Chris Thile’s new podcast and musical variety show, the Energy Curfew Music Hour uses music to imagine how people can adapt to a world reshaped by climate change.
Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Today we‘ve got a story from our show’s managing producer, Nat Hardy. Nat, what do you have for us?
Nat Hardy: Hi Megan! Recently, I went to a concert and I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it claims to have given me a glimpse into what the future will sound like. And it sounded something like this:
Narrator: At the chime there will be 60 minutes til energy curfew. Now finish the last of your perishables, and enjoy this fully acoustic show.
Nat Hardy: What you’re listening to, is a live taping from the podcast and musical variety show, Energy Curfew Music Hour. It’s hosted by Grammy-award winning bluegrass musician Chris Thile and his band The Punch Brothers.
Chris Thile: Ahoy! And welcome to the Energy Curfew Music Hour, your weekly off ramp into 24 blessed hours of powerlessness
Nat Hardy: In each episode, a pair of artists ranging from pop star Shawn Mendes to pianist Jon Batiste, join Chris in an imagined future where people are changing the way they live to address climate change.
To learn more about what this near future might look like, I sat down with the show’s co-creators, host Chris Thile, and director Claire Coffee. Chris says that Energy Curfew Music Hour takes place in a slightly different reality from our own.
Chris Thile: There’s shadow hints towards, you know, various natural disasters and things that have led towards humanity kind of finally banding together once and for all to do what we can keep the earth habitable for future generations.
Nat Hardy: These shadow hints suggest that the world looks pretty different. There has been some sea level rise – at one point the Hudson river is referred to as the Hudson Sea. But it’s also a world where the government is taking action on climate change. Here’s the show’s director Claire Coffee:
Claire Coffee: Our idea was to have this show where we’re past the point of the politicizing and gnashing of teeth and all this, and it’s like, well here’s where we’re at. And so now what do we do, and how do we adapt?
Nat Hardy: That adapting takes a lot of different forms. Throughout the show they mention things like an electronics buyback program, a system where energy credits are rationed out to households and a weekly shutdown of the nation’s power grid. In this imagined future, the radio show takes place right before this day without power, a day they call “the dark day.”
Claire Coffee: We saw the radio show as like sugar to help the medicine go down. Like, okay, if we have to shut down the grid for 24 hours, we’re gonna give you a musical variety show to kick things off!
Nat Hardy: To be clear, this idea of shutting down the electric grid once a week is not being considered in the US today. But the idea of changing the way we live to address climate change is a real thing people have to grapple with. And the show takes the perspective that although these changes may be hard, they could bring positives too.
Claire Coffee: What kind of like made me come around to the positivity is, like, everybody has to get through the day anyway, like you have to figure out ways of finding joy, and you have to figure out ways of making light, and making music, and laughing together.
Nat Hardy: The show imagines that one of those upsides might be gathering around a radio with your family to listen to music. Every performance on the show is made exclusively with acoustic instruments and people’s voices.
Claire Coffee: Wouldn’t it be amazing if all you could do is make music acoustically and like go see community theater? Like, that’s what’s available.
Nat Hardy: Chris and Claire say that the idea for the show has a lot to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. What would happen if the climate crisis also forced us to change the way we live?
Chris Thile: Lockdown was so scary. And many of us lost family members, loved ones, you know, I certainly did. But there were aspects of that, you know, you would get those pictures of metropolitan areas where they could see mountains in the background for the first time in years. Or like the way it just was so quiet outside all of a sudden, and you know, things like that. That even as we’re struggling as a species to stay here, part of the reason for the show is that there could be aspects of it that are far more edifying than our current, you know, madcap existence, that being obliged to slow down, to use less, could result in in a happier life, even if certain aspects of it are deeply traumatizing.
Nat Hardy: In a way, Energy Curfew Music Hour fits into the genre of climate fiction – a genre of books, movies and other media that speculate about what life might look like as climate change progresses. But what makes the show unique, is that art is at the center of this speculation.
On each episode of the show, musical performances are interspersed with jokes, and fictional advertisements, but also a lot of conversations about the art of songwriting. I asked Chris why the craft of songwriting plays such a big role in a world reshaped by climate change:
Chris Thile: It again helps us look directly at the monster and realize that life can still go on and we can be constantly kind of inundated by this problem that we’ve created, but we can still care about things like craft and like, in fact, we have to. Because it will give us the strength that we need to go out and deal with the problem.
I can’t constantly live in the center of the ugliness that we’re responsible for. No, I want to believe in our in our capacity for beauty and the thing that gives me so much energy to get out there, and, you know, try and help in whatever way I can, is that when we come up with something beautiful, our first instinct is to share it with someone else. That gives me a lot of hope.
Nat Hardy: I asked Chris what he hopes listeners will take away from each episode of the show.
Chris Thile: I want them to feel good about being human. That’s what I want. If this could be an hour where, where you get to feel good about being human in the context of feeling scared about being human.
Nat Hardy: The first season Energy Curfew Music Hour is available on podcast platforms now, and a second season is currently under production.
Megan Hall: You’ve been listening to Possibly. You can find more information, or ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, at askpossibly.org. You can also subscribe to Possibly wherever you get your podcasts or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky at “askpossibly”
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
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