The following tracks are posted here courtesy of Pardis Sabeti.
"Coming Up"
Sabeti wrote this song at Oxford, while working on her doctoral dissertation (an analysis of natural selection as seen in resistance to malaria in African populations). She would work in the lab every day for 14 to 16 hours, then come home and pick up her guitar to relax. One day, she says, “out popped the song.”
"Absence"
This song expresses the angst Sabeti felt over having to choose between a career in medicine and a career as a research scientist. “It was about not knowing what you want to do in life, and so staying on the fence forever, and essentially losing in the waiting,” she says. Although Sabeti now works as a research scientist at the Center for Systems Biology, she earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2006 (and in fact was the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude). She considers her medical training essential to her research work, adding a focus on the whole organism to the focus on individual genes and molecules.
"Days Go By"
This song is based on the story of the MIT Blackjack Team, as told in the book Bringing Down the House. Sabeti, who earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from MIT in 1997, knew some of the book’s main characters.
"Headlight Waves"
The concept for this song came to Sabeti “as an image,” she says. She describes the scene: “A bunch of people are sitting around a table in an old diner, chewing on chicken, eating in a very greedy, ravenous way, and looking angry and hateful. Then a headlight shining through the window casts a beautiful light on the scene, transforming everyone to reveal great kindness and warmth.” The idea, she says, “is that there is so much darkness in the world, with corruption, violence, selfishness, but every once in a while you see something beautiful and kind that shines through.”
