Season 6, Episode 1
Season six launches with the return of an old friend: bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean. The first episode of the first season of SongWriter featured a jewel of a story from Susan about the surprising and near-mystical way she met her now-husband. And even after six seasons of the show, that story feels palpably encoded in the DNA of SongWriter.
Last month at a live performance at KQED in San Francisco, Susan recounted a story from her recent collection, On Animals. The story is about homing pigeons, and their uncanny brilliance, and heartbreaking limitations. Susan told the audience that scientists still don’t understand how these animals perform their breathtaking feats of precise geolocation.
“What is it that allows pigeons to be released literally hundreds of miles away and find their way back to a specific place?” Susan asks. “Not the same city, not the same block, but to one specific place, their coop.”
During the live performance, Dr. Laura Simone Lewis, who studies primates and humans, helped explore the topics of animal intelligence, especially around ideas of “home.” Dr. Lewis described how different species of primates seem to think of home in markedly different ways. Chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and will usually attack, and often kill, any chimps who enter land they consider their own. Bonobos, on the other hand, rarely resort to violence – a bonobo-on-bonobo killing has never been witnessed by scientists – when they encounter outside groups of bonobos. In fact, about 85% of the time their response is to have what Dr. Lewis colloquially calls a “block party.”
“They’ll play together, groom together, share food, sleep and nap together, have sex with each other,” Dr. Lewis says, “And these intergroup interactions can last for days or even weeks.”
Dr. Laura Simone Lewis, photo by Adrian Borque
The artist tasked with writing a brand new song in response to Susan’s story for this episode is San Franciscan native and Mexican American activist and songwriter, Diana Gameros. A formerly undocumented immigrant, Diana was struck by a detail Susan relates about a homing pigeon named Soleil who never returns home. Though scientists think that the rare homing pigeons who don’t return home may be blown off course by high winds, Diana wondered if there was another explanation.
“Being the artist, revoltosa that I am, I could not stop relating to that bird who decided not to come home,” Diana says. “What if he decided for himself not to go back? He wanted to explore other worlds.”
After the show Susan told me that she thinks Diana’s song is “unbelievably beautiful,” and that it reminded her of the many times her work has been adapted by other artists.
“There’s a special pleasure that I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of times, and that is to see your work reinterpreted by other artists,” Susan says. “What could be a bigger compliment than if someone really gifted, like Diana, could find inspiration in something I’ve done?”
Diana’s brand new song is called “Soleil (Little Wing).
Season six of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.
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This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc (funder DOI 501100011730, under the grant https://doi.org/10.54224/31681). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.