The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, Meaning & More

How well do we know a familiar tune? 

Pianist, composer, and educator Tom Rule enjoys putting that question to the test. He has slipped “Baby Shark” into a church prelude and hidden “Old MacDonald” inside Christmas arrangements—musical surprises that invite us to reconsider what we hear and what we expect.

From his Outhouse Studio in Macon, Georgia, Tom joins Scott Catey for a conversation about the craft and pleasure of making music. He reflects on classical training, learning jazz, teaching students to enjoy the work of practice, and discovering how experiences from different parts of a life can come together at the keyboard.

We also explore his current projects: revisiting recordings whose original digital tapes could no longer be read, developing solo piano arrangements from improvised church preludes, and discovering how much music he can make with one synthesizer. Along the way, Tom shares the joy of playing with trusted friends, the hurt of seeing a college recording studio he built dismantled, and the freedom to pursue an idea without knowing exactly where it will lead.

For Tom, musical magic begins when something catches the ear—a turn in the harmony, an unexpected arrival, or a familiar melody suddenly heard differently.

Highlights

·       Why changing the chords and context can make a familiar melody almost unrecognizable.

·       What Bach’s delayed resolutions reveal about musical surprise—and how Tom brings that thinking into his own work.

·       How playing tuba as a teenager helped prepare him to cover bass and piano in a jazz ensemble.

·       The listening, friendship, and honest criticism behind his decades-long collaboration with guitarist Joey Stuckey.

·       Using AI stem separation to revisit old recordings while keeping musical judgment in human hands.

·       Finding creative freedom in church improvisations, hidden nursery tunes, and experiments with a single synthesizer.

About Tom Rule

Tom Rule is a pianist, keyboardist, composer, arranger, and educator based in Macon, Georgia. His work draws on jazz, classical music, church traditions, and electronic experimentation, combining a wide range of influences with a taste for musical surprises and a ready supply of puns.

He has produced six albums and contributed to more than a dozen others. His teaching career includes more than twenty years in higher education, spanning music and computing at Mercer University, Middle Georgia State, and Chattanooga State. He also teaches piano at Young America Music School and accompanies the choir at First Presbyterian Church in Macon.

A longtime collaborator with guitarist Joey Stuckey, Tom brings the same curiosity to performing, arranging, recording, and teaching: how can music remain inviting while offering something new to discover on the next listen?

Connect with Tom Rule 

Website: https://www.TomRule.info

Bandcamp: https://tomrule.bandcamp.com/follow_me

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/macmusicguy

Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/TomRule?e9s=src_v1_cmd%2Csrc_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o%2Csrc_v1_rso

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tomrule6

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TomRule.MacMusicGuy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_rule

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomrule2/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trule

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/

Curiosity. Play. Discovery. Music. 

For singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music educator Cory McAtee, play isn’t simply something children do. It’s a way of discovering the world: experimenting, moving, making mistakes, following curiosity, and paying attention to things we might otherwise overlook.

In this conversation, Cory joins Scott to talk about a musical life that began with pots and pans and neighborhood performances, coalesced through clarinet, saxophone, tuba, piano, and more, and eventually led her back to a childhood ambition to write and perform her own music.

Along the way, they explore what it means to make music for “children of all ages”; why Cory refuses to underestimate the intelligence and curiosity of young listeners; the trees, creatures, and natural world that populate her songs; and why adults may lose something important when we stop playing and begin to assume we already understand the world around us.

They also talk about music education and the formation of listeners; joy, melancholy, and music as an emotional language; the freedoms and frustrations of being an independent artist; home recording and the creative possibilities of experimentation; and Cory’s contribution to Chris Redding’s GRAMMY-nominated The Colors in My Mind.

There are also saxophones in redwood groves, Bananarama, an unfortunate click track, looming bagpipe lessons—and the story of a windy day, a football field, and a sousaphone bell.

At the center of it all is a wonderfully simple idea: growing up doesn’t mean growing out of  wonder. Attention, curiosity, play, and discovery are joyous practices we need throughout our lives.

Episode Highlights

·      Rediscovering a childhood ambition to write and perform music

·      Tim Noah and the encouragement that helped Cory begin songwriting

·      “Steppin’ Into the Outside” and the relationship between music, movement, and nature

·      Why children don’t need to be protected from sophisticated ideas or language

·      “This Old Tree,” mycelium, and imagining the hidden lives of trees

·      What happened when Cory took her saxophone into a California redwood grove

·      Play as a form of learning, discovery, and attention

·      What adults may lose when we stop playing

·      Songs as part of a listener’s lifelong emotional vocabulary

·      Measuring artistic success one meaningful listener at a time

·      Joy, melancholy, minor keys, and music’s ability to help us move through difficult emotions

·      Teaching children not merely to play notes, but to become expressive musicians

·      A tuba bell and Cory’s Mary-Poppins-ish encounter on a windy football field

·      Hearing arrangements from the perspective of multiple instruments

·      Chris Redding’s The Colors in My Mind and making music collaboratively across distance

·      The freedom, experimentation, and occasional disasters of home recording

·      Kindies Do the 80s, Bananarama, and making a familiar song your own

·      The instruments Cory still wants to learn—Bagpipes, anyone?

Cory’s New Music: “Scary Night”

Cory’s new single “Scary Night” is out now, accompanied by a new music video. Built around the wonderfully spooky vocabulary of Halloween—mysterious noises, creaking doors, howling dogs, and things that go bump in the night—it’s another example of Cory’s knack for turning the familiar world into an invitation to listen, imagine, and play.

Find Cory’s music, videos, and more at her official website, linked below, and look for Steppin’ with Cory and “Scary Night” wherever you listen to music.

About Cory McAtee

Cory McAtee is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music educator, and recording artist whose work celebrates creativity, nature, movement, curiosity, and the joy of making music.

A lifelong singer and performer, Cory began making music as a child and went on to study and play an unusually broad range of instruments, beginning with clarinet and later adding piano, saxophone, tuba, and others. Her path toward writing her own songs took an important turn through her friendship with Emmy Award-winning songwriter and producer Tim Noah, who encouraged her to begin songwriting and helped guide her through the early creative and recording process.

Her debut single, “I Want to Go Outside and Play (Steppin’ Into the Outside),” grew from that experience and reflects many of the ideas that continue to shape her work: getting outside, moving our bodies, remaining curious, and rediscovering the world immediately around us. The song received a Bronze Medal from the 2026 Global Music Awards.

Cory’s album Steppin’ with Cory and songs including “This Old Tree” and “Wish on a Star” combine accessible songwriting with an unusual respect for the imagination and intelligence of young listeners. As an educator, she has worked with students from preschool through high school, helping them move from their first encounters with rhythm, melody, and instruments toward expressive music-making of their own.

Her collaborative work includes performances of Bananarama’s “Venus” and “Cruel Summer” for Patrick Adams’s Kindies Do the 80s series. Cory also contributed vocals to “Love Cure” on Chris Redding’s GRAMMY-nominated album The Colors in My Mind, a project exploring neurodiversity, communication, and the ability of music to reach beyond conventional language.

Her newest single, “Scary Night,” arrives just in time for Halloween—a playful trip through dripping faucets, creaking doors, howling dogs, and the deliciously spooky sounds of the season.

Connect with Cory McAtee

Links:

• Website: https://www.corymcatee.com/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@corymcatee/ 
• Bandcamp: https://corymcatee.bandcamp.com 
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4XogwUx2rPxDUpqe5Z8L2z?si=JdViRLhAQGepnEkj26bSHA 
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/corymcatee 

Photo credits: Heather Bee Photography

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, explore, discover: https://www.TheSumofAllWisdom.com/

·       A vocal injury, four months of silence, and a palimpsest

·       Surprise at a previous connection

·       A breakup song that probably belongs in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

·       Tragic clowns and irony

·       The difference between enunciation and finding a richer voice

·       Sixteen years away from recording—and the realization that he couldn’t live without music

·       A songwriter’s unlikely vision of immortality

Greg Amici was fronting the New Jersey band Big Honey when a vocal cord polyp interrupted his music career. During months of vocal rest, he wrote without speaking, working on a palimpsest. The image suits a life in which earlier work remains visible beneath what comes next: bands, acting, screenwriting, songs left unfinished, and songs waiting to be heard.

Years later, an opportunity to write music for a film brought Greg back into the studio. Sixteen years after Big Honey, he realized, “I can’t live without making music.” Working with producer James Mastro and a group of musicians he trusted, he began recording the songs that became Tragicomic.

In this conversation, Greg and Scott explore the album’s characters, dark humor, and visual world. They follow “I’ll Be Back” from a personal breakup into a song shaped by The Odyssey, and talk about why Greg still cares deeply about album art, printed lyrics, and the experience of holding a record.

Greg is also looking ahead. He talks about studying music theory, experimenting with alternate tunings and piano, and working with a voice teacher to change how he sings. A recent injury has delayed his return to the stage, but another album is on its way. With wit and candor, he considers how much he still wants to make—and where a song might live after its maker is gone.

About the Artist

Gregory Amici is a singer-songwriter from New Jersey, whose creative journey has taken him from the heart of Manhattan to Los Angeles and back again. Greg likes to call himself a “count in name only,” tracing his aristocratic lineage through Italian family names such as Benedetti, Stalute, and Scala.

Greg found his calling as a musician in high school, inspired by local bands. Picking up the guitar in his late teens, he founded his first band, The Clergy, and later teamed up with a musical partner to form the ’80s alt-rock band Junk. Their cover of "The Shape of Things to Come" was featured on the compilation The East Coast 60’s Rock n’ Roll Experiment, produced by longtime friend Matt Pinfield. 

Later, Greg formed Big Honey, a New York-based band with a loyal following. Their rise peaked at the CMJ Music Festival but paused indefinitely when a vocal polyp sidelined Greg for years. Despite this setback, his talent was widely acknowledged, earning praise for his distinctive voice and songwriting abilities from peers within the music community.

After a 16-year hiatus, Greg returned to the studio, reuniting with producer James Mastro (The Bongos, Mott the Hoople) and drummer/engineer Ray Ketchem (Elk City) at Magic Door Studio, which led to the album Tragicomic, available now.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://gregamici.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@gregamicimusic/
• Bandcamp: https://gregamici.bandcamp.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GregAmiciMusic/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregamicimusic
• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0024823/

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—produced and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/

Creative talent does not follow straight lines. The zigs and zags of a creative career can be exhilarating and frustrating, joyous and crushing. What happens when opportunity knocks and we ignore it? Or when opportunity arrives in a totally unexpected form?

In this conversation, French-American singer-songwriter Erika Horsey and host Scott Catey explore a life shaped by music, movement, emotional sensitivity, and a succession of moments when recognition seemed tantalizingly close. Beginning with her first song—written at six years old—the story moves through self-taught piano and guitar, early performances, industry interest, independent recording, and the creation of a personal record label.

But this episode is not simply a catalogue of accomplishments or near misses. At its heart is the distance between possessing a gift and building a life around it. Looking back with unusual candor, Erika considers the opportunities she did not fully recognize, the times she waited to be chosen, and the hard-earned realization that creative work also requires us to act on our own behalf.

Beneath that story runs a deeper thread: sensitivity as a way of making art. For Erika, songs begin with attention, with observation, with noticing—a stranger’s suffering, an overlooked life, an unexpected act of kindness, the ache of longing, or an emotion that cannot be contained in ordinary speech. Music becomes a way of absorbing experience, processing it, and giving it another form.

We also hear a live performance of an original song and discuss the mysterious moment when words and music seem to arrive together, almost fully formed.

This is a conversation about talent and recognition, instinct and discipline, regret and persistence. Above all, it asks whether a creative life must be validated by conventional success—or whether continuing to make the work is itself a way of claiming that life, regardless of what other may think or say. Erika is an inspirational and endearing voice, one that deserves to be heard and cared about. This is your opportunity to take that step. 

Episode Highlights

·       Writing a first song at six years old

·       Learning piano and guitar by instinct

·       Turning observation and emotional sensitivity into music

·       Recognizing—and sometimes missing—creative opportunities

·       The difference between waiting to be chosen and choosing the work

·       Founding an independent label and releasing music on one’s own terms

·       How songs can emerge almost fully formed

·       A live performance of an original composition

·       Why regret can become wisdom

·       Continuing to create without an expiration date

Music Featured in this Episode:

• “Ashes to Dust,” performed live, originally from the album A Slice of Dust

Used with permission.

Artist Bio

Erika Horsey is a French-American singer-songwriter whose music grows from emotional sensitivity, close observation, and a lifelong instinct for turning experience into song. Writing in both English and French, she combines intimate vocals with piano and 12-string guitar to create music that is reflective, atmospheric, and deeply personal.

Born in Washington, D.C., and raised across Belgium, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, Erika developed an early connection to both music and language. She wrote her first song at six, began composing on piano as a teenager, and later taught herself guitar. While studying French at Johns Hopkins University, she continued writing and performing, developing the intuitive creative process that remains central to her work.

Erika’s songs often begin with a moment of human connection: a stranger’s story, an unexpected kindness, a loss, a longing, or an emotion requiring another form of expression. For her, songwriting is both an act of attention and a way of processing experience.

After periods in New York and Paris and early interest from major record labels, Erika chose an independent path, founding Angel Wax Productions and releasing three albums: From the Triskel to the Tiger’s Eye, Truth Remains, and A Slice of Dust. Her recent releases include “Renegade,” “Crocodile Tears,” and “Ma Lumière.”

Across her work, Erika returns to the same enduring conviction: a creative life has no expiration date, and the work remains worth pursuing regardless of where recognition leads.

Alongside her work as a performer, creator, and founder in New York and Paris, Erika’s years in Los Angeles, where she lives now, were spent in music leadership: Assistant to the Dean at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music, and Director of Admissions at Shepherd University's Cornel School of Contemporary Music — all while writing and releasing her own work. Music has always been the through-line.

Connect with Erika Horsey

Music is more than entertainment. It is one of humanity’s oldest ways of understanding the world.

Links:

·      Erika’s website: www.erikahorsey.com

·      Angelwax website: www.angelwax-productions.com

·      YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ErikaHorsey

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is a long-form, reflective podcast centered on working musicians and music-adjacent professionals whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and lived experience over promotion.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Stay curious!

Where is a poem? 

For poet, drummer, novelist, and performer Rich Ferguson, poetry lives in the breath, the body, and the beat. It moves through voice and gesture, enters into conversation with music and silence, and gathers new meaning from the people and places surrounding it.

In this conversation, Rich joins Scott Catey to explore the deep musicality of language and the entwining of music and poetry. He explains how cadence becomes an editing tool, why memorizing a poem is a physical process, and how years of preparation make spontaneity possible. As Rich puts it: if a passage doesn’t sing, it doesn’t belong in the poem.

They also discuss the continuing legacy of Beat poetry and its power to awaken attention. At a time when art is increasingly encountered through scrolling, fragments, and disposable moments, what can poetry and other artistic forms do to slow us down and return us to direct experience?

Rich describes Poet Film Stage, the multidisciplinary performance series he created with poet, playwright, and director Kathleen Florence. Combining poetry, theater, movement, music, and carefully placed silence, Poet Film Stage transforms a traditional reading into a collective journey. No single poem or performer is the destination; meaning emerges from the relationships among them.

The conversation culminates in Rich’s performance of “Live and Die in LA,” a propulsive spoken-word portrait of the city he once fled, but ultimately learned to love. Moving through music, violence, racial history, celebrity, incarceration, reinvention, and the accumulated ghosts of Los Angeles, the poem becomes both love letter and reckoning—a city carried in the blood and breath of the poet.

Highlights

Along the way, Rich and Scott explore:

• Why Rich considers his voice a musical instrument
• How the Beat tradition continues to reverberate through contemporary poetry
• Poetry as an antidote to distraction and disposable attention
• The role of movement, gesture, and memory in live performance
• How rhythm helps a writer recognize what belongs
• The discipline hidden beneath apparent spontaneity
• Letting go of beautiful language that does not serve the work
• How emotion and imagination can transform autobiography into art
• The influence of Los Angeles on Rich’s creative identity
• Why poems change when placed in conversation with other poems
• Community, collaboration, and the making of Beat Not Beat
• The artistic partnership between Rich and drummer Butch Norton

Performance Featured in this Episode:

• Live and Die in L.A., a spoken word poem

Used with permission

About Rich Ferguson

Rich Ferguson is a poet, performer, drummer, novelist, and former California Beat Poet Laureate. His books include 8th & Agony, Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, Somewhere a Playground, and the novel New Jersey Me. He served as lead editor of Beat Not Beat: An Anthology of California Poets Screaming Through the Post-Beat Scene.

With Kathleen Florence, Rich created Poet Film Stage, an ensemble performance project bringing poetry into conversation with theater, movement, film, music, and silence. His spoken-word performances and films frequently feature musical collaborators, including drummer Butch Norton, who was also a guest on The Sum of All Wisdom.

Explore Rich’s Work

Rich Ferguson: http://rich-ferguson.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fuzzydoodah

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fergiebeat/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rich.ferguson1/

Poet Film Stage: https://www.kathleenflorencepoet.com/

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center: https://www.beyondbaroque.org/

Chapters

00:00 — From New Jersey to the San Francisco poetry scene
04:12 — What is Beat poetry now?
07:51 — Poetry, consciousness, and the struggle for attention
13:31 — Reimagining the poetry reading through Poet Film Stage
18:49 — Movement, silence, and embodied experience
25:45 — “The work lives in my body”
26:33 — The life cycle of a poem
32:58 — Improvisation, preparation, and the illusion of effortlessness
36:16 — Using cadence and musicality as editing tools
38:32 — Killing your darlings and getting the ego out of the way
40:48 — What writing a novel taught Rich about serving the story
44:13 — Memory, imagination, and emotional truth
49:57 — Becoming the place where you live
52:36 — Rich performs “Live and Die in LA”
57:17 — Leaving Los Angeles—and learning to love it
1:00:16 — Meeting and collaborating with Butch Norton
1:01:45 — Poetry, community, and the documentary Speak
1:03:02 — Becoming California Beat Poet Laureate during COVID
1:05:30 — Building Beat Not Beat around Wanda Coleman
1:07:19 — Closing thoughts and what’s next

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom is a podcast about music, makers, and meaning—hosted by Dr. Scott Catey.

Listen, watch, and explore more: https://www.thesumofallwisdom.com/

Stephen Wade is a renowned banjo player, folklorist, and author. He joins today to discuss his new book, Our Common Life, and explore our shared musical inheritance, American folk culture, creative individuality, and the promises we make to those whose stories we carry.

Episode Summary

Every traditional song contains more than notes and words. It carries the traces of musicians, families, communities, migrations, technologies, institutions, and individual acts of invention. Bob Dylan may have sung about containing multitudes, but Stephen Wade gifts us with his wonderful and humane understanding of the multitudes contained in a tune. 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Scott Catey speaks with renowned banjo player, folklorist, historian, and author Stephen Wade about his new book, Our Common Life: Folk Songs from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall, published by the University of Illinois Press.

Stephen describes traditional music as a collection of “common possessions with individual contributions.” A tune may pass through generations, but it never remains unchanged. Each musician catches it, puts their hands on it, and contributes something of their own, sometimes surprisingly.

Beginning with Stephen’s childhood in Chicago, the conversation follows the people and encounters that shaped his musical life: sidewalk performer Casey Jones and his trained chicken Mae West; blues musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Big Joe Williams; banjo teachers Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins; and the musicians, writers, and working people whose lives populate Stephen’s research.

Along the way, Stephen traces the African and Caribbean ancestry of the banjo, the meeting of Black and European musical traditions, Chicago’s role as a crossroads for American music, and the relationship between changing instruments, technologies, dances, and communities.

But this is also a conversation about the responsibilities of memory. Stephen explains that his work represents “promises made” to people who trusted him with their knowledge and stories. Research, in that sense, becomes more than documentation. It is an ethical act: gratitude, reciprocity, and cultural preservation.

Episode Highlights

Scott and Stephen discuss:

• Growing up amid Chicago’s sidewalk culture, churches, record shops, radio stations, and blues clubs 
• Casey Jones, the celebrated Chicago street performer who performed with a chicken named Mae West 
• Hearing Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams, and Mahalia Jackson as a young person 
• Stephen’s early discovery of guitar, five-string banjo, and American traditional music 
• The differences among five-string, plectrum, tenor, fretless, and gourd banjos 
• How musical styles, social dancing, technology, and instrument design influence one another 
• Stephen’s apprenticeship with Fleming Brown and his relationship with Doc Hopkins 
• Pete Seeger’s influential book How to Play the Five-String Banjo
• WLS, the National Barn Dance, and Chicago’s place in American broadcasting history 
• The musical lineage connecting Dick Burnett, Doc Hopkins, Fleming Brown, and Stephen Wade 
• The history of “Man of Constant Sorrow” 
• Chicago as both an arrival point and a dissemination point for American music 
• The African and Caribbean origins of the banjo 
• Cultural sharing and cultural distinctiveness in American folk traditions 
• William Sidney Mount’s painting Catching the Tune
• Folklorist and music librarian Dena Epstein 
• Hilda Polacheck’s transformative childhood experience at Hull House 
• The extraordinary moment Stephen discovered that the historical account he was reading belonged to Dena Epstein’s mother 
• Will Keys, musical self-reliance, and making banjo strings from screen-door wire 
• The relationship between representative musicians and exceptional artists 
• Folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick’s idea of “finding the predominances” 
• Uncle Dave Macon and the world contained in “Arcade Blues” 
• Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, and the histories concentrated inside particular places 
• Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, the Federal Writers’ Project, and American working-class storytelling 
• How Stephen combined banjo playing, tall tales, spoken language, and theatrical performance in Banjo Dancing
• The moment Stephen discovered that musical virtuosity alone was not enough to hold an audience 
• Why performing reveals what a musician has truly learned 
• What it means to catch a tune and pass it forward 

Memorable Moments

Common possessions with individual contributions

One of the conversation’s central ideas is that tradition and individuality are not opposites.

A song such as Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” may become a shared cultural possession, but every musician who performs it brings a distinctive history, voice, technique, and sensibility to the music. Even after recorded sound gave listeners a seemingly fixed version, musicians continued to transform songs through performance.

For Stephen, a traditional tune is therefore never the work of only one person. It is an accumulation of encounters.

“There are many people in a tune.”

Catching the tune

Stephen uses “catching the tune” to describe how music passes from one person to another. The phrase evokes William Sidney Mount’s nineteenth-century painting Catching the Tune, which depicts the process of learning music by ear and highlights the physicality of learning, making, and transmitting music.

This kind of learning is bodily, social, and attentive. A musician watches, listens, imitates, remembers, and gradually makes the music their own. The tune is inherited, but it must also be recreated.

Stephen’s own musical lineage extends through Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins to Kentucky musician Dick Burnett, who published an early version of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” These connections make musical history immediate: not an abstract timeline, but a chain of people who knew, heard, and taught one another, linking communities, geographies, and centuries.

Making a way out of no way

East Tennessee banjo player Will Keys embodies another of the episode’s central ideas: creativity under conditions of scarcity.

Keys developed a highly individual banjo style that he could neither explain nor slow down sufficiently to teach. As a child, he played an instrument strung with wire taken from a screen door. Later, he carved banjo bridges from discarded materials and made intricate objects for friends.

His work exemplified what Stephen calls “making a way out of no way”—using ingenuity, patience, and the materials at hand to create something personal within a shared tradition.

The exceptional and the representative

Which people best reveal a culture?

Stephen recalls a conversation with folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick, who encouraged him to pay attention to average practitioners as well as celebrated artists. Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway tell us something about American culture, but so do street singers, factory workers, local musicians, crafts...

What happens when we stop asking whether art is successful—and instead ask how it matters?

Singer-songwriter Emma Swift has spent a life listening closely: to records, to other singers, to fragments of language, to the places where songs come from, and especially to Bob Dylan. Her acclaimed Blonde on the Tracks explored Dylan’s songs not as museum pieces to be faithfully reproduced, but as living works to be inhabited, interpreted, and made new.

For Emma, learning a Dylan song is almost an intellectual exercise: “Some people do crossword puzzles to exercise their brain. I learn Bob Dylan songs.” It is, she says, a way of getting inside someone else’s mind.

That idea opens into a much larger conversation about creativity.

Emma and Scott talk about what it means to be an interpreter as well as a songwriter; the singers who taught Emma how to sing; the continuing mystery of Dylan’s work; and why a great song can still “capsize” us decades after it was written. For Emma, interpretation is not imitation. A song can carry traces of Dylan, Marianne Faithfull, Nina Simone, and every artist who has inhabited it before—and still become something new in the hands of the next singer.

They also explore Emma’s own creative process: notebooks, overheard phrases, melodies captured on a phone, collaboration, and the gradual transformation of small observations into finished songs.

And then there is the increasingly difficult question of how we decide whether any of this has succeeded.

Emma thinks visible metrics may be among the worst things to happen to the creative industries. A record, she argues, succeeds first because it sounds good—not because an algorithm, stream count, sales figure, or social-media metric tells us that other people approve of it. Pulling a beloved record from the shelf and settling the needle in the groove is something different: an intentional, intimate encounter between listener and artist. “There’s something kind of sacred in that.”

It is an idea at the heart of The Sum of All Wisdom: listening is itself a creative act.

Along the way, Emma takes us from Sydney to Nashville, where she arrived in 2012 with two suitcases—one containing clothes and the other, somewhat impractically, filled with records. She came looking for the songwriting world of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Gillian Welch, and found a place where she could begin building a creative life of her own.

Ultimately, though, this conversation reaches beyond records, songwriting, or even music.

Emma believes creativity is something much more fundamental. It can mean making a song, a garden, a meal, or a piece of clothing. Art can offer refuge from a destructive world—but creativity also gives us another way of participating in it.

“We’re all born to be creative people,” Emma says. And perhaps the world would be kinder “if everybody felt entitled to be creative.”

Highlights

• Why certain songs “capsize” us
• Bob Dylan and the art of interpretation
• Marianne Faithfull, Nina Simone, and the lineage of a song
• What singers can learn by inhabiting someone else’s music
• Emma’s journey from Sydney to Nashville
• Guy Clark and the power of the unadorned song
• Songwriting through notebooks, overheard language, and collaboration
• Why commercial disappointment isn’t necessarily artistic failure
• The problem with visible metrics and algorithmic culture
• Vinyl, ritual, and the intimate experience of listening
• Why creativity belongs to everyone

About the Artist

Emma Swift is an Australian-born songwriter, currently residing in Nashville, TN. A gifted singer inspired by Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull and a plethora of dead poets, her sound is a blend of classic folk, Americana and indie rock. 

In August 2020, she released the critically-acclaimed Blonde on the Tracks, a Laurel Canyon inspired reimagining of some of her favorite Bob Dylan tunes on Tiny Ghost Records. The album received Best of 2020 accolades from Rolling Stone, Nashville Scene, No Depression, The Guardian, and more. 

Her new album The Resurrection Game was released on Tiny Ghost Records on September 12, 2025.

Connect with Emma

Links:

• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/emmaswiftsings 

Cover photo by Autumn Dozier, https://www.instagram.com/autumn.dozier/ 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two key ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and others who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, creativity, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living and as a way of knowing the world, each other, and ourselves.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

What if learning music begins with listening, not learning how to play an instrument or reading notation?

Find a sound. Notice it. Find another one. Play with them. Follow your curiosity. Make a mistake. Keep going.

For Kalani Das, musician, educator, music therapist, author, and master percussionist, music begins with experience, not rules, notation, or technique.

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Kalani joins me for a wide-ranging exploration of what happens when we stop treating music as something we have to master and begin treating it as something human beings naturally do.

Kalani traces his journey from a dyslexic kid struggling with conventional music lessons to drummer, performer, educator, Orff Schulwerk practitioner, music therapist, and facilitator of musical experiences for people of widely different ages and abilities.

Along the way, he challenges some remarkably persistent assumptions about learning and creativity.

Notation isn't music. Technique isn't a prerequisite for expression. Teachers don't always need to provide answers. And sometimes the most powerful thing a facilitator can do is create a space—and then get out of the way.

Kalani also performs twice for us.

First, he builds an original piece in real time through live looping, moving among percussion, keyboard, ukulele, bass sounds, and Native American-style flute. The performance leads to one of the episode's most important observations: perfection isn't the point.

“Good enough is not only good enough. Good enough is great.”

Later, the conversation turns toward silence, attention, technology, and the grounding experience of making sound. Kalani combines drum, drone, flute, and a reading about space for a striking demonstration of what can emerge from simplicity.

We also explore Kalani's work in music therapy, including traumatic brain injury and addiction recovery; his discovery of Orff Schulwerk; improvisation and play; the importance of letting learners discover things for themselves; and music's extraordinary capacity to create connection.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about permission: permission to play, to experiment, to make mistakes, to listen, and to discover what happens next.

As Kalani puts it near the end of our conversation, being musical is “a way that we not only celebrate who we are, but it's how we remember who we are.” And from there, he’s got one more incredible insight that follows. 

It can also help us “create who we want to be.”

Episode Highlights

·       Why conventional music lessons can sometimes create barriers to music

·       Beginning with sound and experience rather than notation

·       What Kalani learned from Orff Schulwerk

·       Play, experimentation, and the natural ways children learn

·       Why a teacher can be more powerful as a facilitator

·       Kalani's live-looping process and multi-instrument studio

·       Why “good enough is great”

·       Native American-style flutes and musical accessibility

·       Music therapy, traumatic brain injury, and addiction recovery

·       Creating musical experiences that include different abilities

·       Silence as an invitation to participation

·       Listening in a distracted, screen-saturated world

·       Drumming, embodiment, presence, and flow

·       Why simplicity can be extraordinarily powerful

·       Music as a way of celebrating, remembering—and creating—ourselves

Music Featured in this Episode:

• In-episode demonstration & performance

Used with permission

About the Artist

Kalani Das is a musician, percussionist, educator, author, music therapist, and internationally experienced facilitator whose work brings together drumming, improvisation, music education, mindfulness, and community music-making.

His teaching emphasizes accessible, human-centered approaches to music: experimentation before perfection, experience before abstraction, and creativity as something available to everyone.

Kalani teaches drums and percussion, ukulele, and Native American-style flute, and he shares an extensive library of creative and educational material online. His work includes World Drum Club, Kalani Music, Ukulele Club, and his weekly Tuesday Muse Day livestream, plus courses, community resources, and his book The Way of Music: Creating Sound Connections in Music Therapy.

Connect with the Artist

Visit KalaniMusic.com for Kalani's teaching, performances, events, and resources.

On YouTube, find World Drum Club for drumming and percussion instruction, Kalani Music for music and Native American-style flute resources, and Ukulele Club for ukulele instruction.

Kalani also hosts Tuesday Muse Day, a weekly livestream featuring improvisation, live looping, teaching, meditative “yin drumming,” and audience-driven musical challenges.

• Website 
• Patreon: https://patreon.com/kalani 
• Kalani Music on YouTube
• World Drum Club 
• Ukulele Club
• Instagram 
• The Way of Music: Creating Sound Connections in Music Therapy 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative l...

Earl Slick has spent more than five decades alongside some of the most consequential artists in rock and roll—David Bowie, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Buddy Guy and many more. And he's not done yet. 

BOWIE: LIVE ON THE LOCH — NOVEMBER 7–8, 2026 Earl is helping lead Bowie: Live on the Loch, an extraordinary two-day celebration of David Bowie at Cameron House on Loch Lomond, Scotland, in aid of Save the Children. The weekend reunites members of Bowie’s legendary Glastonbury 2000 band—including Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell—for a live performance on November 8. 

The weekend also features rare Bowie footage, the Duffy Archive exhibition, conversations about Bowie’s legacy, and Earl Slick’s Rock ’n’ Roll Guitar Auction, with proceeds supporting Save the Children. 

Information and tickets: https://www.cameronhouse.co.uk/bowie-live-on-the-loch/

For the podcast conversation, though, Slick doesn’t particularly want to talk about being a guitar hero. 

“I love being a sideman,” he says. “I like to be the guy that supports the guy.” 

In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Earl joins Dr. Scott Catey—with guitar close at hand—to talk about rhythm, instinct, collaboration, creativity, and what it means to discover what only you can bring to the music. In our conversation, Earl takes us inside his remarkable musical life—from seeing the Beatles and discovering Keith Richards to joining David Bowie for the Diamond Dogs Tour and confronting an intimidating question: Was he supposed to replace Mick Ronson by sounding like Mick Ronson? 

Bowie’s answer changed everything: “I love what you do. Do what you do.” 

Earl tells the stories behind his work on Station to Station, including “Stay” and “Golden Years,” and explains why rhythm—not guitar heroics—lies at the center of his playing: 

“The rhythm to me…it’s the heartbeat.” 

He also remembers working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono during the Double Fantasy era, and shares the deeply emotional story of performing “Imagine” with Bowie in Hong Kong on the third anniversary of Lennon’s death. Earl remembers fighting back tears—and knowing that if he looked at Bowie, he might not make it through the song. 

And then there’s Buddy Guy. After playing with Bowie and Lennon and spending decades on some of the world’s biggest stages, Earl says one of the great validations of his musical life came when Buddy Guy invited him to play. The experience left him so exhilarated that he walked around Chicago for two hours the next morning trying to come down from it. 

Near the end of our conversation, Earl describes that disappearance beautifully. When he’s making art or playing onstage, the noise of everyday life falls away. Thinking stops. “I just become me. Whatever the essence of me is.” And perhaps that’s the larger lesson here: greatness isn’t always about standing at the center. Sometimes it’s about listening closely enough to discover what only you can bring—and putting it in service of something larger.

Highlights

• David Bowie and the creative freedom to “do what you do”
• John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Double Fantasy
• Keith Richards and the power of rhythm guitar
• The making of “Stay” and “Golden Years”
• Why Earl Slick loves being a sideman
• Mick Ronson and finding your own musical identity
• Steve Cropper and the lineage of the great sideman
• Playing with Buddy Guy
• Guitars, amps, pickups and playing with your fingers
• Visual art and losing yourself in the creative process
• Why the ordinary world disappears when Earl steps onto a stage

Music Featured in this Episode:

• Slick’s in the moment riffing

All music used with permission

About the Artist

Earl Slick is one of rock and roll’s most distinctive and enduring guitarists. Best known for his decades-long collaboration with David Bowie, Slick helped shape landmark recordings including Young Americans and Station to Station and returned to Bowie’s band across multiple eras. He also played with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, and has worked with artists including Ian Hunter, John Waite, The Cure, and Buddy Guy. Renowned for his muscular, instinctive playing and deep sense of rhythm, Slick proudly embraces the role of sideman: serving the song, supporting the artist, and always bringing something unmistakably his own.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://earlslick.net/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarlSlickOfficial 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarlSlickOfficial/ 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earlslick_official/ 
• Rock & Roll Guns for Hire: The Story of the Sidemen film: https://vimeo.com/227339886 

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. 

Episode Summary

For more than four decades, percussionist, composer, producer, and artist-relations executive Rich Mangicaro has stood alongside some of music's most celebrated performers—including Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, David Crosby, Venice, and many others. But as Rich explains, lasting musical careers aren't built on virtuosity alone. They're built on listening.

In this conversation, Rich reflects on learning groove with The Drifters, finding his place in Glenn Frey's band, building instruments with Gon Bops, composing music for film and television, and eventually discovering his own artistic voice after decades as one of Los Angeles' most respected sidemen.

Together we explore why percussion is about storytelling rather than timekeeping, what separates great musicians from merely talented ones, how the streaming era has transformed music, and why serving the song often matters more than standing in the spotlight.

This is a conversation about rhythm, humility, collaboration, and the quiet discipline of paying attention.

Episode Highlights

·      Growing up with Ringo, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms 

·      Learning groove from The Drifters 

·      Touring with Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh 

·      Why the best percussionists don't play the most notes 

·      Artist relations and designing instruments at Gon Bops 

·      COVID, creativity, and finding a personal compositional voice 

·      Streaming, physical media, and the economics of independent music 

·      Film music, Hans Zimmer, and why movie scores deserve respect 

·      Rick Rubin and listening as creative practice 

·      Why "you can't converse unless you listen"

Featured Music:

·      Amazonia (Travels) 

·      Flattening the Curve (Dialogues) 

·      The Way It Was (A Dream I Had)

All music used with permission

Memorable Moments

·      "My job wasn't to show everybody how good I was."

·      "You can't converse unless you listen."

·      "Music is conversation."

·      "Play what the music calls for."

·      "Our job is to make people dance."

About the Artist

Rich Mangicaro is a percussionist, composer, producer, music journalist, and artist-relations specialist whose career spans more than four decades at the highest levels of the music industry. Best known for his fifteen years performing with Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, Rich has also toured or recorded with artists including Joe Walsh, David Crosby, Michael McDonald, Aaron Neville, Jeff Bridges, The Tubes, James Morrison, Jackson Browne, and the acclaimed vocal group Venice.

Away from the stage, Rich has become one of the percussion world's leading voices in artist relations, helping shape instrument design while working closely with generations of influential drummers and percussionists. He currently serves as Artist Relations Manager and Product Specialist for Gon Bops, where he also produces and hosts The Percussion Loft podcast.

As a composer, Rich creates immersive instrumental music that blends acoustic percussion, cinematic textures, and melodic storytelling. His three solo albums—Travels (2018), Dialogues (2022), and A Dream I Had (2024)—reflect a lifetime of listening, travel, collaboration, and creative curiosity. In recent years, he has also composed music for television, film, and commercial productions with longtime collaborator Jonathan Clark.

Whether performing, composing, producing, designing instruments, or mentoring fellow musicians, Rich approaches every role with the same philosophy expressed in this conversation: the greatest musicians are not those who play the most notes—they are the ones who listen the best.

Connect with the Artist

Links:

• Website: https://www.richmangicaro.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RichMangicaro
• Bandcamp: https://richmangicaro.bandcamp.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richmangicaromusicandmedia
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richmangicaro

About the Show

The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, and Meaning is inspired by two ideas: 

·      Music IS the sum of all wisdom, and 

·      Music is humanity’s oldest way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. 

The show offers long-form, reflective conversations with musicians and related professionals who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and whose work creates meaning, community, and cultural impact. The show prioritizes listening, craft, and the lived experience of making music as a way of making a living.

The Sum of All Wisdom is written, produced, and hosted by Dr. Scott Catey. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it—or carrying something from it into your own listening and creative life. Until next time: stay curious, keep listening!