Related Issue
Summer 2026
The Arts
Tuneful Travels
Producer Ana González ’15 traveled nationwide with cellist Yo-Yo Ma to explore how music and place intertwine.
By Emily Gold Boutilier / Summer 2026
June 23rd, 2026
“Take Me Home, Country Roads” has an early cameo in the West Virginia episode of Our Common Nature—a podcast that follows cellist Yo-Yo Ma and public radio host Ana González ’15 as they crisscross the U.S. The song choice is fitting. For locals and nonlocals alike, John Denver’s 1971 hit is practically synonymous with the Mountain State.
The state—and the song—may be almost heaven. But as González and West Virginia singer- songwriter Kathy Mattea discussed, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River are Virginia landmarks. The “Country Roads” writers didn’t know their subject very well.
PHOTO: JENNIFER CHEN
“That episode wound up being about how hard it is to get to know a place if you’re an outsider,” said González.
Our Common Nature, a seven-episode WNYC podcast, came out in October 2025. Each episode is a travelogue that explores the intersections of music, culture, and the natural world. In Kentucky, Ma plays cello in a cave with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra. In Maine’s Acadia National Park, he joins Wabanaki musicians to welcome the sunrise. Aboard a canoe in Hawaii, he performs “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for humpback whales as hula masters chant. And in West Virginia, he plays Bach Cello Suite 1 Prelude in G major for kids on the banks of the New River. (The show’s executive producers include Sophie Shackleton ’09 and Ben Mandelkern ’09.)
Like Ma, González hadn’t spent much time in nature before the project. “I wasn’t an indoor video game kid, but I was an indoor jazz band kid,” she said of her childhood in New Haven, Connecticut.
At Brown she concentrated in jazz studies, played bass in the Jazz Band, and made a documentary about hip-hop in Rhode Island. She eventually joined WNYC, where she produced the Peabody Award-winning Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, about the early days of AIDS. Now she’s senior producer of the kids podcast Terrestrials. Our Common Nature was a side project.
In the West Virginia episode, music was a way into conversations about coal mining. Mattea brings up “Lean on Me,” by West Virginia native Bill Withers. She says he once told her the song is about coal miners: Just call on me, brother, when you need a hand. Another
interviewee, Diane Williams, remembers how, when she was a girl, coal miners at the company store would pay her to sing “Sixteen Tons”: I owe my soul to the company store.
“The series became a meditation on what music really is and where does it start and where does it end,” González said. “And the answer I got was that it started before any of us can remember and it keeps going infinitely, because sound is waves and waves are energy and energy is never created or destroyed.”
