Ned and Emily Hartford

Ned and Emily Hartford are the creators of Metra, a climate change musical. Here’s the premise – The year is 2043. The world is hot, water is scarce, the weather is unpredictable…and the fossil fuel industry continues to thrive. The wealthy are comfortable in their air-purified, cooled, humidified, superbly hydrated Bubble cities. But in a roadside bar on the Outside, an unlikely group of revolutionaries is about to demand a new story…

Tell us about Metra in 10 words or less. 
A musical fiction podcast about how we change the world.

Why Metra, why now?
EMILY: Ned and I have been working on Metra together for over seven years (it had a first life as a stage musical, and we began pre-production on the podcast in summer 2024).

I brought the myth of Erysicthon and his daughter, Metra to the table. It was a timely allegory about extreme greed, and the enraging casual violence against women that had turned me off of ‘classics’ for so long. I wanted to figure out how I could break the story enough for it to belong to me.

We played around with the myth with a group of artists, and out of those experiments, Ned wrote the first songs that would be a part of Metra. We decided to build something together.

Ned and I looked at the myth: an imperious king selfishly and violently cuts down a sacred grove. So, the goddess of abundance curses him with unending hunger, and in this ceaseless craving, he decimates the resources of the kingdom. We realized that Metra was giving us a way to talk about the insidious power and wealth grab at the heart of the climate crisis. It gave us a way to talk about the myths created, and all the lies told, by those wealthy and powerful grifters.

And it gave us a way to talk about the alternative: the power of collective action, care, and working toward justice. The power to make literally any other choice for the future of the world.

NED: I am so proud of the work Em and I have done. I think we’ve taken the REALLY complex subject of climate justice and created a hugely entertaining (and, IMHO, incredibly tuneful) work of art that tackles the massive complexity in a way that is totally grounded in character and plot.

Myths and stories have the power to change narratives. Thoughts?
EMILY: Listen, the world is so scary right now. And it would be delusional to tell you that I think our podcast can solve the climate crisis (inevitably tackling rising fascism and sundry threats to vulnerable communities along the way).

But the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, matter. A story can both describe and create reality. Tell a story enough times, to enough people, and it inscribes a path forward. But so often, we don’t step back and ask whose story we’re following.

The fearful, nihilistic story about the climate crisis is that we’re doomed. But that story shields the massive amount of narrative (and financial) energy propping up the ‘inevitability’ of our reliance on fossil fuels. The U.S. fossil fuel industry benefits from over 750 BILLION DOLLARS annually in subsidies and tax breaks. They are taking free money from taxpayers (SO! MUCH! MONEY!) in exchange for the destruction of the planet and a tidy myth about the free market. 

What if, instead of that myth, we told ourselves a story about scientific ingenuity—about how possible it would be to dream big, and go all in on all of the solutions to the crisis that we already have? What if we kept telling ourselves that new story until it started carving a path forward?

The only thing we know about the future, for sure, is that it hasn’t happened yet. So: change the myth, change the world, baby.

Is it too late for us to take climate action?
EMILY: Nope!  "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

NED: Definitely not. We literally could be net zero in 10 years. The technology is there. But it would take a massive, centralized coordinated effort by the government, like during the New Deal and WWII. We can’t let the market decide. We have to choose and make long range plans, and put everything we’ve got into it, just like the Chinese are so successfully doing (and leaving us in the dust).

And we would probably have to nationalize the American fossil fuel industry because they will do EVERYTHING in their power to keep this from happening.

What was the hardest part of making this podcast? How did you overcome it?
NED: Musical audio drama is a tough audio nut to crack. For Metra, all the dialogue and music and songs had to live in the same world and sound of a piece. The audio had to fit in the loudness ranges of streaming platforms. Plus, the songs still had to “pop,” because that’s what people expect.

It was a daunting set of challenges, and it took about a month just to figure out the best workflow for mixing and mastering the episodes. Even after coming up with the best work approach,  it still took about 160 hours per episode to mix and master each episode (this doesn’t include the almost 1800 hours of recording, sound editing, and sound design).

But the good news is that I think it really shows in the quality of the listener experience.

Think back to your mindset before you made Metra. Now that you’ve made it, has anything changed in your mindset?
NED: “There was a life before Metra?” asks the bleary-eyed man who has spent his past year locked in a windowless recording studio. “What year is it? Who am I?”

You made this as a married couple. What were the challenges and delights of that?
EMILY: Delight: getting to be the first person to hear Ned’s incredible songs. Basking in the genius of the human you love. Challenge: it’s 12AM and we’re brushing our teeth but we’re still talking about work.

NED: Em is a kind, bold, impassioned creative, who is absolutely stellar at bringing the best out of people. Getting to watch her at work makes me love her more and more every day.

What role does art play in narrative change around climate action?
NED: Culture is basically a set of myths a society tells itself to explain/excuse how it got here and how it intends to move forward. Some of our myths—Manifest Destiny, White Christian Exceptionalism, Greed is Good, The Market Will Solve Everything—are killing us. Literally.

If we want to survive, we need new myths, because if we want to survive, we need a big, bold, new approach to what our society is and what it means. And to support that new approach, we need new stories and myths that are so damn entertaining—-with absolute earworms of songs people will sing as they take to the barricades—that the new world we dream of becomes tangible…so tangible we can see it, hear it, feel it, and know to our very core, it is within our grasp.

EMILY: Here’s a quote I love from adrienne maree brown about collective action, imagination, and reclaiming our right to shape the world:

“I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”

― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

I want our show to be part of a wave of radical imagination, where we get brash, wild, and queer about reshaping the world. I hope it helps people feel possibility in a scary time. I hope Ned’s music energizes audiences and reminds them that they’re not alone.

What’s a podcast you love that nobody knows about?
EMILY: Ned and I are both voices on a great indie fiction podcast called The Dragoning. It’s about a world shaken by an epidemic wherein rageful women are transforming into dragons and immolating men. (It’s quite a satisfying listen.)

What’s a podcast you love that everybody knows about? 
EMILY: I’ll go to the Nightvale universe here and say, Within the Wires. I LOVE getting to be immersed in a new mode of found audio with every season, and I love how the deep exploration of form lets them reveal the world a tiny, rich scrap at a time.

NED: Um, SOME folks know about this podcast, but so many more should: The Climate Pod. I have learned 90% of what I know about the climate crisis through their incredible interviews and by reading the books of the folks they’ve interviewed. And they aren’t afraid to delve deep into how social justice is inextricably linked to climate justice.

Thank you, Emily and Ned!