Friends & Neighbors Wagner Bros.

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.