🎶 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. “The film may have ended, but I knew the story couldn’t possibly be finished,” he told me.
Sammy and I teamed up to continue to tell these stories. We were fortunate to receive the extremely generous support of the filmmaker behind 16 Bars, Sam Bathrick, and his partners, who gave us unfettered access to the film’s audio and music. Speech, the voice and soul of the film, came on as our podcast host. Like Sammy and I, they all recognized that the musicians’ stories didn’t simply stop when the cameras got packed away, and they trusted us to build on their work in a meaningful way that took the men’s stories in new directions. The result is Track Change, a five-episode documentary podcast series that launches today on the NPR Network after years of hard work from my team at Narratively and our partners at VPM, who believed in this project when nobody else would.
From haunting country to fiery hip-hop and soulful R&B, each episode of Track Change demonstrates the potential of music to empower and break through generations of injustice — and to underscore the humanity of those society has written off. Following the release of episode one today, we’ll drop a new episode each Wednesday for the next four weeks. It would mean so, so much to us if you’d listen — at NPR, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please let us know what you think.