Kae Tempest: The song must be listened to in order to acquire its full charge

"Stories and songs bring us into contact with our best and worst natures, they enable us to locate ourselves in other people’s experience and they increase our compassion. But these things in a vacuum are useless. A story doesn’t cultivate empathy just by virtue of its having been thought up; it must be engaged with to become powerful; the story must be read, the song must be listened to, in order to acquire its full charge" - poet and performer Kae Tempest wrote in the Guardian about their new book 'On Connection', a non-fiction meditation on the power of creative connection.