BONUS - Making Metra

Emily & Ned Hartford sit down to talk about the origins of Metra, adapting the show from a stage musical to an audio drama, and how they approached shaping a story about climate liberation while living in our dumpster fire of a time.

(We'll be back soon with more re-mastered songs from the upcoming cast album!)

Check out our website for ways to join the climate movement: metrathemusical.com/do-something

Support Metra at ko-fi.com/metrathemusical

Metra is Written by Emily and Ned Hartford
Music and Lyrics by Ned Hartford
Dialogue Directed by Emily Hartford
Produced by MythMakers Media

Sound Editing and Design; Instrumentation Arranged and Performed; Vocals Arranged; and all Audio Produced, Engineered, and Mixed by Ned Hartford

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Make my media audio. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Metro Bonus episode. You are hearing the voice of Emily Hartford, director and co-creator of the show. You may recognize my voice from uh such places as the credits of the show and um a special caller named Erlen. And on with me today is a voice that will be very familiar to you. Ned, hi.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Hi, Ned Hartford here, uh co-creator of the show with Emily. And um by no small coincidence, I sound a little bit like Tom Mulby.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Worlds colliding or dimensions of reality melding. Uh do you think we should start by introducing ourselves after all this time? Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

You go right ahead. You start.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Okay, great. Uh well, yeah, my name's Emily. I am a theater maker and media maker. We live in New York City. Um, I am also an arts educator, a nonprofit fundraiser, a um sometimes puppet designer, a um, you know, interactive performance art maker, intimacy director, and a couple times in my life, a birth doula.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Pretty amazing human being you are.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Those are a bunch of things about me. Ned, who are you?

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Many years I I was uh a songwriter, performing artist, and singer-songwriter. And then I decided I wanted to learn how to write musicals, and I got back into acting, which I'd done a lot of. Uh recording engineer and bringing all those tasks to bear in trying to create, not trying, in in fact, in creating Metra, uh climate revolution with songs.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

You did it.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, it was a lot, a lot of a lot of producing work was involved.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

And we live in Brooklyn with two incredible cats um who don't do anything we say.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Or pay rent.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

So how the heck are you, Ned? What a weird time to be trying to make art about the climate crisis.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

I hear a siren in the background on your end, so how appropriate.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah, it's true.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Yes. Um, you know, uh, I I had to work the last five months of doing the show. As you know, Emily, I was working seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, and I'd worked for a solid year prior to that. Gave myself SIBO. I've got I've my stomach's all messed up. And and and that's partially from the stress of the world.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Yeah, it's this is not an easy place to live right now. And we we send everybody love and fortitude. Um, those of us trying to weather life in the United States, but also everywhere. But yeah, so we made a podcast about it. That's where we put all of our anxiety and hope and climate dread. We decided to make art about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, it was it was either spend 12 to 14 hours a day here in the studio making it or sitting at home doom scrolling. So there that was the choice.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, we make choices. You know, there's there's an interview that we put in our feed from the Art is Change podcast.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

With the fabulous Bill Cleveland.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Incredible podcast hosted by Bill Cleveland, who is such a gorgeous interviewer. We felt so taken care of, and and he really put together a beautiful episode about Metra that we then put into our feed. So if you look for the Art is Change podcast episode in the Metra feed, I really, really highly recommend listening to that. And I say that because that we talked a lot about the beginnings of Metra and and why we made it on that podcast. And I think it's a really cool listen. Um, but we can also give a little introduction for folks who haven't uh heard that. But what I'd really love to do is is get into how we made, how we went about transforming our stage show into a musical audio drama. But um, but yeah, as a little bit of a how did we get here um explainer, it was about gosh, nine years ago, maybe eight or nine years ago, where I felt like I wanted to make something with a group of people. And I hit upon this myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the myth of Erisicthon, which I didn't think I had ever seen, you know, adapted uh into a different form of art. And I wanted to, I've loved Greek myths since I was a kid, but I have always been really frustrated by them as well, and am feeling like they couldn't quite be mine because of the casual violence against women um that pervades them and pervades so much of classic literature. And so I wanted to make something that had the gorgeous transformations of the metamorphoses, but be able to break the story in a way that it could be mine. And so I gathered a bunch of people together and we started looking at the myth of Erisicthon as a story about power, a definition of power that's based in domination and primacy versus the possibility of a power rooted in emergence and collectivity. And Ned was a part of those devising workshops, and we had so much fun and so much fun. We had so much fun, and and so many of our friends were there, and everybody generated really interesting stuff, and we had uh a ton of really cool conversations that then became the DNA of Metra. But we walked away from that workshop and then Ned wrote this series of mind-blowing songs. Do you do you want to talk about? Do you remember what the very first songs you wrote from Metro were?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

They were Metra's Mother and series Curse and Fearful. Those were the three that were the first ones.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

We realized, you know, that it's a story about disastrous consumption. And I think when we realized that, and and you and I had been growing in um both our climate anxiety and our climate activism. And I think it was the two of us who walked out of those workshops going, This is a climate story.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah. I mean, uh, for us, our basic approach, I think I can speak for both of us on this, is once you really dive deep into what's happening with climate change, you inevitably start getting into climate justice and how many systems of harm have got us here. And those systems of harm are just myths we tell ourselves, like manifest destiny or white Christian exceptionalism, you know, the things we we define our country by, uh, that the market will solve all our problems and that greed is good. All these things are killing us, and capitalism is killing us. And we're not going to solve problems of climate change unless we address the systems of harm that got us here, those myths.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, and it was really about we we started to realize that we could build something about the way the story of power operates and how the story of power is just that. And if you can change the story that everybody's telling themselves, you can change the world.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

The systems that got us here aren't gonna save us. You know, it we have to be able to imagine a better future to create it. Right now, we have no problem imagining the end of the world, but we have a lot of problems imagining a better world.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

And and so we wanted to make a show that was really honest about the intersecting oppressions uh or oppressors that that are fueling the climate crisis and be really real about the danger we're in, but also be bold in a vision for the world we deserve and and really revel in the potential in transformation. And so, you know, we made we made it as a stage musical. We made it first as a play with songs, and then Ned, over the course of its development, added more and more and more songs until it was a full-fledged musical. Um, yeah, Ned, did you uh what did you want to tell the people about um kind of that phase of things before we move into audio drama lands?

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Well, in the stage production, we knew we could only afford one musician. So to make it easy, it was me, because I work cheap. And uh, but we wanted the music to be special, so we had this amazing guitar rig where I was able to do all this uh looping and special effects, all with this MIDI controller. That ended up being part of this show. Obviously, the the music's diegetic, and a lot of it is produced by just one guitarist, and everything you're hearing when then when Tom Molpey's playing all that guitar stuff, that's what we did live on stage. But now we've expanded it out and we have this nymph chorus, tree nymph chorus, and that's just acoustic guitar accompanying it. And then um we able to to have some underscoring in in mainly in one episode. You know, you try and set rules for how you uh use things, and since the music was diegetic, we had to be very careful about how when we use say underscoring. And so we made the choice like in episode three, there are three stories that get told by different characters. There's the story that Sam tells about the whale, there's the story that Diane tells about her her husband's death, and there's actually then not told by a character, but there's that story at the top where Corey witnesses the the wrecking of the refugee camp. We have underscoring and music under each of those sections to sort of underscore how the stories we tell opens us up to something larger. They all lead to moments of transformation for those characters.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

I think it is a cousin of the way that music works in the stories that the that the mythmakers are drawing Tyler into. And then that gave you an opportunity to really play with music when we got to the revolutionaries opportunity to break the myth and tell a new story. Yeah. Uh yeah, so I loved that convention. Well, we're getting deep into audio drama land. So can I can I ask you a question about it?

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Um, so you can ask me anything you want. I love talking to you. Oh, that's really cool. You know, during the folks, during the pandemic, we live in a little tiny New York City apartment. And I actually had my recording studio in the apartment, like in the kitchen nook. That's how crazy it was. Yeah, in the kitchen. And just across a little divider is was our living room, and that's where Emily would be working every day trying to get work done. And it was so nice because I could just sit there and look over at her and go, so what are you doing? You know, and she started wearing a specific headband where if she was wearing a scrunchie or something, if she was wearing that scrunchie, I was not allowed to talk to her. That's how bad it was.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

It was a bedazzled clip-in neoprene bow.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

That was my privacy bow.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

And I would still start talking. I'd go, so am. Oh no, you got the bow in.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

When I was doing my very serious fundraising.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Uh so fast forward to 2024, we had just done a concert reading of Metra at Judson Memorial Church with an incredible cast, many of whom you have heard on the podcast. And we knew we wanted to bring the show to a wider audience. And we knew that there was not a very practical way to do that through theater at this time. And we have dear friends who have had so much beautiful success with audio drama. And we decided that that that would be a really exciting way to continue to share the show.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Yeah, I had moved my studio into a proper recording studio space.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And, you know, we had a vocal booth, great mics, I had all sorts of other gear, and the ability to mix everything and do all the sound design and stuff. So it just made sense.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And so when you you were the person who took that stage musical script and did the first pass at creating an adaptation into a nine-episode audio drama. So what was that like? What did you discover? What had to change, or what were the opportunities moving it from a stage musical to an audio drama?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Well, the big problem with the stage musical is you have two hours, you know, and you've got so much real estate that has to be taken up by songs. In the stage show, we weren't able to do the one, the world building we needed to do. The show jumps back and forth in time. It's essentially set in the this sort of post-climate apocalyptic future. You've got to build that world out for it to make sense. In the stage show, we just leaned into comedy to try and buy grace from the audience for the holes in the plot. We kind of knew what we wanted, but there was no space for it. Also, climate justice is really complex. And what this audio drama allowed us to do, we essentially doubled the length of the show. That allowed us that deep dive into climate justice while we were still wetting it deeply to plot and character and and and music. We really uh tons more music and gave us the space to really properly build the world. We brought back a number of scenes we tried to have in the musical that we had to cut out because of time, and then we wrote that scene with with Kupchin, uh, the the the Russian ship commander with Corey on the boat. Just a lot of great world building we were able to do, and it was it just felt really rewarding.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah, and and a bunch of new characters, getting to meet Diane and her kids. Yeah. Uh yeah, it's worth saying, I mean, you you do say that we leaned heavily into comedy in order to buy grace for the exposition in the stage show. I think we did I think it was more than that. You know, I think that that we somehow wrestled the first 20 to 30 minutes of that show into submission after half a dozen rewrites while we were in production in in the more than that.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

There was there was like there was there was a virtually a a rewrite every night after rehearsals.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yeah, yeah. So we, you know, we tried our damnedest to make the those first handful of scenes really focused and giving the audience what they needed in order to take them on the journey. Um but yeah, it was so exciting to get to live in those early episodes of the audio drama script because it suddenly the world that we had been envisioning and talking about with so many of our collaborators for years felt it felt so much more real. And it felt like we finally had the opportunity to to spend time with these people in the way that we wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

And so that's how things were were different with the writing approach. But for for you, Emily, as the director of the stage production and then directing the dialogue, what were the what was the differences in in directing? I to me they're kind of obvious, but you you talk about it yourself uh for our listening audience.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Yeah, I have directed a little bit of audio, but I am much newer to it than um than stage directing. And it's worth saying that I am a very physical stage director. And so honing in on what it means to tell a story auditorially is a really exciting and fascinating challenge. But yeah, the the scariest thing about stepping into directing the dialogue of Metra was the fact that we had to have one person in at a time and only do one side of dialogue at a time. And because of that, I asked a great favor of not only Ned, but also Corinna Schulenberg and Shere J Davis, who play Sam and Corey. And and luckily those two like each other a lot. Um, because I asked if they would come to the studio together and cozy up in that single-person vocal booth with two mics. So that we could have with two mics, so that we could have a base for the show that was real scene work and real people talking to each other. Um, and you know, that not only meant that their dialogue felt grounded to me, but it also meant that I knew what I was looking for, you know, it it meant that I had a guidepost and a litmus test for all of the other dialogue to make sure we were really grounding it in realism. And, you know, one of my favorite things about audio drama, and and I'm an avid, avid fan, is that it's such an intimate medium and it allows you to be in the listener's brain as they're going about their day. And so, you know, I wanted to make something that that felt that present and alive and and was connecting to the listener authentically in the way that the characters were talking to each other. So that was the biggest challenge. And I do, I am really proud of how it came out.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

You should be. You did great work. Thanks, me and it was great to have those two fabulous actors get to really play off each other. I think it was really great. There was just absolute bleed between the two mics because they're standing right next to each other, which was a huge audio headache.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yeah, I created a ton of work.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

So the sound editing work was so difficult. But it's like film editing. There would end up being a new direction kind of emotionally for a scene, because there were audio takes that kind of led it in that direction. Surprising direction sometimes, which caused me to have to search all through the script through all the sessions for little grab bag words or that could make that new emotional arc make sense. So, oh yeah, it was complicated.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

So maybe let's move to the to the mixing and mastering process. So this was your first time uh mixing an audio drama. Do you want to talk about what you learned and what you wanted from that process?

SPEAKER_01 19:07

The the challenge is because a lot of people listen on their commutes, you're not gonna want to have a big volume range between the softest sounds and the loudest sounds. You're producing the dialogue to exist in this world you're creating, but then the music has to pop in a way that that people expect. And um you want the music to sound like it's part of the same world as the singing, and it was really difficult to get within a narrow volume range, get that feeling uh an energy that those that that transition required. And what a lot of these other shows opt for is to sort of do the music track and just layer it behind the sung vocal, sort of like a karaoke track. And it doesn't sound necessarily like it's part of the world, but it's certainly an easier way to go. I just wanted it to be special.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah, and and your bar for music production is gorgeous professionally produced albums that that you've been able to put out in the world.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

And we couldn't afford someone to do that, so I had to do it.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

So you had to learn and you did a beautiful job.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

So, Emily, I'm curious. You know, I lived with this thing for months and months and months every day here in my studio. You directed the show uh of the stage production. What was it like for you? How was the experience different for you listening to the audio drama? I was too deep in it. There was no way for me to take a step back. How did it hit you differently?

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Yeah, it's it's that's a great question. Um, I think sometimes it was scary, you know, because the way this process needed to work, you had to be much more the one who was doing the granular decision making and the editing process. And I knew that you were doing really, really painstaking work. And so I was trying to be really targeted in my listening when I when I would listen to the roughs, but it was really important to me, of course. You know, this has been a baby of ours for many years now. And so I was really trying to hone an ear to the story I knew we were telling, you know, even though it was a story that was evolving as we were making it and had deepened as we expanded it, I tried to keep a hand on the thread of the story that we've been trying to tell over the past, you know, eight, nine years. And what is the heart of that? And how can every decision we make be heard through that lens of um, for lack of a less nerdy theater word, the the dramaturgy of the show that we had built, the dramaturgy that we had built is, you know, in collaboration with. with so many brilliant people and and trying to carry the the wisdom from all of those collaborators into my listening um of the the rough cuts of the show.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

A dramaturgy based around empathy, compassion, and communality. And it was great you kept a a hand on that thread because in the rewrites I was like why can't we just kill all the billionaires? And and you were like no knit, come back, come back from the guillotine.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Oh here's a siren.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

They're coming to get me because I I I talked about harming billionaires.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Yeah they don't like that. Yeah and it's it's a dramaturgy rooted in the real power of collective action. And so whenever there was a choice that that felt like it was undermining that, you know, of course of course the show has has big stakes and big dangers and big failures, but it always needed to underline for me the possibility of how we can move forward. Yeah so that's something I was listening for. And um you know I tried to be careful because I knew it was painful for you to go back and do really involved edits.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

I whine but then I do it.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

I had to learn that and I had to learn that actually it was okay if I made him whine and I could still ask for the choice that I knew I wanted.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

It's part of the grieving process.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Yeah. Well that is maybe a good segue into talking about how we made these mailbags which were the final piece of this puzzle. Should we talk about that? Sure. Maybe I'll start by saying we originally wrote this show during well, you know we wrote the first draft of the play during the first Trump presidency, but we honed the script and we first produced the the play during the Biden presidency. And by the time we were making the audio drama it felt like every day our speculative fiction was getting less and less speculative and and less and less satiric, you know? So I think we were both craving a directness, a way to talk to the audience a little more stripped of metaphor about what's really happening.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

And there was on top of that, there was in the original stage production The Sweet Old Woman, her monologue, she named names in that monologue Charles Koch, Bruce Kovner, Paul Singer, all these horrible people totally intent on destroying democracy, burning up the planet, all on the altar of their incredible greed and arrogance. We name names but you know what? You mention someone's name you can get sued. Billionaires love suing anybody these days. They've got lawyers on retainer. So I hate to say this, but it's not a cop-out. It's still in the show but it's in the mailbags now. All that naming of names that way if if somebody wants to sue us well we can take out the mailbags and it doesn't affect the uh the storyline. I mean there was a practic there was a practical reason to it.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

No, I know I know um but it is and it but it speaks to a larger uh point which is that we wanted to really be telling the truth about what's happening and and we wanted to be able to say these things out loud. But what was uh scary about that process was you know we've been writing Metra and the the you know and learning the heart of it learning the core of it for uh years and years. And so our barometer there, like I was saying with it with listening to the rough cuts, I felt like I could trust a barometer about um you know what the story of the show was. But these mailbags uh were being written in the course of either weeks or days.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

We were writing them while we were producing the show. Yeah. The challenge was come up with a way to really deep dive but still have it work within the story and characters of the show in a way that ended up deepening the arc of a couple characters and bringing it into the present.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

It also speaks to a dynamic in our creative partnership and in our relationship, you know, where where you feel really driven to to kind of speak out loud the harms that are happening, the, the scary news and I can't process those things unless we're also grounding in some kind of way forward. And that became the balance of the mailbags I think you had done I mean you have you have done this reading for for a long time but you backed up the mailbags with so much research in terms of telling the story of the climate crisis. And I think my role in it was making sure it was always tied into that metra dramaturgy of transformation and possibility the definition of hope that Rebecca Solnet espouses that is hope is not a lottery ticket that you sit clutching on the couch. It's an axe to break down doors with in an emergency. So uh you know you were writing the the fire of the emergency and I think I was contributing the axe of hope breaking down the door. But on that note who's doing the work that's giving you hope?

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Organizations that are getting in people's faces at this point. I have to tell you Extinction Rebellion, climate defiance, uh sunrise movement. Getting in people's faces and calling them out. I'm not going to criticize people for petitioning or all these other things.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Well I think it's all it's all a part of the fabric of the thing.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

It is all a part of the fabric but I'm so glad these other people are just getting in the face and calling them out because it's a huge corrupt system and we need to talk about all these different people's complicity and the degradation of our democracy and our lives that has been introduced by these billionaires.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

And you know also the the kind of simple radical mayor administration that is rolling out in New York City that's tying progressive change with things like also fixing potholes I think I think that's been really powerful too. And my hope is that we're finally reaching a tipping point where people are realizing how manipulated we've been at you know here here in the United States and of course plenty of us have known that for a long long time.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

In England the Green Party the ultra liberal green party progressive wanting to deal with wealth inequality and climate change that's the party that's doing really well and making huge gains not the centrist labor party they're losing seats left and right to the far right Nigel Farage Reform Party. And I think that's a wonderful sign. And here in this country the Democratic establishment won't give any money to truly progressive candidates but they're still doing well like Charles Booker in Kentucky couldn't get any money for any of his campaigns from the Democratic Party. It all went to Amy McGrath she's a vet but has no real stance other than that she's against Trump. And she kept losing and now against the Democratic establishment's will and and money Charles Booker is still way in the lead now. He's going to get the Democratic nomination there and I think he's got a good shot of winning.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Well I was just gonna say I think we're also seeing people starting to be really brave you know and you look at the the people of Minneapolis um standing up against ice and and you're watching those you know that resistance happen in so many places in so many powerful ways. So you know that's what's giving me hope. And maybe on that note I could share a little bit you know I recently found some notes that I took before our very first rehearsal in 2022 for for the flux theater production of Metra um so I thought it would be nice to share those notes. How do you get radicalized? Answer listen notice find community how do you create change? Answer be change share stories be wholly and then I wrote the question how does that really connect and I answered myself this is a system that severs us from wholeness. When we refuse to let it sever us we have the power to dismantle it and finally what does success look like like magic like friendship like the truth so that's what I was hoping to do. I think you did okay good well I think that was a good talk um what should we tell the people as we sign off you know um thank you so much for listening um I hope that you've enjoyed the show and I hope you look out for future things. Um if you'd like to help support the show leaving reviews especially on Apple Podcasts is super super helpful and maybe tell a friend. Uh there's also a link in in the show notes to this site called Kofi I think it's called um which is sort of like a Patreon kind of thing. It's very very nascent but if you're interested in Metro stickers go on there or DM us on Instagram. We got some really cool stickers and I could send them to you.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

And uh also if if you want to do the show as a theatrical stage production you could license it to do that. You could you could reach out to us and also we're doing uh I'm mixing a cast album right now that will be available on Bandcamp for you to to purchase pay what you will I'm excited for people to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

I'm excited for people to hear the full expression of your mix with our gorgeous gorgeous performers.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

And just reiterate once again get involved with climate organizations. The ones that get into people's faces they have huge bills. Just getting into those conferences is really expensive. Then they've got to take a bus there they have to have a hotel room they got to pay lawyers because they get arrested. All those things add up so climate defiance extinction rebellion sunrise movement give them cash they're putting their lives on the line for us and support true progressive Democrats and Democratic socialists wherever you can and and help them out because the Democratic Party's not helping them out. Democratic Party only works for billionaires.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Amen all right friend I'll talk to you later oh friend I love you so much we made something good all right we hope you like it everybody