The 2025 Public Song Project Recap!

All Of It producer Simon Close recaps the 2025 Public Song Project, which aired a radio special revealing its winners over the weekend. This Saturday, August 2, at 1 PM you can see the Public Song Project live in concert with the Brooklyn Public Library! Join us on the steps of the library's main branch in Grand Army Plaza for a free show.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Over the weekend, WNYC aired a radio special for the Public Song Project. That's our project where we invite anyone to send in a song based on something in the public domain. On Saturday, we revealed the winners of this year's contest in a radio show hosted by All Of It producer Simon Close. All of the submissions are now online in a big playlist. You can also listen to interviews with the winners and their songs like this one from Anni Rossi.

[MUSIC - Anni Rossi: A Jelly Fish]

Anni Rossi: Visible, invisible, fluctuating charm

An amber-colored amethyst inhabits it on your arm

Approaches, and it opens, and it closes

It approaches, and it opens, and it closes

You have meant to catch it

And it shrivels

You abandon your intent

Jelly Fish

It opens and it closes

Getting closer, and approaches

Jelly Fish

Alison Stewart: This coming weekend, you'll get to hear Annie and other winners perform their songs live on stage in front of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. That's Saturday afternoon, but joining me right now with a preview of the concert and a recap of the special is All Of It producer Simon Close. Hi, Simon.

Simon Close: Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: So the Public Song Project is wrapped for 2025. Yay. [applause]

Simon Close: Yay.

Alison Stewart: All right, who were the winners and what did they cover?

Simon Close: So there was Anni Rossi, and that was a kind of punk cover of a 1909 poem by Marianne Moore called A Jelly-Fish, and you can hear that sort of jellyfish slinkiness in the way that Anni plays that song. Another winner from this year-- there are six total, so that was one of six. Devon Press, who lives in Chicago, plays in a band called Kangaroo. He sent in a song called Moonlight, which is based on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and also Habanera a little bit thrown in there.

We also got, let's see, a cover of The Swan, the Camille Saint-Saëns classical composition that was covered on JUNO synth and clarinet by Devon Yesberger and Mark Dover. We also got a cover of-- or an adaptation of a Shakespeare poem, Sonnet 43, from a band called Dreamglow, who are based in Boston, and let's see, Ra Le Bu, local singer-songwriter. He sort of wrote a new song based on the story of John Henry.

Our final winner for this year was a singer-songwriter named Brittain Ashford, who did a sort of new take on Hush Little Baby. She rewrote the lyrics and switched up the melody. I'm going to play a clip of that now. The reason I want to play this is because it's pretty different from the Anni Rossi cover you just heard, and I think that the two of them side by side show sort of the variety and breadth of submissions we got. So if we want to just throw to it now, this is Brittain Ashford's new adaptation of Hush Little Baby.

[MUSIC - Brittain Ashford: Hush Little Darlin]

Brittain Ashford: And if I'm not really what you want

I still hope that you find the one

So hush little darlin, let me say

You know I only live to love you more each day

So while you're drifting off to sleep

Cross my heart, my soul to keep

Alison Stewart: That's Brittain Ashford with Hush Little Darlin. In the special that aired over the weekend, you featured each of the winners that mixed together their songs in an interview with them. First of all, why did that make sense to you?

Simon Close: Luke Green and I worked on this special together-- Luke, who's a producer on All Of It also. We came up with this concept for the special where it was kind of like an immersive journey through the public domain, and as we were thinking about the best way to present these interviews that we did with the artists and their songs, that kind of immersive feel made sense to us. Once we'd spoken to them, we realized that we could sort of break apart the conversations I had and layer them on top of the songs and experience the song and the creative process of making the song from the artists themselves.

Alison Stewart: Can we hear one of those?

Simon Close: Yes, definitely. I mentioned Ra Le Bu before, who's a locally based singer-songwriter. Also, his day job is he works as a stager, and he told me that he cleans sites of plastics that you would find in the water to make them more environmentally and aesthetically pleasing.

His submission was like a new version of the John Henry ballad. You've probably heard a version of that before. It's been covered by so many people over time. It's the story of the railroad worker who goes up against a steam drill and then manages to drill further than the steam drill does, and it's a very humanist story. Ra Le Bu told us that he was introduced to that story as a kid by his mom, and it's stuck with him ever since. He has a tattoo based on the story.

Alison Stewart: Oh, really? Wow.

Simon Close: He wrote this song for his daughter, as he'll explain in this montage. So this is a clip of the montage that we played in the special over the weekend.

[MUSIC - Ra Le Bu: Sparks Fly]

Ra Le Bu: My mother, she used to read it to me, and so that was my first introduction to, was just bedtime stories.

What you know, about living for something, dying for the same thing.

His character, in the end, like when the story is over, he winds up ending his story in Virginia, and that's where my family is from. So I always felt like he was my uncle or my godfather or my father or something like that, my grandfather, so I always felt that connection to him.

But I know something [unintelligible 00:07:18]

With my mom reading the story to me, it always taught me about persistence and being determined and never giving up, so that's definitely a moral I want to share with my daughter, just to keep on striving for things that you believe in. So I want to share that with her, too, and she responds to music well, so I knew that through the music, I'd be able to get that point across.

Some will understand

No one understands

Each and every day, I'm faced with the choice of if I want to persist or not, and I choose to because I'm always thinking about John Henry. Even in my right forearm, I got a tattoo of a sledgehammer that would've been like one that he used.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking to All Of It producer and Public Song Project producer Simon Close. He just hosted a special over the weekend celebrating this year's Public Song Project and its winners. And this Saturday, he'll be hosting at the Brooklyn Public Library for a free concert. What were some of your takeaways from this past year?

Simon Close: We got all sorts of submissions. So I think Ra's is a good example of one kind of submission from-- it's a cover or an adaptation of something that means something to the person who covered it. Other people are musicians who found a song and thought, "Oh, I can do something creative with this," but then in Ra's case, it's a story that's been with him for his whole life, basically. There were some other submissions like that, one from-- Carl Banks I think was the submitter's name-- was a poem that his father used to say to him, and now he tells his poem to his kids, too, and he wrote a song based on that poem for his kids as well. Those are really beautiful stories and one type of submission we got.

We got a lot of covers of Ain't Misbehavin' by Fats Waller this year-

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Simon Close: -which is a great song, so that was wonderful to hear. If you go to the website, you can hear all the different versions of them. Lots of very different takes on that song. It entered the public domain this year I think is the reason that people wanted to cover it. Then another very common type of submission we got is a song based on a poem, so you can take the lyrics-- or the text of a poem and write original music for it and make your own song out of it.

Alison Stewart: Can people listen to the songs that didn't win?

Simon Close: Yes, you can. There's a public songbook on our page, so if you go to wnyc.org/publicsongproject, you can hear the interviews and the songs from all the winners. There's also a playlist of the judges' personal favorites as a way to shout out more than just the winners and also the judges who helped me sift through all these songs, but then you can listen to all-- I think it's 123 songs that we received this year, along with the 200 or so that we received in the last couple years.

Alison Stewart: When people think of the public domain, they probably think of things from the 1920s or much older. Is that true?

Simon Close: Definitely, that is true. January 1st is a big day in the public domain because that's when copyrights expire and new things enter the public domain. This year it was 1929, so basically, more or less, everything from 1929 and older is in the public domain.

The public domain is also a pretty contemporary, relevant-right-now idea as well, so there are other ways that things can enter the public domain. One, for example, is a government employee or someone who's working for the government in their capacity, so like you think of the Works Progress Administration, those artists, even though technically those works of art aren't old enough to be in the public domain, if you make something as a government employee, it enters the public domain automatically, so that's one way that something can just be free of copyright as soon as it's made.

Another reason that the public domain and copyright are important issues right now is that artificial intelligence is totally flipping the way that we think about copyright and public domain. There's the common issue that most people who know about how copyright intersects with public-- or copyright intersects with artificial intelligence are probably aware of is AI uses old art to generate new art, basically, and often whoever's using the AI doesn't have the right to that original artwork to sort of take it and instruct the generative AI with that.

The other flip side of this is that only humans can own copyrights, basically, but the law hasn't really caught up with what AI is, so when someone generates something with AI, it is not owned by anybody, so for the first time in at least the modern history of the idea of copyright and the public domain, more stuff that is new, more new art-- if you want to call AI-generated art art. More new art is entering the public domain now than old art is, because every time you generate something with AI, it's in the public domain, which is like an extremely confusing thing that lawyers in the government sort of don't know what to do yet, as we're all figuring out-

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk]

Simon Close: -what to do with AI. For that reason, copyright and public domain are very current and kind of increasingly urgent issues even though there's also a lot of old stuff in there too.

Alison Stewart: I want to get to this Saturday's concert at 1 PM at the Brooklyn Public Library. What is going to happen?

Simon Close: So we'll hear from a few of the winners this year plus a couple other submissions that stood out to me. One of them is from a band called Bargainland, who are a local-- they were parents that met in a kindergarten co-op and now they play musical saw and accordion together. That'll be really fun. So it'll be a live concert on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza. I'll be hosting. You'll hear from some of the winners and submitters this year, and there may be a group song at the end too.

Alison Stewart: Tell me a little about Dreamglow. We're going to hear a little bit of that before we end the show?

Simon Close: Sure. This is going to be a clip of their montage. Dreamglow are a Boston-based kind of vocal experimental group, and they did an adaptation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 43.

[MUSIC - Dreamglow: Sonnet 43]

Angela Yam: To find the sound for this dream world doesn't necessarily call for operatic singing, dare I say. At least I don't listen to opera singing when I'm trying to go to sleep. But also I wanted that feeling, and you can hear it in the layering of the vocals as well, of this sort of the rise and fall of breaths and the rise and fall of your own subconscious. At least that's how I interpret the layering of the vocals, because it's all just me and just Nathan.

Dreamglow: -form form happy show

To the clear day--

Simon Close: There's one section of the song that really jumps out to me. The rest of the instruments drop out and then it's just voices and percussion.

Nathan Halbur: That driving percussion and the driving vocals as well in that moment, I felt as just building to this explosion of light.

[unintelligible 00:14:30]

Dreamglow: How would, I say--

Nathan Halbur: That's my laundry basket very heavily featured in that moment.

Dreamglow: By looking on thee in the living day

Alison Stewart: That was Dreamglow. Okay, give me the pitch for this weekend.

Simon Close: This weekend, Brooklyn Public Library collaboration on the steps of the main branch in Grand Army Plaza. It'll be a free concert at 1 PM so you can stop by the farmers market while you're there, too, get a snack and then stay for a show. You can go to wnyc.org/publicsongproject to find out how to RSVP and find out more about the project and listen to more of the submitters and the winners from this year.

Alison Stewart: That is Public Song Project producer Simon Close. Congratulations, Simon.

Simon Close: Thank you very much, Alison.