"Mitochondria" is really a celebration of understanding our roots and answering the question, what do we owe each other on a warming planet?

In writing "Mitochondria," a lot of our inspiration came from the understanding that our elders held so much knowledge.

And in the natural world, that couldn't be more true.

Hello everybody.

Welcome to Lil Idli's "Mitochondria" EPA release show.

It's a show, but really, it's a party.

So tonight you're going to hear a lot of music about roots and about cells, about ecosystems.

And we hope it's as healing as it is fun.

My name is Ranjani Prabhakar.

I live in Washington, D.C..

I am an environmental advocate and a musician.

Over time, it's made sense to me that my life as an artist and my life as an advocate are two parts of me that really exist as one.

I am in a band called Lil Idli.

It's myself and my partner who started this band in 2020 right when the pandemic hit.

One thing we really allow ourselves is to not crowd each other in the studio.

We actually take turns coming down here and tinkering with sounds.

A lot of it is asynchronous, the way we work, A lot of time is also spent on just discussing ideas about a song.

So even before we come down to the studio space, we are talking about it.

We are thinking about the soundscapes.

I think about it as a negotiation and seeing like, what do we want to do individually?

But eventually we are still interested in serving the song.

We have put out a number of singles and music videos, but we've just released our first five song EP called "Mitochondria."

♪ Mitochondria, ♪ In the dark matter.

A lifetime or more, I still recall.

♪ My first memories of singing and being connected to music come directly from my grandmother.

My grandmother was a singer as well.

And when I was younger, about 3 or 4, she would line up all of us cousins, and she would teach us songs that were part of the South Indian Carnatic repertoire, which was very close to the traditions of my family.

As a fun Show and Tell, I've actually brought my very own mitochondria with me tonight, and, that is my mom.

So let's give my mom a round of applause.

Thanks for giving birth to me, mom.

It's been a blast.

I think my mom was always the first to remind me that if you have an artistic spirit, it's a gift.

And it's a gift that's meant to be shared in any way that that feels right to you.

I think a lot of my job is really about being able to tell stories.

I work for an organization called Earthjustice.

They are the largest nonprofit environmental legal advocacy organization in the country.

We are living in the time of climate change.

Climate impacts have been felt by marginalized communities across the country for decades already.

These are Black and Crown communities, low-income communities who are experiencing the effects of climate change first, and the worst.

One of the privileges of my job is getting to interact with these communities, understand their stories, share in their pain, and bring all of that to their members of Congress, who may at times be able to intellectualize the issues of climate change but need help and understanding how to actually make decisions that would change so many people's lives for the better.

So y'all are at the greatest protest in town.

Sometimes life in DC does feel like one big protest.

Everything I've learned about the ethos around ecological justice, I've learned outside of the halls of Congress.

But we just wanted our music to remind people that, we together, connected in this space, are so powerful and collectively we can disrupt what on the surface seems to be impenetrable or permanent.

And it's not.

Permanence is not in the room with us tonight.

There's a sense of decorum and language that's very specific to Congress.

That doesn't seem very natural outside of it.

And as an artist, the most beautiful thing is being completely limitless when it comes to language.

♪ The Earth is allergic to you.

♪ Without me.

So why can't you just let the Earth be?

I originally wrote "Allergic" as a love song.

It was a song about heartbreak.

But the more I got closer to the climate community, the more that song started to take on different meaning to me.

And something that I've learned through the years, just being deeper into environmental movement work, is this idea of reciprocity.

The way that we treat ourselves and each other is directly mirrored in how we treat the Earth.

When it comes to love and heartbreak and relationships, often themes found in pop songwriting, what does it mean to experience those things in relationship to the land and the soil, and to nature?

And what happens when those relationships are broken?

♪ So why can't you just let the earth be?

♪ in dealing with climate anxiety and grief, a lot of that comes from the fact that we're building systems that take us so far away from nature.

What we're told by nature is that we are all interconnected.

We are all part of one big whole, and human beings absolutely fit into that equation.

♪ Mycelium ♪ Quietly bare.

Rooted where cells repair ♪ In understanding mycelium, which are fibers in the soil from fungi that help trees communicate with each other, and how mushrooms and plants and trees are actually part of one larger ecosystem.

We too belong to that.

And that was an inspiration for a song that we wrote where the chorus sings, "I'm all of you, just not any you, you know."

♪ I'm all of you, just not any you, you know.

♪ It's sort of had us thinking about how I don't need to know someone.

I don't need to know their entire story.

I don't even need to love them or like them to understand that we are all part of the same being.

We don't have to look the same or eat the same food or speak the same language.

We are really all parts of each other and that was really in taking inspiration from the wisdom that I found delving deeper into nature.

Deepak Gopinath on the drums, everybody.

My name is Ranjani.

We are Lil Idli.

Thank you again for coming tonight.

♪ We've been ready.

♪