Next week, Hidden City launches its first podcast, “Song of Philadelphia,” a creation of author and filmmaker Julien Suaudeau (listen to the trailer HERE). The concept is straightforward enough: Frenchman moves to Philly and sees and hears what we can not. But telling Philly stories is never straightforward, as Julien discovers, microphone in hand, in search of the intimate, personal Philadelphia. How much remembering and forgetting happens in our city every day? Can you hear the past humming through the present on the streets of Philadelphia?

Each episode centers on Julien’s encounter with a single Philadelphian. As, little by little, he builds a sound mosaic of the city. This fall, Hidden City will produce three episodes of Song of Philadelphia; three more will follow in the spring, with bonus episodes in the summer. We expect this rhythm to continue for years to come. And you will find it on your favorite listening platform (Apple and Spotify) and HERE on a special podcast page.

Please join Hidden City for a Song of Philadelphia launch party at Vox Populi October 16 at 7PM. You can meet Julien and hear from the subjects of the fall’s three episodes.

To introduce the show, which I’m helping to produce, I asked Julien to give us some insight. How did this Parisian become so fascinated by Philadelphia?

Nathaniel Popkin: A Parisian walks down the Ben Franklin Parkway toward City Hall….this is beginning to sound like a bad joke. But really, what did you see when you arrived in Philadelphia in 2006 (the year of Franklin’s 300th birthday)?

Julien Suaudeau: French people are so used to bullying our Belgian neighbors with stereotypical jokes—we couldn’t possibly complain when the joke is on us. The truth is, I had no idea who Ben Franklin was back in 2006. He was hardly more than just a name to me then—and a quote, the liberty vs safety dilemma that came back into style in the aftermath of 9/11. The history of his stay in Paris may be important to Philadelphians and in the US, but it is not something that we learn in French schools. So, when I first arrived here in August 2006, I knew of the “historic” element of Philadelphia, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. What struck me right away in Philly, as someone who had just spent a year in Vancouver, was how real it felt. To me, it was a real city—busy, messy, dirty, smelly, noisy—not a sanitized work/living arrangement.

I sometimes think of that also in terms of place vs space. The surroundings of Vancouver are beautiful—the Rockies in the distance, the Pacific Ocean, the clean air. But I didn’t feel at home there. When I arrived in Philly, something familiar came through right away. Maybe it was that infamous grit, that “Philly thing” that gets overbranded these days. I am generally skeptical when the rough side of citiness or the sadness of the land is romanticized, but I do love a city that misbehaves. Oh, and going back to that summer of 2006, I remember the mugginess, the smell and the thickness of humidity as I drove down Washington Avenue to go get furniture at Ikea. I also remember the first time I spotted the giant silhouette of the SS United States, across the parking lot off Delaware (Columbus) Avenue. I had never seen a ship that big. It was like an uber-metaphor of industrial blight, greatness rusting into oblivion, and a very concrete materialization of the passage of time.

Nathaniel: How has your sense of Philadelphia evolved in 18 years?

Julien: I think you always see and hear more as a newcomer or as an outsider. When you live anywhere long enough, unless your urban awareness is out of the ordinary, you always end up unseeing and unhearing, especially realities and aspects of life that may disrupt the storytelling that fits your interests and needs. That happens in Philly as much as in any city: unseeing unhoused people, overdoses, police brutalities, poverty, gun violence, underfunded public schools. The case of Kensington is extreme, both because of the scope of the crisis and the local policies that were implemented in response to it: how can you convince yourself, as an elected official or a voter, that cordoning off an entire neighborhood with police and/or a military presence is good governance? We can’t just decide that broken doesn’t exist, convince ourselves that we can just snap what bothers us out of existence and make it invisible. A better stance, I think, is to accept that broken is a part of us, and that it doesn’t make us ugly or less special to the rest of the world. This is one of the main lessons I have learned in and from Philadelphia. And, today, I feel like a Philadelphian as much as I am a Parisian. I don’t have to choose between one or the other, I’m fine with being a weird hybrid, and with the fact that I will keep changing, bouncing back and forth between these two poles of my world, sometimes feeling more from here, sometimes more from over there.

Nathaniel: You’ve written four novels in French since coming to Philly—Dawa (2014), Le Français (2015), Ni le feu ni la foudre (2016), and Le sang noir des hommes (2019). Did you think, finally! I’ve arrived in the place where I can write the great French novel? In other words, did you need to get some distance to write?

Julien: No doubt, but only because my first three novels were about contemporary France—the big mess (that’s what dawa means as a slang word, borrowed to Arabic) that we are still in as a postcolonial country that won’t accept itself as such. I had to take a few steps back to see the big picture. It was like looking at a painting: you always need to move to a certain distance and to a certain angle to make sense of it. To find a certain moment, too. It’s all a matter of perspective: I had the idea for Song of Philadelphia as I was walking in Paris one summer, surrounded by very Parisian sounds, and I found myself wondering which aspects of the Philadelphia soundscape I missed the most, or which Philadelphian sounds I would pick to explain my other home to people who have never been here. Home, back home. Which is which, now? Where am I really from? And does it mean anything? That’s when I realized that there is no signature sound of Philadelphia, except for the Philly Sound, of course! There is an infinite supply of city sounds, in Philly as anywhere, because there are so many of us, and we all experience the city in a singular way and build/store our memories according to our individual experiences in the city. This is the polyphony, the stream of consciousness that I am trying to capture in the podcast.

Nathaniel: In what ways does going back to Paris every summer infect your experience of Philadelphia? Or vice versa…What about the City of Brotherly Love do you carry with you to the City of Light? (A more straightforward way to ask: what about Philadelphia do you miss when you’re in Paris….and vice versa)

Julien: I know what I don’t miss: the heat, the humidity, and the need to turn on the AC to make it through the day or to get some sleep. Because of climate change, we do have more and more heat waves in Paris, but it is mostly dry heat, and the absence of AC kind of removes the agency to make things worse for the planet. You just feel miserable and wait it out. The other thing I don’t miss when I am away is the loudness. Jean-Luc Godard used to joke that Americans talk loud because their country is too big and they can’t hear themselves unless they scream. What I do miss is the chorus of voices, the rhythm of them all. Because English is not my native language, when I hear it spoken it always sounds as if it’s coming out of a movie or a music album. I grew up listening to British and American indie bands and watching American cinema. One of my greatest satisfactions as an adult is that I don’t need a translation anymore to read something that was written in English. I guess that’s why, almost twenty years in, I still marvel at the voices of Philadelphia. The personalities, the stories and the memories they carry. I miss that warmth and that energy when I’m somewhere else. French people, especially in Paris, have a much more hushed way of talking to each other. They are also less guarded, I think, when it comes to talking about themselves or what’s on their mind, whatever they’re going through. I love the idea that the podcast is about sitting down with someone and having them open up to share something that is part of themselves—not the most American thing to do, in my experience. The other thing that requires a major adjustment when I go back to Paris in the summer is my perception of time: everything moves more slowly. I don’t think I miss the American rush, the no-nonsense efficiency, the Wawa cup in one hand and the cellphone in the other, but there’s something about the Philadelphian pulse that I carry with me when I go away. It’s like time zones: I always know what time it is in Philly, no matter how far away I am.

Nathaniel: Is it possible to experience two cities at once? How does this work for you?

Julien: And three, four, even! On any given day in Philly, I always find myself in a moment that overlaps with another moment experienced in Paris, or in London, or in Brussels, the other cities where I lived long enough to have this built-in storage device, this archive of experiences that only rise to the conscious level when something happening elsewhere reminds me of the trace they left. The ghosts that live with us are not just people we’ve lost or that we don’t see anymore: they are moments, feelings, emotions. It is very tempting for me to slide down the rabbit hole of those reminiscences, which can take the form of what Baudelaire, who knew a thing or two about walking around the city, called correspondances: I smell this on Italian Market, which triggers the taste of something I ate long ago in the fifth arrondissement, across from a movie theater that was showing a movie I first saw in the West End. I could spend days just contemplating the ways those memories signal to each other. I guess, in a way, Song of Philadelphia is an attempt to find a sound translation to that process and to experience it collectively, with a community of listeners, not by myself. You just have to walk around and find the gateways, the portals.

Nathaniel: I recently read Ni le feu ni la foudre (Not Fire Nor Lightening), told in multiple first person voices as the narrator-characters navigate the present and the past (through personal/place memory). Does this approach inform what you’re hoping to do with Song of Philadelphia?

Julien: Definitely. One can never get enough stream of consciousness in their life. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is one of the rare books I go back to: it’s as if the flow keeps going when you close the book, and yet you are never disoriented (or it’s a pleasant disorientation) when you open it again. Like radio stations in the night: they keep broadcasting airwaves even when almost no one is listening in. I want to record as much of Philadelphia as I can, not to put it in a museum, like an artifact, but to highlight some of the deep-seated rhymes, overlays, matching notes in the infinite tap of experiences and memories that make up the city. Our collective stream of consciousness is woven into the fabric of the city.

Nathaniel: The log line for Song of Philadelphia is: How much remembering and forgetting happens in our city every day? Can you hear the past humming through the present on the streets of Philadelphia? Julien Suaudeau came over from Paris in 2006 and started to hunt for sounds and stories. Now you can listen to his audio archive, Song of Philadelphia, an exclusive podcast from Hidden City. Is part of the premise to elicit from Philadelphians their hidden stories? As if to dig through the individual minds and memories to create a collective experience?

Julien: It depends on the meaning that you assign to eliciting something that’s hidden. If it’s about extracting, probing, investigating even, this is not what I’m doing. I don’t see myself as a journalist reporting a story, or trying to get to the bottom of it. I am more of a listener, an archivist, and a storyteller. I listen to the stories people entrust me with, I record them, and I edit them with sounds that I grab as I go. Those stories are hidden in the sense that they are personal experiences or memories, and that the medium is audio, not visual. On the same token, focussing on sound makes us aware of so many layers of the city and of our lives that we are no longer paying attention to. At the end of the day, Song of Philadelphia will be something like a sound mosaic of the city, a time capsule of what it was like to live here in the 2020s. Just kidding: I have no idea where this will take me. The city and the infinitive number of ways we experience it will show me the path. I also like the idea of a constellation of stories. If one object defines Philly for me, it’s the star bolts that keep so many of our walls straight (sort of). Something about them touches me: they indicate a weakness, but they are also evidence of support, resilience. We’re still here, and we should be proud to be a vulnerable city. A good story, one you can empathize with, is when the storyteller opens their heart to you. Philly is that open book to me.

Nathaniel: How do we hear the past humming through the present?

Julien: There’s this French pastry called mille-feuilles—one thousand layers/sheets. I don’t have the physics skills to go into Einstein’s theory of eternalism—you should read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem if you want to see how it unfolds as a literary experience – but the idea that everything that happens doesn’t stop happening just because our narrow subjectivity can only process a linear timeline is very appealing to me. A city is a juxtaposition of thin places: sites where you can see the past leaking through the present. I guess the official, touristy version of that here is Independence Hall-style horse carriage tours of Society Hill. That’s what the majority of outsiders are drawn to in Philly: the alpha of the nation. We assume that colonial-era buildings and cobblestone streets are the baseline. That was my perception when I first got here, but as time went by I have realized that this is a very narrow, Eurocentric way of looking at history. What did this place look like before it was called Philadelphia, or Pennsylvania? Who was here? Can we explore the past without the sense of ownership that comes with naming things? Memory can be deceitful and self-serving, in that we can warp it to shield ourselves from what was there before what we’ve been taught to remember, or even from the complexity of what really happened. But it’s really the one tool we have to expand our conception of time. The sound of someone trying to remember, to piece out a chain of events or to recall a specific moment—I don’t know of many things that move me more. When that person is sharing their story with you, you are literally listening to a time-travel experience, and they are inviting you on that journey.

Nathaniel: What do you see (hear, experience) in Philadelphia as an immigrant that some of us crusty natives can’t or don’t?

Julien: I’m not sure. The sound that the crust makes when it crumbles?

Nathaniel: What sort of past sounds (or what specific sounds) do you wish you could still hear?

Julien: The song of Philadelphia before the internal combustion engine. The voices of my children when they were three-years old. They didn’t speak much English, but they had such a badass Philly accent.

Nathaniel: There are quite a lot of podcasts where people tell their personal stories. What’s going to make this one stand out?

Julien: The accent, again. No one can speak English like I do.

Nathaniel: This is not the only podcast you’re working on. With the Citizen, you’re producing People Left Behind, which tells stories of survivors and co-victims of gun violence in Philly. How do these two shows relate?

Julien: Both are 100 percent Philly-made and Philly-centered. This is me trying to contribute to my community, to make it a better place, and also trying to fit in. I do so by telling stories, because this is my trade. So much in the world is broken, damaged, or a source of pain and suffering. Stories don’t fix anything, but they provide a structure – they help us make sense of stuff that can often feel meaningless. And they give agency to the people telling them. It brings me great joy to be the go-between, the one to share what they have to say or what’s on their mind with the world.

Nathaniel: You also head up the film dept at Bryn Mawr. I’ve heard that French people know something about the cinema…what role did movies play in your understanding of Philly?

Julien: I was obsessed (this is not a figure of speech) with Trading Places when I was a child. I knew the dialogues by heart and can still deliver them—in the French dubbed version. Later, it was Blow Out, Mikey and Nicky. I went back in time as I got older. And now, I teach at a college where Katherine Hepburn is an alum—she was admitted in 1924, one hundred years ago. Because The Philadelphia Story is really The Main Line Story (on a Hollywood soundstage), I feel compelled to set the record straight and tell the Philly Philly story—show the world the dark side of the moon, if you will. But there’s more to my lifetime attraction to Philadelphia than the movies. The Philly Sound, The Roots. Charles Barkley… You should have seen me as a six-foot, fourteen-year-old power forward on the basketball courts in Paris.

Nathaniel: Let’s say I’d like to tell my story on Song of Philadelphia. How do I get in touch?

Julien: Just holler. Eventually, I will hear you. Here’s an email address to reach out if you don’t have the patience to wait: songofphiladelphia@hiddencityphila.org. And tell your friends and neighbors that I’m looking forward to hearing from them, too.