🎶 Hear What It’s Like to Bare Your Soul and Record Music Behind Bars
Years in the making, Narratively’s new podcast, Track Change, finally drops today. Through remarkable songs, it spotlights the obstacles and hope of life during and after incarceration.
Four years ago, one of my oldest friends — who knows better than most the types of underdog, empowering stories that compel me and Narratively to action — connected me to a producer she’d just met at a film screening. The event had been the first time this producer, Sammy Dane, had spoken publicly about the documentary he’d been a part of — a beautiful film called 16 Bars, which offers a haunting lens on our nation’s incarceration epidemic. It follows Grammy-winning hip-hop icon Todd “Speech” Thomas, of Arrested Development, as he records music inside Virginia’s Richmond City Jail with incarcerated musicians whose pain and perseverance is present in every lyric, every bar.
Sammy was so inspired by his work on 16 Bars — and so tormented by the inequities he was unable to fully spotlight in just one documentary — that he maintained relationships with the men and their families and continued recording audio with them long after the project was complete. “T…
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