THE FIRST EPISODE IN OUR MULTI-EPISODE SEASON FINALE! With music being so integral to this podcast, running in parallel to the conversations and correspondence we feature, it’s not surprising that the conversations themselves start to sound like music in their own way. They flow like the components of a song. Verses, choruses (etc) repeating. The more you listen to these stories, the more you can’t help but see their intersections—where they share space, and where they diverge. We’ve weaved together a lot of conversations, but nothing we’ve ever released has ever been at this scale or scope. The idea is to expand to a larger dialog than ever before. To extend our “choir,” that cloud of witnesses, beyond any statement we’ve ever been able to construct. These stories will be told over more than a single episode, with different people having more or less to say at different points along the path. “Verse,” this first part, is the one dealing with our points of origin. It’s not about where we are now, or even how things crumbled to get us there. It’s about where we came from, and how that shaped everything.