was certainly the case here. It was all good.
Ian Brennan:
I mean, I think there was one take by one person that maybe was not of the same level, and that was it. And I think that's probably a reflection on the classical part too, that I mean, this is very disciplined. It's not informal.
Leah Roseman:
So there's a track, I think it's track five with hammer dulcimer ... It sounds like it's hammered dulcimer. It's called Turning Inauspicious Days Good. So I was curious about that instrument and also the fact that you filmed and recorded in a forest. We hear the sounds of birds. It's really beautiful.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. We were really lucky to be up in the forest and I think it was some of the best sound you could have, meaning better than a studio that's been prepared. And obviously there's the birds, the crows in particular are pretty noisy, but they tend to be musical. They tend to respond to the music. So oftentimes it's an accompaniment more than a disruption. And that instrument, like a lot of the music in that region originates from China, gets changed to some degree with travel and over time, but it's incredibly beautiful and resonant and hard to record instrument because it has so many overtones. But yeah, I think that's a particularly special track on the record. (music, excerpt track 5, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
So there's this huge Buddha statue, right? Near where you were.
Ian Brennan:
They say there's always these claims and sometimes they're hard to verify one way or the other, but that it's the largest, tallest sitting Buddha statue in the world. It's very, very tall. It's like 85 feet tall. And so where we were, you could see the head of it, depending on where you were on the mountain slope, if you went on the way down or in, you could see the head of it in profile. So it was quite amazing. And a lot of people, the tourists that do come, which in the period we were there, there were basically none. They walk the steps up to this Buddha. And so they're not that far away, probably hundreds of yards or a kilometer away, but they're in a totally different environment than the forest is.
Leah Roseman:
A previous guest of the series, Noam Lemish, he actually lived in Bhutan for a year. So we talked about that. He was invited to teach Western music and run a radio show, but he did interact with some of the local musicians and he has like a jazz and improvisatory background. So that ... I'll point people to that conversation if they're curious.
Ian Brennan:
Wow, that's amazing. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So not many people outsiders go to Bhutan. What were your impressions on that first trip?
Ian Brennan:
Well, it's incredibly beautiful physically. It's like most countries, I think much bigger than it might appear or be believed to be because when you get into the detail of a place, and I did not. I mean, somebody that lives there for a year maybe could, and even then maybe not, because it's very much like a brain, a lot of terrain that's up and down. So I mean, to really get to know the different places is not easy. And many of the musicians came to us from villages that look on the map to not be far away, but took them sometimes two days to get there.
Ian Brennan:
But the feeling is very unique. It's a small population. It was largely depopulated after COVID with people going outside the country for work and there's a lot of that are the younger people. So like a lot of countries in that situation, there's quite a few young people, under 18, 20, something like that. And then quite a few people that are older, 50 and above, 60 and above. But in between, a lot of the people have left, but there was a very welcoming, strong feeling. I mean, like, wow, this is a place you could live, that kind of feeling, which is as lovable as most places are. I mean, I don't know that you always get that feeling from a place, but that was almost instantaneous off the plane and just driving from the airport inwards, it just felt immediately like, "Oh, this could be home."
Leah Roseman:
So there's an old song that no one else knew, an elder Pemo Chodin sang this. It's called, "Even If Yo Remember the Home You Left, You Must Remember Where You Are," which is such a great sentiment. So I was going to play a clip of that.
Ian Brennan:
Beautiful. (music: clip of track 8, Bhutan Balladeers album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
Do you have anything to say about that or ...
Ian Brennan:
Well, just that because people come from different regions, which again, some people might look at the map and think, "Well, this is a small country," but they're having different experiences. And of course, this music is being actively kept alive by a small group of people. And some of these songs are known by one person. In this case, it was an elder. And so many of the songs, they decide spontaneously in the moment like, "Okay, I'll try to sing this with you or play with you on this song." But that was a song that no one knew. So they weren't even able to or willing to try because of that. And that's how rare the song was. But it's beautiful. And there's great poetry in so many of the songs. And I think like with a lot of things that are in languages other than our own, the meaning is usually evident, meaning the most meaningful phrases tend to stand out sometimes.
Ian Brennan:
And so I think the poetry is in the sound to a large degree too.
Leah Roseman:
So on YouTube, there's sort of a compilation little video from some of Marlena's footage. So is there a complete video anywhere?
Ian Brennan:
No, that's what she generally does are these mini documentaries just fly on the wall, very rarely with any text or any narration, just to give a sense of what it was like. That's the goal, not to be comprehensive.
Leah Roseman:
So I'll link that video in the show notes along with the album.
Ian Brennan:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
There was another one, I was curious about this instrument, the Chiwang, which seems similar to the Morin khurr from Mongolia, which I have featured on this series with Bukhu Ganburged, which it looked to me like the strings were maybe twisted horse hair, that it wasn't like an erhu. I mean, it has the two strings. I don't know if you looked at it that carefully, their violin type instrument.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. Yeah. It is animal hair. I'm not sure of horse hair. They talk a lot about horses. I didn't see any horses while I was there, but yeah, it's another one of those instruments that has correspondence around the world really, but especially in the region.
Leah Roseman:
So this track that I was thinking of that has this instrument is called I was Unhappy in My Marriage. (music: clip track 3 Bhutan Balladeers, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
And it is mostly the women singing and men accompanying on instruments, but the men sometimes sing, as I remember.
Ian Brennan:
Yes. Yes. The men also sing. There were only two men involved out of the 15 people. Well, there were three, but the one man was more of an agent, more of a manager. He played music a bit, but that wasn't really his thing. But there's the master, Yeshi, and he plays all the instruments and sings and writes songs. He's won awards in Bhutan for writing songs. Then there was a younger man that also played, but yeah, the majority were women and some of the songs were three, four, or five women singing together without instruments.
Leah Roseman:
So ornamentation, it was interesting listening to it and when the instruments are playing with them, they kind of know what they're doing, but it's like this slight, slight delay, you know what I mean? So do you think they're just imitating or they're anticipating a little bit because they know ... You know what I mean?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hear what you're saying. I think a lot of it's intentional, just a way of almost like a call and response where they're mirroring each other. Because some of the songs, we had more time in this case, and some of the songs, there was an extra take for whatever reason, not many, but some. And it would be the same, like very spot on, not very different from one take to another.
Leah Roseman:
I should know which name of which book, but in one of your books about music, you write about this experience and I think you said that it wasn't as quiet as you'd expect in Bhutan.
Ian Brennan:
Oh yeah. I mean, I think it's that idea of the John Cage idea, I guess, of silence that doesn't really exist. And when you start paying attention, you start hearing things that maybe you've filtered out. And so it's always strange, I think, with the recording because the louder bands, those noises don't matter. They can be harder to record the louder bands, more parts and more bleed and that sort of thing can be very challenging, but you don't have to worry about the air conditioning and little sounds. But when people are playing very intimate, quiet music, which is what I tend to prefer, very spare, oftentimes acapella, then all those noises are very evident usually. And fortunately, again, a lot of them contribute musically through some alchemy, but yeah, it was even up in the forest, beyond the crows and the wind, which is always the big challenge outside is wind.
Ian Brennan:
There's a lot of other noises as well. And in the city, in particular, I mean, we were outside the city, but in the city was extremely noisy, especially at night, really, really noisy. Lots of dogs and then chanting in the morning, morning hours. So it was not peaceful in that regard. That's true. I don't think of it that way, but now that you bring that up, I think that's probably what I was referring to was the early morning awakenings from dogs and chanting
Ian Brennan:
And bars.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, really?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, nightclubs, whatever, something, people partying.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I made more notes than I usual on the record. There was a track Homesick for My Village because it had the flute and the lute, the drumnyen, and we were just talking about the ornaments, how the flute was closely following the vocalist. So maybe I'll just play a little bit of that.(music: clip track 4 Bhutan Balladeers, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
And I thought the final track "Farewell song, I hope we meet again", it's this beautiful group singing that would be nice to just highlight a little bit of.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Great. (music: clip track 11 Bhutan Balladeers, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
Well, I wanted to talk as well, going back to Oakland where you grew up, you produced this really powerful album with unhoused people called "Not a Homeless Person, Just a Person Without a Home", with the Homeless Oakland Heart Collective. So Ian, just in the last few years, it seems like the language around that has changed. We say unhoused
Ian Brennan:
Yeah
Leah Roseman:
rather than homeless.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah, it's true. The language has changed recently. We're on the euphemistic treadmill always with these things.
Leah Roseman:
What do you think about that?
Ian Brennan:
Well, I think political correctness is used as something to divide and beat people up sometimes, but it's actually very important to be careful about language, and therefore it is going to evolve. I think it's also important to recognize that evolution and to see things within context, what was an appropriate term in 1960s is not going to be in 1970s and probably not in 1980s. And nowadays with social media, the treadmill is sped up to where sometimes it's a year or two, but it is not something to be made fun of though. It's something that's really, really important how we talk about things because when people talk about something in a degrading way, that's the first step towards violence, is that they will think of it as lesser. They will regard it as an object usually rather than a person or something of value, and that precipitates violence, whether it's verbal, emotional, or physical. So these words do matter.
Leah Roseman:
So the Homeless Oakland Heart Collective, I assume they were already existing when you connected with this community to make this album?
Ian Brennan:
No, no. We went around and just met people in the community. I work with different homeless organizations, particularly in the East Bay, particularly in Oakland, providing training, and went around with someone who was a leader in the community, and we would just talk to people and say, "Hey, do you want to sing?" And bringing people food, bringing people something to drink regardless, but some hydration, but asking them, and most people did, they had things they wanted to share, and that's the basis of the record.
Leah Roseman:
So we'll get into some of this nonviolence training because I want to talk about your book "Peace by Peace", but let's talk about the album specifically a little bit. It's really powerful, and Track 17 Can't Remember How I Became Homeless. (Music: clip track 17, album linked in show notes)
Singer 1 Homeless Oakland Heart Collective:
"I can't remember how we came homeless. I was only 6, or 7 years old. I can't remember how we came homeless. "
Leah Roseman:
The album cover photo, do you want to speak to that image?
Ian Brennan:
Well, Marilena's photography I think is really strong in that there's so much empathy in it and also an emphasis on the humanity and the individuality of the people that she photographs. And she has an ability to form rapport with people almost instantly in a lot of cases. And this was someone who was sleeping on a couch, broken couch, underneath an overpass, and got up and sang a really heartbreaking song about her mother and just went from hanging out, sleeping during the day and pit bulls around and all that stuff, guarding the encampment to singing about her mom in a very touching way. And this is a photograph of her while she was singing.
Leah Roseman:
So that's track five, Mother in my Heart?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Singer 2 Homeless Oakland Heart Collective:
(Music: clip of track 5)"Let them go to the park. I think of my mother in my heart, no joy left in my heart anymore. So I hold on to those memories and if I die this way, just let it be. I have no plan because..."
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering what that month looked like, because you said in the show notes that you spent a month visiting the encampments.
Ian Brennan:
Well, I mean, I think it's that idea, again, of something being familiar, but not familiar or not intimate. So it's an area that I was born hundreds of yards away from most of the encampments and have spent a lot of time in that specific neighborhood of West Oakland, which is where most of the recordings took place and have worked with homeless organizations there, but it's still a different thing to be on the street, on the sidewalk, talking to people. And I think it's really an honor in a sense, maybe that's not quite the right word, but I think so, that to be able to meet people and to have them share, and certainly it's something that is informative about the world in ways that I don't think can be without experiencing them directly.
Ian Brennan:
And I think that's the danger is that it's so easy to, and understandably so, that people want to ignore or deny or minimize these things because they're overwhelmed with their own stress and troubles. And in a neighborhood such as West Oakland, where there's been gentrification and so there's people living in overpriced lofts and condos and they stumble out of their place and they're on their way nowadays into an Uber or to a BART train or whatever it may be to go to work. They've got their own troubles and they've got their own stuff going on, but there's a lot of life and stories around them that have greater complexity than I think we realize if we don't stop and try to listen and be interested in them.
Leah Roseman:
Would you be willing to share any of those stories that people shared with you?
Ian Brennan:
Well, I think in general, there's kind of two sides to that. One side is that there's people that are in need of greater mental health treatment and assistance than in the past, meaning up until 50 years ago, would have received that 50 or 60 years ago, more actively, maybe too actively, meaning involuntarily, but they would have been treated for their psychotic symptoms. So you've got people out on the streets that are really struggling to function. And then you've got other people that just, by the grace of the universe, were not in their position that have had things go wrong. But I think of one that always stayed with me, and this was in New York City down in the Bowery, and there was a person that was encamped on the sidewalk on the street, and I was talking with this person, and they had grown up their whole life upstairs in that exact building, and generations, I think at least one generation had grown up in the same apartment upstairs, and got evicted, and so had moved downstairs, and that's where they were living now.
Ian Brennan:
And that always haunted me, but I think at the same time, it was like, "Well, yeah, this is their home. This is where they live."
Leah Roseman:
So when you were in Oakland, there was some guitar sounds. I know sometimes you have travel guitars you give out with-
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. Yeah. I usually, if I can, bring these little travel guitars that actually sound good. They're about, well, I can't, but maybe two feet long, but most of the guitar that you hear was a guy we stumbled upon who, of all things, was just walking down the street with this broken toy guitar and yet played pretty amazingly at moments and didn't know how to play. It was just doing it intuitively. And that's the thing. The last time we spoke at the end, I think I wasn't clear. So there was something that I think we agree on, but I wasn't clear about it, is that I love virtuosity. So I've been lucky enough to record with Ustad Sami and people like Yeshi in Bhutan who are master musicians, but I also love recording people that don't consider themselves musicians, especially children I think are the best example of this.
Ian Brennan:
And I've always found them to be similar in a way. And I was doing a talk for some neuroscientists many years ago now, three, four years ago, and they told me that, "Oh yeah, when we have studied the brain of people that are non-musicians, and when we study the brain of people that are master musicians, the brain activity is almost identical." There's like a level of integration and freedom that's going on. And it's in between that I think sometimes that is where somebody who's formalized but isn't really free. And also, I think this has to do a lot with pop music. When I say somebody's got one song, it's like with pop music, that's kind of common that they're not really deepening necessarily the way a jazz musician is or a classical musician is where they're going deeper and deeper and deeper and probably getting stronger with time.
Ian Brennan:
Someone like Nels Cline, who I'm fortunate enough to be friends with and to have worked with and to love his playing so much. But this was a guy on the street who was coming from that very intuitive place. And just last night with my daughter, we have a little toy piano, not toy piano, but miniature piano. And when her friends come over, they almost always go straight to that piano. So if eight of them come over her classmates, then at least one of them goes straight to the piano. And almost always they find a pattern within 30 seconds, 60 seconds. They maybe don't maintain it for long, but they find it for a period of time. So I was playing with her last night. We do this sometimes where we both play and she played some of the most beautiful chord changes. I mean, she doesn't know chords, but just intuitively.
Ian Brennan:
And again, it was for a minute or two, but it was beautiful. So that's what I love is I guess the two extremes. And this guy with the broken guitar was in that place where he was just free. So he was doing things on the guitar that I could never do. Somebody who practiced too much when I was young, practiced three, six, eight, 12 hours a day from the time I was 14 to the time I was 20. And I could never do what he was doing in that moment. I'd never be that creative.(Music clip: track 3, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
So in light of this album you recorded in Oakland, maybe we could talk about piece by piece in your work with violence prevention, because if you hadn't done that work, I don't think you would've felt comfortable going in and doing this kind of recording.
Ian Brennan:
Right, right. No, I think that's true. Yeah. Or maybe would've had a very different experience doing it. Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So it was hard to know how to approach talking about it, so I just wrote down a bunch of quotes longhand. And I thought I would just ask you. I mean, it is beautifully distilled. I was kind of curious, last conversation with you, you said that, because you've written other books about violence prevention, that this is the most distilled. And you avoided giving examples in this. You did once or twice. Was that a decision just to pare things down so much?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. I mean, this is more like almost like bullet points where ... I mean, I've always tried to write in a very distilled way, no matter what I'm writing, whether it's prose or whether it's about anger and violence or whether it's about music. And so the first book was similar in a sense. I mean, I think it's a lot of core material and the second book also, specifically on the topic. But this was more ... 15 years after the first book was more about, okay, I've been teaching this for 33 years. I won't be teaching it forever. I've developed this curriculum for whatever it's worth, but it's basically going to die with me. So I'm not going to be ... I think 15 years ago, I was more worried about giving the recipe away or something like that. Whereas now it's like, no, if it helps somebody take it, steal it, whatever, some of the ideas.
Ian Brennan:
So it's very distilled. So yeah, aside from I think the prologue and the epilogue, that sort of thing, there isn't a lot of examples or personal stuff this time.
Leah Roseman:
I got a lot out of reading it, and I think it's one of these books. It's kind of psychology and philosophy. I think it's very broadly applicable as we had discussed before, but now that I'd read it, I really felt that way. So I'm just going to read back to you some of these quotes, and maybe you could just reflect on them.
Ian Brennan:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
For one thing you do say at the beginning, when speaking of violence, it is meant in all its variants, verbal, emotional, social, and physical.
Ian Brennan:
Right. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's all about the continuum and getting away from absolutes because I think that's what creates a lot of division and argument and depression and ultimately violence because it doesn't reflect reality. And it's interesting because even the phrase ... My grandfather was ... My father's father was bipolar manic and so he was very big on this idea of everything in moderation. But if you look at that phrase, that's an absolute. Say you're talking about moderation, but you're using extreme language because it's not quite everything. I don't think that we should be doing it in moderation. There's some things we should just not be doing. So if we can use that more careful language, I think it benefits us. It goes back to that idea that political correctness matters as far as language. And yet what we're bombarded by in the media is extremity all the time.
Ian Brennan:
I mean, advertising, propaganda, songs often as well, especially pop songs, a lot of them are full of these always and never platitudes. And so it's not like it's the worst thing in the world, but it's certainly not beneficial ultimately to our balance and wellbeing and health.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Okay. Here's another quote. You wrote, "We live in fluid states along a continuum and are not exactly the same figure to any two people in any two situations or even with the same individuals at different points in time. We must resist the tendency to reduce others and experiences to all or nothing, either or equations." I really like that.
Ian Brennan:
Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the struggle. I mean, it starts with talking about it, thinking about it, but then consistently applying it, especially when the societal forces kind of encourage us to do the opposite, especially in America. I mean, other societies I'm sure as well, but there's a lot of value placed on vengeance in American society where it's valorized and it's kind of mythical and it's not healthy. And it's not healthy, meaning violence is bad for the person who commits the violence as well as other people. Not as bad because it shouldn't be a competition anyway, but it's bad for them also in all cases. And in some cases, that person is harmed more than anybody else. They're the one who gets fired from their job, or they're the one who gets socially ostracized, or they're the one that breaks their own hand or ... I think about many of these news stories I've read over the years that are very similar, that boomerang effect of anger where a person in a state of road rage will try to do something violent to another person in a car and then flip their own car and they die.So I mean, it's very extreme and they don't deserve that, but it's a very stark example of how violence is bad for everybody involved, including the person who perpetrates it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. The States is a very litigious kind of culture too, right? Like suing people all the time and ...
Ian Brennan:
Well, yeah, I think the threat of doing it for sure, whether people actually do it or not, I don't know. But I think a lot of it is that hyper individuation and the breaking down of community. And it's hard to watch when I've traveled with the introduction of personal devices, how that's begun to happen in almost everywhere, where there's this fracturing of the community and the intergenerational bonds that in very recent times, in the last 10 or 15 years, in a lot of these communities. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You talk about how choices should be provided in groups of three or more, not just two, to avoid the binary trap of ultimatums. And I really ... I was thinking about that just in terms of parenting. My kids are grown up now, but I do remember dealing with tantrums and elsewhere in the book you write about how you want to ignore behavior, but not the person. And I think that can be really challenging when you're presented with something like that.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode.If you missed part 1 with Ian, he spoke to me about the Tanzania Albinism Collective, Rwanda’s The Good Ones, the Zomba Prison Project in Malawi, Comorian from Comoros and Africatown’s Ancestor Sounds with music of the descendants of the last slave ship in Mobile.You’ll find other suggested episodes in the show notes along with links to the albums featured in both of these episodes. Please sign up for my newsletter, and follow this podcast on your podcast app or YouTube. In the show notes you’ll also find links to support this independent podcast. Most importantly, share episodes you love with your friends. Now, back to Ian Brennan.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah, I think it is challenging. All the mistakes that I write about or I'm writing about myself, ultimately. I've been fortunate. I don't struggle with anger maybe as visibly as some people in my life. I've been pretty calm most of my life, but that doesn't mean I'm without anger. And so it's hard to not fall into those traps of judging and naming and labeling and being divisive. But if you're in a relationship with somebody, which I think ultimately is kind of the question sometimes is, do you want to have a relationship with this individual or not? You have a choice in most cases. And so in a fight, flight or freeze reaction, if it's a stranger, just leave. Don't engage them. Don't get engaged in this symbolic violence where you're willing to kill somebody or die for some kind of symbol. But in other cases, we are obligated to be there.
Ian Brennan:
You're the parent or it's a loved one, maybe not obligated with a loved one, but we choose to be there. Certainly in the professions I've worked in, in mental health facilities, you are obligated to have a relationship with people you would not choose to, meaning people that might be scary or threatening or attempting harm to themselves or others. So that's where I think it becomes really, really important to not be ambivalent and just be really clear that, okay, I'm going to have a relationship with this individual, so who am I going to have a relationship with that the healthy part of them or the unhealthy part of them? So we have to start with the belief that they have a healthy part of their personality. And if we don't have that, then people shouldn't be working in the helping professions to begin with. And then to look at things and not make them life and death when they're not.
Ian Brennan:
So I tell people in positions of authority, the real job and the real objective is just don't make it worse. If you can come into a bad situation and not make it worse and not intensify it negatively and not pour gasoline on the fire, you're doing awesome. That's all you need to do. You should get a paycheck for not making it worse. You don't have to be a hero, just don't make it worse. Then you can try to make it better, but even then it may not work, but we certainly don't want to make it life and death when it's not. And that's what you see every single day. I mean, somebody getting shot in the back as they're running away unarmed from someone, that's a classic case of making something life and death that was not. And so it's not easy because people are bringing their own adrenaline and their fear and their countertransference.
Ian Brennan:
But to look at it and just go, "Okay, this is bad, but I'm not going to punish this person for being unlikable in general or having bad social skills or not being a good communicator. I'm going to try to communicate with them and try to have a more positive outcome." Not a perfect outcome, but a more positive outcome.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were doing intakein locked psychiatric wards like emergency situations, I imagine many of these people were having delusions, they're experiencing things that weren't there.
Ian Brennan:
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, many of them. I mean, it's a range because a lot of people have been detained by the police and incorrectly, meaning they shouldn't have been. The police were sometimes misusing that ability just to solve a situation in the community, meaning to get somebody out of somewhat from a domestic disturbance or off the streets if they were ... We'd have somebody that was unhoused and they're in a wheelchair, but their wheelchair had a broken wheel, so they'd put them on a 5150. I mean, they'd misuse it. But sure, the majority were coming in because of psychotic symptoms and/or because of intoxication of some sort and often both, the two together.
Leah Roseman:
Since we're going to speak again in a couple of months, what I'm going to do is save some of these reflections on this book because I do want to get to at least one more of the musical projects in this episode.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I was thinking we could talk about the Witchcamp Ghana album, "I've forgotten now, who I used to be".
Ian Brennan:
Right.
Leah Roseman:
So you guys recorded in three villages, you met with over 300 people. You refer to them as clandestines because they're sort of in hiding.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
How did those connections come about and why Ghana specifically?
Ian Brennan:
Well, Ghana specifically because it maintains these camps. And in defense of Ghana, which is a very important place for people, is welcoming people back from America and has a lot of good in the capital, but like so many places, there's a divide between the urban, the capital city in particular of countries and the rural areas. And it's another one of those countries that the far north is very far, not only in distance, but also in many nations, it's the roads that it might take six hours, eight hours in the EU or in Canada, but when you've got dirt roads and bad weather, it can take two, three days. And so these areas are very, very isolated where most of the camps are. But in defense of the government, it's a conundrum because the camps exist, so then if they close them, where do people go?
Ian Brennan:
So they are, in some cases, relatively safe in the camps, but that's why we specifically went to Ghana. I mean, there are similar phenomenon in some other countries. I mean, there's 56 sovereign nations in Africa, so not all of them, but some of them, but it's very prevalent there. And as far as finding and making the connections, it was very difficult because they're denied, meaning people deny that they exist. And one of the villages we went to, nobody knows exists. I mean, not nobody, but it's by design unknown as opposed to one of the villages we went to, which is one of the official villages that the government is to some degree involved in. I mean, NGOs kind of run it.
Ian Brennan:
So when we got there and we started asking around, because that's how most of these things usually start is we just go and then we talk to people. The person that was going to take us deliberately took us to the wrong place because he didn't want to go there. And I don't know, I think there were many levels to that. Probably maybe he was afraid a little bit, like maybe to some degree believing in some of the ideas of witchcraft and the dangers. But in fact, most of the people that are there are elderly women that have either begun to have cognitive decline and/or they've been exploited after their husbands die, where people want to take their land so they ostracize them and claim they're a witch and try to get rid of them that way. And then oftentimes also for physical ailments. And a lot of that's visual, where somebody starts getting cataracts and their eyes change and people maybe that don't understand that from a medical standpoint, it's easy for them to think, "Okay, well, this is something supernatural.
Ian Brennan:
This is something negative." So there's a lot of levels to that. And then these women then tend to be also exposed to sexual abuse, elderly women that have been ostracized and are extremely vulnerable. So it's really, really tragic and it's quite complex, but the reality is that they're not witches and the reality is that historically this is part of colonialism was ... And we're talking about not just colonialism from the late 19th century on, but colonialism in the middle ages is that the people that are usually middle-aged women or older that possess a lot of cultural knowledge and are probably more assertive are the ones that are going to get targeted by people that are trying to colonize. We've got to get rid of them. We can't have these people, these elders that know how to help people with herbs because we're trying to give them pharmaceuticals.
Ian Brennan:
We can't have these people there that are fighting for their property rights and being outspoken. We need to get rid of them. And the easiest way, I mean, it's very misogynistic, but the easiest way has always been to claim they're a witch and to banish them in that way. And so it continues to this day. And so meeting these individuals was very, very painful and sad, but again, incredible how musical many of them were without ever having tried solo musical creation before and trying to write songs before or play an instrument before.
Leah Roseman:
So you've recorded over six hours of music and there's found objects for instruments. There was even a balloon leftover from a rally. And I understand people are going to be hearing regional dialects of lesser spoken languages as well.
Ian Brennan:
Right, right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. There was a solo called Abandoned.(Music: clip track 16, album and film linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
There was a track with drums called Hunted. Do you remember anything about that?
Ian Brennan:
There was one male who was a musician and he's called a wizard, not a witch. And in his case, and he's married, he has children, young children. In his case, it's because he has one damaged eye, and so that's why people believe that he was a wizard. And so he was then beaten worse further because of this, becoming maybe more scarred and disfigured. And he was able to flee and find refuge in a village that accepted him, on the periphery of their village that he was accepted, not in the village itself, with his family and in a little area with some others. And so he had multiple drums and had a lot of skill in vocalizing with them, kind of talking drum kind of instruments.(Music: clip track 10, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
And in some cases, there's electronic alternation of voices. You also have that on the Homeless Oakland album. Is that something you're loaning to them? You know what I mean?
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. I bring, especially in situations where there's people that don't play instruments or maybe this is their first time, I'll bring loops where they can hit the loop and experiment that way. And it might be 10 minutes of recording, but then there'll be a minute or two of it that just is striking and beautiful. Some of the recording there is that where it's live, but it's something that's happening in the moment that they're triggering on an extra track. There's a vocal track, but then there's an extra track.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And the last track, it's like a long one, but it's a compilation. It's called Left to Live Like An Animal. There's different things put together.
Ian Brennan:
Yeah. There's some hidden tracks in that, but the core track, Left to Live Like An Animal is one of those moments where the magical aspects of recording and just listening kind of come together. And that was that we were at the official village where we were not welcomed, the other places we were, we had to meet the chiefs of each village, pay tribute to them before we could do anything in each village. But in the NGO, we were not welcomed, but we were allowed, but we weren't welcomed. And so it was kind of became rushed where it was like, we were made to wait for hours and then we had to leave and wait some more and then come back. And it was the furthest away. It was many hours drive away from where we were in the north, where we were headquartered. And so we finally were recording and there were staff members there that were interfering.
Ian Brennan:
They couldn't understand what was being sung because again, the differences in language, but they just weren't supportive of the women or the process of them communicating in this way. And then, so we recorded quite a bit quickly, but then it got to the point where they were basically throwing us out. We were in this little office and they were telling us, "You got to go. " And there had been this one woman that was standing outside the entire time and had a look of tremendous, tremendous sorrow, like really deep, deep, deep sorrow. And so she was there, she was there, she was there, and they said, "Well, you got to go. " And I said, "Well, hold on, hold on. " And she was still outside, just standing there. I said, "Do you want to sing? Do you want to do a song?" And she said, "Yes, I do.
Ian Brennan:
" And I said, "Okay." And so we went in there and they were like, "She can't sing, she's not a singer." I mean, none of the people were, but they were really down on her in particular, which is so common with the people that end up being the strongest. And so she just sang this in one take and it's just one of the most, I think, devastating vocals I've ever heard without being able to understand the word. I mean, I know the meaning of the song, but without able to understand the words, but just so, so clear and so direct and so understated. And again, that's a thing that I think you can either do that where somebody's really being intimate and sharing and free, or you can spend 50 years learning to do that. It's very hard in between, but it was one of those moments, hold your breath kind of moments for a number of reasons, where she's on this tightrope creatively, but then beyond that, that there were people literally there wanting to stop it.
Ian Brennan:
It's like, okay, are they going to allow us even to record for a minute or two minutes or three minutes without putting the kibosh on it? And we got through it. And I think it's just incredibly beautiful what she did.(Music: clip of track 20 "Left to Live Like an Animal", album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
Is that the first time an NGO has kind of put up roadblocks, interfered?
Ian Brennan:
Well, I don't know. I mean, in general, we try not to interface with agencies, not that we're anti or negative, it's just bureaucracy. Anytime you get involved with bureaucracy, it's going to be challenging. So I don't know. I don't think it is the first time. I'm trying to think of other instances, but in general, we try to stay away, and in this case, we had stayed away. We'd gone to a village that was known to be a quote unquote witch village, but was denied as a witch village. Then we went to a village that was unknown, where they were literally hiding these women, like hiding them away deep, deep. It's a big village, big farming village. So they've got lots of land and areas, and so they had these women hidden away in their own area, and then the official one. And so it was the official one where we had the trouble, like the chiefs at the other two village, they were fine.
Ian Brennan:
They just wanted the respect and the formality to come meet them and bring them some gifts and talk with them and explain what our goals were, and they were completely supportive from that point on. Okay.(Music: clip track 19, album linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
Well, I know you have to go today, and I look forward to our next conversation, and there's so much more to get into.
Ian Brennan:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
