Music has a way of shaping the emotional atmosphere around us. It attaches itself to memory, grief, identity, relationships, and the parts of our lives that words cannot always reach.

In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW takes a closer look at the theme music heard at the beginning of the podcast: “Better Angels,” written, produced, performed, and sung by Alexis Hightower. Tanisha reflects on the often unseen labor behind music-making: the vulnerability, experimentation, discipline, technology, frustration, and imagination required to translate feeling into sound.

Alexis then shares the story behind “Better Angels,” from the drum and bass groove that first gave the song its sense of forward movement, to the way the song shifted from something bold and self-assured into something more honest, introspectiv ...