Friends & Neighbors

Delaware First Lady Tracey Quillen Carney and Trauma Matters Delaware Chairperson Dr. Julius Mullen discuss their pioneering work in recognizing and responding to childhood trauma.

Singer/songwriter and alt-rock frontman John Faye’s “The Yin and the Yang of It All: Rock’n’Roll Memories from the Cusp,” takes us for a ride into the belly of a dream. In the new memoir, Faye beautifully renders his healing journey from an alienated and grief-stricken teen and major label frontman to a fiftysomething father, mentor and champion of the middle-class musician.

In which I find out how my long-time music marketing and singer/songwriter friend, Elisa Peimer, made a mid-life pivot to become a psychotherapist – and how the 80s band Styx and Broadway musical, Annie, connects us.

I was recording "In The End" in Muscle Shoals just a week after demo'ing it, when bandleader Will McFarlane, asked, “Should we go full Otis on this one?” Otis Redding recorded his posthumous hit, “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” in that very room on those very keyboards just months before dying in a plane crash in 1967. "Absolutely," I responded. The story behind Constellations' fifth and final song and Kyiv-penned music video, this week on Friends & Neighbors.

Prior to becoming CEO of Center for Public Integrity, Paul Cheung put in three decades at America's most prestigious journalism institutions including The Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Associated Press, and the Knight Foundation. This week, Paul travels back to his childhood in Hong Kong and immigration to Manhattan's Lower East Side, adolescence in suburban New Jersey, and storied career at the intersection of journalism, technology and social justice.

In this audio companion to my recently premiered documentary short, I trace my road trip from Memphis to Muscle Shoals writing and recording my tenth album, "Constellations," and reveal how a Texan waitress, Mexican tailor, and Tupelo pop icon's secrets helped inspire my path towards recovery.

For more than a decade, David Smydra has been at the forefront of assuring that tech platforms deliver personalized, high quality news by leading “humans in the loop,” journalists who bridge the gaps between editorial quality, product and audience development, and algorithmic design. This week, the former Google and Twitter curation lead and Online News Organization Board President shares his journey from Detroit to Palo Alto and Back East, as well as his firsthand experience of what it was like when when Elon Musk showed up at his place of now former employ.

It has been an outstanding and occasionally excruciating year. Through it all, I’ve found hope and healing in the shared wisdom of my friends and neighbors. This week, we listen back to some of those insights, inspirations and lessons learned from Senator Sarah McBride, Author Tim Madigan, Music Therapist Kelli Rae Powell and more.

I Remember Everything, the penultimate track on my new album, Constellations, began as another in a long list of "disaster songs" but evolved into something noticeably different, deeply instructive and profoundly transformative. This week, I explore how the song helped me understand the biology, psychology and neurology of somatic memory, and how the body keeps the score.

Cellist Patrick Riley has performed string arrangements on albums by Shawn Mendes, Imagine Dragons, and The Envy Corps, played live alongside The Eagles and Father John Misty, scored big-time Hollywood films – and graced every one of my albums since 2010’s “Forever Young.”