My name is Michael Gungor.

This is a series on the Loving This Podcast about my new album Magnificat.

And in each of these episodes, I want to be deep diving into the songs and the themes and the stories behind the songs and get into the inner workings of all of it.

This album took me a couple years and even in some cases including the song that we're going to go over today longer than that this song today is called same sky and there were so many different versions of it and i'd actually love to play you a few of them i think this is the first version of.

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Man i actually still really like this one um i'm not exactly sure why this never finished i'm going to talk about this in a second though like how do you decide what goes where.

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All right one more if that's all right so we went to sonic ranch studios in texas some of us it was lisa and me and ran jackson and daniel mckenzie and then mckenzie smith was there and john art and we started working on this song and tried to take a completely different, direction on the verse uh listen to this one nico lost his job he had nothing to eat till of buddy bought him groceries gave him some weed he had a good night good sleep.

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Good dreams good times got a flat on the side of the room woman stopped to help me was 80 years old she had a good smile every painting's created one stroke at a time love rise wake us up like the sunshine, okay so how do you decide this is part of the interesting job of the artist right like how do you decide which one is the thing i i still like especially those last two really love those verses, and so they're just kind of they exist there i've got all these ideas like this in my phone and on my computer and everywhere just like little bits of musical ideas but then getting them to fully come together and be cohesive is another part of the game.

It's like, you might have 95% of it, but you can't find that last 5%.

And I think for me, what I could never connect with those earlier verses and the chorus that I had at that time, I didn't know how to get to the love rise part or like the part about love and it not feel just like a little saccharine or a little.

Almost bypass-y of like, okay, stuff is bad, love each other.

Which is a fine message, but there's something about that that feels kind of.

Cheap to me for some reason.

The nature of love is not something that can be forced.

It's not something that can be commanded.

Like, imagine if you went to a restaurant and the chef just stood above your shoulder and commanded you to enjoy the food.

Enjoy this meal.

Enjoy this experience.

It's like, you're kind of, you're kind of killing this for me right now, bro.

I know what it's like in my past to try to force love, to try to like, work it up and feel love.

And then I know what it's like to just see with open eyes and an open heart and for love to be encountered.

The love that I'm talking about, the love that is unconditional and the love that is infinite is not something that can be forced or manufactured or cajoled.

It simply is and you either see it and live in it or you try to run from it and so i wanted the lyric to to be somehow more about seeing it than than trying to you know whip up love as like a virtue or an action of mine and with as many different arrangements of the song as i tried for the last album, Love Song to Life, I just, I couldn't ever get it to 100% of where it felt like it was the thing.

So I just kind of sat on my computer for a while.

And I think one of the really key things that shifted in my own thinking or became a key for me to unlock this song was something called Internal Family Systems.

And I'll come back to that in a little bit here, but let me just play you where the song ended up if you haven't heard it yet.

So here's the first verse in chorus.

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I shifted the lyric in these ways, but to do that, I sort of have to talk about this thing, internal family systems or IFS.

And just even that sentence sounds boring.

I know if you stick with me, I know like I'm going to try to use as little jargon and stuff as I can, but this concept, it's not just going to help you understand this song or even the record more, which it will, but I think it's potentially one of the most powerful technologies for well-being or spiritual growth that I've ever come across.

I've used it extensively in my own life and helped a lot of other people with it as well.

And I think it really is like a life-changing thing to really understand and implement this into your life.

So bear with me while I try to explain this therapeutic technique and sort of model.

And I take it perhaps a little more spiritually and combine it kind of with like non-dual spirituality than perhaps your typical therapist or something like that would.

But I hope you'll follow along here and maybe even give it a try for yourself.

Okay.

So the basic idea is you are not just this singular subject.

But you're made of parts sort of just like how anything that you find in reality, you can see it as a thing but you could also break it down to smaller parts and each of those parts could be seen as their own thing but you could also break them down to smaller parts and it just kind of keeps going like that like the earth is made of molecules and those molecules are made of atoms, and so on and so whatever you might think of as you is also not just a singular entity.

For example, when somebody says, how are you doing?

You know, if you really pay attention to how you're feeling in the moment, It can actually be kind of a complicated question to answer.

Most of us just say, fine, thanks.

If you really answer, you're like, well, let's see.

I'm a little hungry.

I'm a little cranky.

I'm happy.

I'm grateful.

I'm annoyed.

You know, like all the different things that might be happening.

These bodies and minds are very complex.

What you call your body is all these complex systems of your circulation system and your digestion and your pulmonary system and the electricity of your body and your reproductive system, all these things working together, all these different loops and systems and.

Yet alone the brain, like the complexity, all the different loops and different ways that the neurons map and fire and cooperate, create these networks.

It's incredibly complex.

It's not a single thing.

Yet, for so many of our spiritual and psychological and therapeutic models of us, we tend to really simplify ourselves.

We reduce all of that complexity and collaboration and cooperation into a single idea of a me, one consistent, continuous, coherent thing.

And that's just not how it is to be a human being.

And IFS is really good at acknowledging, first of all, that complexity that exists.

And then actually it invites the person practicing this into a space of kindness and love to take care of those parts.

And we can only take care of those parts in IFS when we're in what they call Self, capital S.

And you can know you're operating from Self when you're operating from love, from non-judgment, when you're.

Approach to your parts is more like compassion and curiosity rather than trying to fix or shame or even change these parts of us.

So for instance, maybe I could just tell you about one of my parts that I've worked with the last couple of years named Mikey.

He's a little seven-year-old.

He lives close usually towards the center of my chest.

And he's what you could call sort of an inner child character he's he's very sweet very tender but very sensitive to being bad like if he does the wrong thing he's very sad about that and sensitive to that so i have to really take care of him and pay attention if there's something that comes up that's like this the world or the story could really easily be you're bad i have to immediately usually go take care of him make sure he's seen, make sure he knows that I self am here for him and love him and love him regardless of whether he was good or bad or anything like that.

That's not how I think of him.

And now we sort of have a relationship.

So I have this playful inner child that gets to be around and dance and create.

And I make sure as if I was literally walking around with a seven-year-old kid sometimes that was really sensitive to certain things, I tend to that part.

And there can actually be like dialogue, conversation, a relationship between this non-judging, loving awareness that I know that I am, capital S, self, and this part of me that sometimes would want to hide in the shadow if he didn't know I was there, if he didn't know that I knew he was there.

So in IFS, we have all different kinds of parts.

We've got exiled parts.

We've got protective parts.

There might be parts that stand up when Mikey is getting...

You know, antagonized or feels like he's going to get called bad or something.

And they're like, screw you out of my space, get away from him, like protector parts that can come up too.

And there are what they call firefighting parts and lots of different kinds of parts.

And of course we don't have time to get into everything about IFS here, but hopefully this just gives you sort of a taste and inspiration, especially around the idea that when you are operating in what it calls self.

I would also call it the divine.

I would also call it loving awareness.

When you're in that space where you're not just identified as one of the clouds in the sky.

And that's what I really like this analogy to help describe the whole system as well, is this sky and the clouds.

Because the self is like the sky, boundless, has all the room, all the love in the world for any clouds that could be inside of it.

And the clouds are like the parts.

And when we're identified as just one of the parts, so there might be a part of me that feels sad, for instance.

And if I'm identified as that part, or if that part is like taking the driver's seat, then everything is just sad, right?

It's just, I am sad because that part is being identified with, when I can click back into the sky and notice, oh, a part of me is sad.

Then I, as the sky, can care for that part.

And the thing that we learn in IFS is all these parts are trying to help.

They're trying to do what they know to do, what they've learned.

A lot of these parts were developed at different ages.

They're sort of like loops and behaviors and attitudes, they have their own perspectives and thoughts.

And so they've developed their strategies, but what they're ultimately looking for is what self has, which is love.

Self, God, whatever you want to call it.

And self has all of the resources that these parts need.

So the move then is really to keep moving into self.

When you're in a part, when you're like, wow, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling whatever, can sky see itself?

So that it's not only seeing the cloud.

When you're just in the cloud, all you see is gray.

When you click back, you see that there's room for this feeling, for this loop, for this perception, for this thought.

And that's the kind of love that I was hoping to express and invite for this song, Same Sky.

It wasn't the kind of love where, you know, one cloud is telling another, hey, you should love more.

You're an angry cloud.

You shouldn't be angry.

You should be a loving cloud like me.

That's always kind of a faux love.

That's always its own strategy to kind of shut down other parts, because again, the clouds can be threatened by each other, but the sky isn't threatened by any of them.

So this kind of love is not pushing away the bad, what we think of as bad, pushing away the negative.

It's actually inviting all of it to be seen.

And as it's seen, it's loved, because that's the nature of sky.

It's the nature of self.

it's just open non-judging unconditional love and so then the matter rather than action or a behavior change being the impetus for the song of like hey things are bad be loving it's like hey look it's the sky and you're welcome here.

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Was really kind of clarified of what the sky was in the in the song and how love fit into that the music came together actually quite quickly i could just feel naturally then the verses needed to have some grit they needed to be like kind of not flinching from the pain of life but i also didn't want it to feel despondent i didn't want it to feel like oh it's so sad to be alive it was more like yeah it can feel really sad and hard to be alive isn't that amazing and to understand why that kind of like fairly light hearted open-handed but still fully engaged in life feeling was really important to me um i'd like to do a callback to the first song which sort of introduces like i talked about in the first episode of this series these three characters, One is Mary, the Divine Mother.

One is the forest, which for me is sort of like the context, the space in which all of this happens, all the story of this album occurs in.

And then there's sort of the birth of this, what will become, as the record progresses, this mystical clown kind of a character.

And in the last episode, I talked about how that clown is sort of introduced with this faint whistle that's more like the breeze.

Now, by the way, when I talk about some of this kind of stuff, it's a little bit more like dream interpretation for me than it is like explaining an engineer's manual or something.

Like this isn't technical stuff that you need to understand to enjoy the record.

It's kind of like looking back at how it happened and how it felt and now trying to like put words and meaning to it.

And for me, there's these sort of three energies or characters that are kind of interacting.

And in a way, the mystic character, the clown character, is a product of the love between the sort of the mother and father, Mary and the forest.

And this sort of faint whistle is kind of like maybe the conception of this character.

And so then in the second song, that faint whistle has now become a whistle, a full-on whistle.

And so for me, this kind of feels like the birth of something new.

This feels like the birth of this character, which is also kind of the listener, actually.

It's this just honest acknowledgement of the pain and even honest acknowledgement of the contradiction of our own minds about the pain.

It's like, you ever feel it's all too much, yet somehow it's still not enough.

That's an absurd thing to think.

Those are contradictory things, but that's how it is, right?

That's the mind.

That's the ego.

Or in IFS speak, that's two different parts.

And so this is self singing to the parts and saying, hey, I get there's contradiction here.

There's tension here.

But again, from the perspective of self, it's not a problem.

And same thing, like think about a mother giving birth.

Births are always tumultuous, right?

Like the entrance to this new world when we're born is not just a painless or a quiet thing.

It's like full of screaming and blood and crying.

And so I wanted this lyric for people kind of being born into this moment, this album that we're going to experience together.

I wanted to acknowledge the turmoil that most people are likely in and coming into this experience.

And I don't mean turmoil like special turmoil necessarily, but just the turmoil of being a human being, being cast out of the mother's womb where it was all warm and safe and we had all of our needs met and suddenly we're in this bright unknown crazy mysterious world.

So I wanted to set that up musically by really shifting starkly.

And so what we move from is this whole sort of world of synthesizers and forest sounds and Mary singing and then a whistler.

And then suddenly it's like distorted bass, you know, like we're in.

There's kind of an abruptness to it, but there's also to me like a playfulness about it.

I liked how the bass and the guitar were sort of playing off each other.

One little gear tidbit.

I used the Tascam Porta Studio 424 tape recorder for a lot of the tones on this album, including some of these more distorted tones, just to make them nice and, crispy but without being too abrasive or metallic or digital.

That's also how some of the sounds pitch down and up with the tape machine.

Also the drums you're hearing here are some of the drums recorded by Mackenzie Smith when we were at Sonic Ranch Studios.

They were all cut apart and put through the tape machine as well.

One other musical thing that might be worth mentioning in this song and in this album as an entirety is I tried to lean a little bit more into my more forward, sort of almost yelly or soulful voice.

Over the last several years and even on those early versions of this song, I feel like a lot of times I've been sticking in kind of a more gentle place in my voice.

And I wanted it to be a little bit more playful, so open and unabashed and just itself really engaging fully in the energy.

So I sang a little bit harder on this verse than I think I would have before this album.

The good news is that nothing lasts Thankfully, there's two shall pass In time.

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You'll find You'll find Okay, so then we're back to the forest and we're inviting all the parts in, all the afraid parts, all the stuff that's going on.

And then when it's all welcomed in, we start moving towards the bridge.

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So now that everything's been invited in and it's just the sky seeing itself, now we're in this sort of mystical union.

All the parts have come together in the sky.

And now we're just soaring we're playing we're having a good time i like that harmonically, in the bridge kind of where we go is it's a little ambiguous to me like we're in c and then we go just this b7 chord which is not normally a chord in c um but it's like where are we going because then it resolves on an e minor which is kind of the it's the three of c so it's like we could still be in C maybe, but then it re-establishes the B.

I'm like, okay, maybe we're actually in E minor now.

But then it does this F sharp 7 chord, which isn't really even in E minor, and it's not in C, so it's kind of like, where are we going here?

And then that chord resolves here, which is kind of an interesting place to resolve always have been just fine which is the original starting key, and then the relative minor just fine a minor and then that leads down to the new key which is g, and i don't know all that like kind of where are we at key wise i like that with the lyric which is basically we're flying beyond space time don't hold us into any boxes here we're just having fun And then when we land in the key of G solidly, it's a little bit of a shift of a feeling.

And here I didn't feel like the first two choruses, the lyrics of those choruses, still work where we're at now.

Now that we've been flying, now that everything has already been accepted, singing Sometimes Rain Clouds Block Out the Sunshine felt a little bit like going backwards.

So I finally felt fine to use some of the original lyrics of the song about love rise because from this space we've already accepted it all and now it's just like let this love keep growing the garden's been planted we're here let the seeds grow let them sprout and they quickly do.

And suddenly there are all these others.

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And then here we modulate to the key of D, which is higher than we were even before.

And we're just going to all fly together.

Oh, come on.

Production-wise and session-wise, these last choruses got a little challenging for me, because I kind of brought in elements from every stage of this song.

I had some of the original guitarists.

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James Krause on the mixing love here, pulling this all together.

Actually, this is the first Gunga record that I mixed most of it myself.

But this song and this is love, I was feeling a little bit of overwhelm.

I'm not typically a mix engineer.

And there was just a lot going on and I was having a hard time wrangling it all in.

And James to the rescue.

Thanks, James.

Okay, so we're almost at a landing with this song, but just before we go, we kind of come down again.

And to me, it's almost like the camera zooms back up onto mother again.

And she's holding her baby.

And she just thinks it's beautiful, just perfect as it is.

If we go back to the IFS or the sky analogy, it's like we've forgiven the clouds for being what they are.

Like, it doesn't matter if they're rainy clouds or it doesn't matter if they're hurricane clouds.

They're welcome here.

And the sky is just loving whatever's in her.

And so in this moment, it's almost like the sky gets to sing directly to the cloud.

It says, oh, now I see you and you're beautiful.

And in this sort of unconditional love, What I love is it's actually not even just one directional anymore.

It's not just the mother to the clouds because the mother sees that the clouds are her.

So in a way it's sung from the clouds to the mother and from the mother to the clouds and from the mother to the mother.

It's just it's life to itself.

It's love to itself.

And to sing this line, I asked my friend Aston Tur to sing it.

I just wanted to hear these words out of her voice.

Her voice is so magical.

It's just like butter, melts me every time.

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And this line, as simple as it is, is really the heartbeat of the record for me.

In fact, if there was like a thesis statement in the album for the whole, the biggest theme, the most important theme of the whole record, it might be this one.

Because it's about seeing.

Now that I see you, because when you're in the cloud, when you're identified as just one part, you can't see clearly.

All you can see is the cloud that you're in.

It just everything looks gray when you're in the cloud or everything looks like rain or darkness.

But when you're the sky, when you see that you're the sky, everything is perfect as it is already.

And I like at the end how the whole community sort of echoes the voice of the mother.

Like the sky sees itself in all the clouds.

And then it's like sangha, it's a spiritual community that's how I feel like.

When the most exquisite forms of community are when all of our voices are just like mirrors of this and echoes of this fundamental love, and when the parts of us start catching on and playing along and trusting this guy.

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And this to me is what healing is and integration is, So now I'd like to play you the song in its entirety.

I hope that as you listen, you will allow yourself to be the sky while inviting all of the clouds in.

And I'll just let that audio sort of be the end of this episode.

So thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for being along on this ride.

I'm really enjoying making this music diving into the meaning even afterwards, and I'm so grateful for all of you who are along on this ride and are so supportive, I'll see you next week all the love.

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