Sean Adams chose Jóhann Jóhannsson's 'Fordlandia' as his song of hope, and the reason he gives tells you a lot about where this conversation goes.
He'd considered Solange, Feist, even Elliott Smith, then realised most of the songs that felt hopeful to him were actually about breakups or had difficult histories behind them. 'Fordlandia' stopped him in his tracks years ago, when he was mostly into noisy punk and emotional singer-songwriters, and he still can't fully explain it. He describes it as warm plumes of air, hot pockets of pressure, something like riding geysers of smoke, which he thinks about partly because Jóhannsson was living in Iceland at the time.
His hope for the future is that everyone gets the time and the mental space to luxuriate in a thirteen-minute piece of music without worrying whether it's going to hold anyone's attention in the first three seconds.
Sean founded Drowned in Sound in October 2000, but this episode traces the thread back further, to a kid growing up in a seaside town in Dorset, listening to Bob Marley and Motown in the car, not quite understanding what people were talking about when they mentioned civil rights, but feeling it.
He talks about the record that unlocked something bigger: the opening of Dead Prez's 'Let's Get Free', a visceral wolf metaphor about addiction and the prison industrial complex, delivered over a swaying sample. He was sixteen, and he still gets goosebumps thinking about it.
From there, the conversation moves into what music actually does to us, physically and neurologically. Ariana shares research on how music experienced in childhood continues to regulate us in adulthood.
Sean reflects on only being diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago, and how understanding his brain has reframed his whole relationship with sound: why he's lived in headphones since he was twelve, why small talk is genuinely painful in a way that performing on stage isn't, why "how are you?" feels like an existential question he can't answer honestly when there's a genocide happening and politicians are dismantling net zero targets.
The episode spends real time on the hyper-individualised wellness industry, and why Sean finds it inadequate. He uses the example of Universal Music giving staff mental health days while freelancers absorb the extra work, and argues that what we actually need are systemic fixes, not individual coping mechanisms. He talks about chill-out rooms in clubs, sleep pods in cities, therapy funded as part of salary, not as a bonus for burning out. The personal is always political here, but it doesn't feel like a lecture. It feels like someone thinking out loud.
There's a genuinely funny section about meditation apps, transcendental meditation courses, and how Sean eventually found something that worked: a VR app called TRIPP, following a butterfly down a tunnel, which gave him ten minutes of not thinking about anything else. "I know I'm taking a screen break to another screen," he says, "but if I didn't, I'm not going to carve out twenty minutes to go to the forest."
The second half widens out. Sean talks about the StopTheTories tactical voting campaign, the power of collective action, what it meant to work with Max Richter and Yulia Mahr on the "Voices" project, setting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to music. He reads a passage from Charles Mackay's 1841 "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" as his moment of calm, which feels entirely right for this episode. And when Ariana asks what he'd say to listeners a hundred years from now, he comes back to human rights as an anchor and a compass, more reliable than any religious text or platform terms and conditions.
Please note: This was recorded as a pilot episode. Sean produces Sounds Like Change, and Ariana decided it was too good not to publish.
Find out more and follow the show: https://linktr.ee/soundslikechange
Sounds Like Change is part of the Drowned in Sound Podcast Network, an independent media production company built for social impact.
Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)
