Song Exploder's Hrishikesh Hirway on Honouring His Family Through Music

This is a special reissue from Season 1 of Identified.

Hrishikesh Hirway has spent a decade getting artists to take their songs apart. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the Song Exploder host takes his own story apart instead. Growing up the child of Indian immigrants in a Massachusetts suburb, a food-scientist father, a mother with a master's in literature working at Sears, in a family he describes as "four fourths equals one."

It's a conversation about what happens when the whole fractures. His mother, the family's anchor and storyteller, losing her voice, and the grief he only recognised he'd been accumulating for years; a run of hard autumns since; choosing not to have kids and feeling the numbers dwindle; the guilt of the prodigal son who chose music over medicine; and the first song he'd written in ten years, born from a dream of her.

And through it all, the Thanksgiving his family invented, forty people in a small house, two full meals, and his mother's legendary mango pie, which went on to a New York Times tribute and a Salt & Straw ice cream flavour she never got to see.

His answer to what family is might be the show's loveliest yet: a sectional couch, a Friday night movie, and everyone squished in.

00:00 "Four fourths equals one"
01:04 An immigrant family in the suburbs
02:39 Inventing their own Thanksgiving
07:12 Exeter at 13
09:15 His mother, the anchor
13:49 A shrinking family
16:08 Choosing not to have kids
20:00 Music, guilt & the prodigal son
28:12 The first song in ten years
30:50 Mango pie & Salt & Straw
32:57 What is family? The couch.

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