Sing for Science featuring Neko Case and Rebecca McMackin

This award-winning, top 10 music interview podcast on Apple Podcasts features musicians exploring scientific topics in conversation with experts. Past episodes have featured Korn front man Jonathan Davis and author Mary Roach discussing mortuary science; Sia and sex therapist Alex Katehakis on attachment theory; and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo with Python creator Guido van Rossum on coding — among many others that connect science-curious music fans to thought-provoking topics. The show is hosted by New York musician Matt Whyte, whose credits include composing for Netflix’s Tiger King and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, as well as fronting the mid-aughts band Earl Greyhound. Inspired by performing in a Pete Seeger memorial concert at Joe’s Pub in New York City, Matt created the podcast to continue Seeger’s legacy of using music to engage with the world’s most pressing issues.

Fearless and inventive, Neko Case has spent decades reshaping pop music into something uniquely her own. Her voice — a force of nature — is equal parts intimacy and impact, and her metaphors land like a perfectly timed pitch. From Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, she has built a wide-reaching career, now rooted on a farm in New England. With each passing year, Case’s voice grows more powerful and expressive. Once labeled country or Americana, her early “train-whistle” vocals now echo through a more expansive, unpredictable style. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says. “But I just wanted to do it so bad.”

Over her 20-year career, Case has collaborated with The New Pornographers and Case/Lang/Veirs, while releasing a series of acclaimed solo albums, including Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Middle Cyclone, and Hell-On (2018). Working on her own terms, Case continues to build a legacy that stands alongside the most influential solo artists of her generation. “I’m just trying,” she says, “to be myself as hard as I can.”

McMackin is an ecologically focused horticulturist, garden designer, and writer. She currently serves as lead horticulturist for the American Horticultural Society and is an associate with the Harvard Divinity School’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative. Before relocating to the woods of Connecticut, she was the Arboretum curator at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, and managed Brooklyn Bridge Park for ten years. Her writing has appeared in Gardens Illustrated, The New York Times, NPR, and PBS, and her TED Talk has been viewed over one million times.