[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Jad, Robert. Radiolab.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Are these all 24 amendments, you have songs?

JAD: Oh, my friend. Did you say 24 amendments?

ROBERT: What are there, 26? I don't know how many there are.

JAD: There are 27.

ROBERT: There are 27, okay.

JAD: You of all people I thought would know that.

ROBERT: [laughs] I know they add one every so often.

JAD: So okay, let me explain this—let me explain this project for you.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Okay, so More Perfect now is entering its third season.

ROBERT: Right.

[MORE PERFECT INTRO]

JAD: The first two seasons, what were they? They were—they were extended investigative, highly reported and researched and elaborated stories about the Supreme Court, cases in front of the Supreme Court. But the idea was—of More Perfect was always broader than just the Court. I mean, the idea was to look at the argument that just so happens to happen at the Court. And the process of America sort of trying to claw its way out of the muck to get its higher ideals. Now those ideals, of course, are outlined in the Constitution.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Which has been amended 27 times in ways that are crucially important—especially right now. And most Americans can't name more than one or two of them. I was one of those people before More Perfect. And so when I was on my break, I had this idea—crazy idea—which was could we make an album, could we make a Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st century that reanimated these amendments?

ROBERT: Oh, modest aspiration.

JAD: Well, they say you gotta go big, right?

ROBERT: That's a very didactic thing. Like, that—in those songs, you actually are told exactly how to feel about the concept.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Schoolhouse Rock: [singing] I'm just a bill/Yes, I'm only a bill/And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.]

JAD: Yes, but the idea was could we take the spirit of it, but not, like, didactic in the way the old stuff was. But, like, taking these things that we have been covering for two seasons, the amendments to the Constitution.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: The Bill of Rights, one through ten. The other ones, from 11-27. Taking them, and because they're so stodgy and musty, like, the language ...

ROBERT: Well, some of them are really opaque.

JAD: Yeah, I mean—and so the idea was could we take these stuffy, stodgy sometimes opaque, but deeply important words and bring them to life? So we reached out to a ton of different musicians and asked them, like, would you interpret these amendments? You can talk explicitly about the amendments if you want, or you can turn it into something very personal to you.

ROBERT: But could they do it though? Like, just ...

JAD: Well, yeah. Let me—I don't know. Let me just play you a couple. Let me see, what—should I play one?

ROBERT: Should I choose one?

JAD: Choose one, yeah.

ROBERT: Okay. I'm gonna choose women's suffrage. Which one is that? That's 19?

JAD: Nineteen, yeah. Oh, you chose a good one. You chose a good one, my friend.

ROBERT: Who am I gonna get musically, first of all?

JAD: Okay, you're going to get—drum roll please—Dolly Parton.

ROBERT: Dolly Parton?

JAD: Dolly Parton.

ROBERT: Come on!

JAD: Dolly Parton.

ROBERT: Doll E. Parton or Dolly Parton? [laughs]

JAD: The Dolly Parton.

ROBERT: You know what I mean, if you had somebody, an attorney or something.

JAD: This Doll—Doll, hyphen, E?

ROBERT: No, no, I was thinking maybe her middle name, like Robert E. Lee. His first cousin, Doll E. Parton.

JAD: Doll E. Lee. [laughs]

ROBERT: No, I—you got Dolly Parton.

JAD: No, the Dolly Parton!

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yes. I'll play you a little bit of her song.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: August 18, 1920. Women's suffrage amendment, ratified.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dolly Parton: Women have been fighting for the legal right to vote since the 1840s. In 1890, the National American Women's Suffrage Association—NAWSA—was established with Susan B. Anthony its leading force. But women have been fighting for their rights since the very beginning of time. [singing] First they said we couldn't dance, then said we couldn't drink. And unless some men allowed it, they said we couldn't think. They said we shouldn't speak 'til we were spoken to. Well, there was just so much back then we weren't allowed to do/But the first bite of that apple I guess revealed the truth/That's when Eve got smart and that's why Adam don't like fruit/But that old tree of knowledge had some limbs that broke/We had to fight for women's rights, they said we couldn't vote. It is the duty of the women of this country to secure for themselves the sacred right to vote. We've carried signs, we've cussed at times/Marched up and down the streets. We had to fight for women's rights/Wore blisters on our feet. We got tired of seein' all our dreams go up in smoke/Burdens more than we could tote/Having lies crammed down our throats. But that ol' dam finally broke/When women finally got the right to vote.]

JAD: It's so good! There's so many great turns of phrases in that song.

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: Do you want to hear another one?

ROBERT: I mean, I'm really curious about, like, an amendment like a technical amendment, like the 25th. Like what could you possibly ...

JAD: Oh, let me play you the 25th. You want to hear that one?

ROBERT: Oh, 25th is the ...

JAD: It's the impeachment one.

ROBERT: The impeachment one. Oh, that's very interesting.

JAD: It's technically the succession one. The 25th Amendment is the amendment that establishes an order of succession if the President can't do his job.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: So Devendra Banhart is a sort of a freak folk musician. He does, like, sort of psychedelic folk.

ROBERT: [laughs] Psychedelic folk.

JAD: It's—it's a whole genre.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Devendra Banhart: Hello. My name is Devendra Banhart, and I chose the 25th Amendment, which is about succession.]

JAD: He's an amazing songwriter, and he wrote a really funny song that takes you through the line of succession.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Devendra Banhart: [singing] 1600, Washington, DC. That's where I am. Oh no, poor me. Even though I'm at the bottom of the list, oh Lord, I never wanted this/So won't you please, please, pay attention/To the following line of succession/That's been in place since the 1700s 'til today.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Devendra Banhart: [singing] It all began when the President had a sudden and total awakening that completely rearrange the state of heart/And even worse the newly grown moral compass and a developing code of ethics, they got into art. And so out the White House they went/And next came the Vice President who ate too much drywall/After seeing Lincoln's ghost float oh so very disapprovingly down the hall.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Devendra Banhart: [singing] And so the speaker of the House of Representatives prepared to leave/But due to their old jobs' roles and responsibilities, they rarely spoke. So ironically, when it came time to talk, they clammed up/And so the President Pro Tempore of the Senate showed up.]

ROBERT: So what he's doing is he's knocking off every person who becomes President, and then you find—then you meet the next one in the line.

JAD: And I think—I think that sort of the whole conceit is that everybody dies and it also- and it ends up with him being President.

ROBERT: Wow! So musicians really went to law books and just looked very carefully ...

JAD: It some cases, yeah.

ROBERT: ... it sounds like.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You know, try one where we just get somebody took the idea of the amendment and went with a feeling rather than with the legal matter.

JAD: Yeah. First Amendment is good.

ROBERT: The First Amendment.

JAD: Number one.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: The big one.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Let me play you that one after the break.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Robby calling from Brooklyn, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad, here with Robert Krulwich. Offering up a preview of an experiment that we're doing for the new season of More Perfect, where we are releasing an album. It's called 27: The Most Perfect Album. You can find it on iTunes and Spotify. You can also find all the songs at TheMostPerfectAlbum.org. Now on the podcast, we're not just putting out music, we're—we're telling stories. We're telling these sort of funny, quirky, poetic, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious sort of explainer stories about each of the 27 amendments. I think of them as sort of like audio liner notes for the songs. Let me play you the story that we tell in conjunction with the First Amendment.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: In the podcast. Sarah Qari, producer at More Perfect, created this little story. I'm gonna drop into the middle of it where she's talking with a guy named Burt Neuborne, who is a law professor. And he, to him, the First Amendment is like a poem. So let's drop into that one. You'll hear reporter Sarah Qari, actor Jeffrey Wright reading the amendments, and Professor Burt Neuborne talking about them.

SARAH: First Amendment.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.

BURT NEUBORNE: It consists of six ideas.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

SARAH: One.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

SARAH: Two.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or abridging the freedom of speech.

SARAH: Three.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or of the press.

SARAH: Four.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

SARAH: Five.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: And to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

SARAH: Six.

BURT NEUBORNE: It's only 45 words long. Could have been written on the back of an envelope.

SARAH: These days, the First Amendment is wrapped up in all kinds of thorny stuff like kneeling at football games and hate speech and money and politics, but if you just step back from all of that and you read the text of the First Amendment, and you really try to think about what the words are trying to say, you find that the logic behind it is kind of beautiful.

BURT NEUBORNE: The order of the words in the first amendment is the life cycle of a democratic idea.

SARAH: Here's what he means.

BURT NEUBORNE: So those first two clauses ...

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

BURT NEUBORNE: ... create a free space inside your mind to think and believe as you wish.

SARAH: That's the founders saying that space inside your head where you think your thoughts, that's sacred. The government can't touch that.

BURT NEUBORNE: Without that free space, there can be no self-government.

SARAH: So that's the first idea: The freedom of your thoughts.

BURT NEUBORNE: Once you've believed and thought something, then it's natural for you to want to say it.

SARAH: Which brings us to the next clause.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or abridging the freedom of speech.

BURT NEUBORNE: The speech clause says if you've got an idea formed in the freedom of your mind, by all means go ahead and share it.

SARAH: So you have the freedom to think a thought, the freedom to speak that thought.

BURT NEUBORNE: But that's not enough if you really want to make a real dent in a society. So you need some way to be able to speak to a mass of people, to speak in a very loud voice.

SARAH: Which brings you to the fourth clause.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Or of the press.

SARAH: Which is speech amplified.

BURT NEUBORNE: Then once you've gotten your message out to a large number of people, when people have listened to these ideas and moved by them, it's natural for those people to want to do something about it, to move together, to organize.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: For the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

SARAH: So you can think a thought, you can speak that thought, you can create a movement.

BURT NEUBORNE: But that's not enough. Finally, the petition clause, which is the sixth idea, the petition clause says once you've assembled, once you've organized ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We demand the protection of our First Amendment rights! We assert! We assert!]

BURT NEUBORNE: ... then you have a right to take your argument to the government.

JEFFREY WRIGHT: And to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We speak for this country, and we demand reform now!]

BURT NEUBORNE: And force the government into confronting and either accepting it or rejecting it. And then that government, if it says no, is subject to being voted out of office. So this is Madison giving us the blueprint for democracy, the big bang when democracy begins.

SARAH: The way I'm hearing it is like concentric circles, like starting inside the mind of one person and then, like, reverberating out.

BURT NEUBORNE: Yeah, exactly. The First Amendment is a series of concentric circles, beginning within your mind and then moving to your close acquaintances.

SARAH: Hmm.

BURT NEUBORNE: Then to the society at large.

SARAH: Yeah.

BURT NEUBORNE: And then finally to the entire polity, to the entire people. That, by the way, is the only time in human history that those six ideas have ever been united in a single text. Only time. I went back and looked at every single rights-bearing document in our tradition, all the way from the Magna Carta through the English Bills of Rights, through the Colonial charters, through the state constitutions.

SARAH: Oh, wow!

BURT NEUBORNE: Through the French declaration of the Rights of Man. It's never been done before, to put the six building blocks of democracy together in a single coherent text. The First Amendment is the ideal city on the hill. It is the ideal community that the founders were trying to establish. And remember, establish for the first time in human history.

ROBERT: Wow! I've never thought of it that way. It's a little bit like some kind of very thoughtful relay race where each—as the baton is passed, it's the next logical step to turning what is inside you into powerful statements outside of you.

JAD: Yeah. So that's the First Amendment liner notes.

ROBERT: Well, actually the other thing about the—now that you've got me thinking about it. The way that guy described the First Amendment as this progression of ideas. I mean, it's—it just comes almost like just in about a couple of centuries after people like Shakespeare and Cervantes and—began creating interiority. Like this ...

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Like, there weren't any—there really wasn't any place to go to hear someone talking to herself or himself.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And not even a couple of centuries pass, and then you get a government that takes that idea that people have an interior, and that interior is distinct and needs protection from the government, and then comes this—this six point flow. Wow!

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I never really thought of that.

JAD: Yeah, it's a cool idea. But interestingly, the song that that's paired with on the album—I mean, actually we got a couple of different submissions for the First Amendment, but one of them came from a guy named Joey Stylez. He's a Native Canadian First Nation Métis hip-hop artist. And he made a song which sort of argues with the spirit of Burt Neuborne's take. He sort of looked at sort of all the people that have been left out of that city on the hill.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joey Stylez: On my track, "Ghost Dance, Part Two," I was dealing with the freedom of religion. From 1870 up until 1934 it was illegal for Native Americans to practice our ceremonies. I had in mind specifically the ghost dance, as in 1890 at Wounded Knee, 150 to 300 mostly women and children were massacred for ghost dancing. And to me, that shows they were scared. They were scared of us having our culture and ceremonies because they empower us. I truly hope the warrior spirit shines on this track, and our natural side of being wild and free sets the tone. I hope.]

["Ghost Dance, Part Two" - Joey Stylez]

ROBERT: That is really—I mean, the lyrics and the musical traces are all not—they're—they really challenge your sense of the amendment a little bit, so that these songs, the way they're written and the words that have been chosen and the moods they strike are all either arguments of tempo or arguments of spirit.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Or arguments of history.

JAD: Yeah, I would say 80 percent of the songs on the record are arguments with the amendments.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Rather than just celebrations or explanations of them. It's—it's—yeah.

ROBERT: Well, this is very interesting.

JAD: It's cool, right?

ROBERT: Yeah. It's a very different way to do it.

JAD: Yeah. So this was just a preview. If you're interested to hear more, go to wherever you get podcasts, search for More Perfect, sign up. Radiolab.org/MorePerfect will take you there. If you want to hear the record—it's a great record, I'm so proud of it—go to iTunes, Spotify, wherever, search for "27: The Most Perfect Album," and you can hear all the songs in their entirety at TheMostPerfectAlbum.org. Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

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