70 THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 13, 2021
of faith. When he was ordained as a
minister, he played U2 over the P.A., as
a wink to his circuitous journey.
In isolation, these stories might feel
trite, or a little maudlin. But the show’s
brilliance lies in the power of people try-
ing to explain the flood of memories that
a song triggers, and in the realization
that this is always happening, everywhere.
We bend songs to fit our circumstances
and needs; sometimes intention ceases
to matter. A ballad about heartache can
remind you of a long-lost friend, and a
song about God can become fuel to get
through a humdrum day.
An especially moving episode takes
on “Song to the Siren,” originally re-
corded by the singer and guitarist Tim
Buckley in 1969. A man named An-
thony Famiglietti tells us about being a
“misguided” teen-ager, and about dis-
covering new music with his best friend,
whose father was an avid amateur run-
ner. After his friend died, when they
were twenty-one, Famiglietti began to
see life differently, devoting himself to
running and eventually becoming an
Olympian. Throughout this journey, he
would listen to “Song to the Siren”—
the John Frusciante version, introduced
to him by his friend—during warmups.
“I heard in that song my friend speak-
ing to his father, and I heard in that
song my friend’s father calling to his
son from this vast distance,” Famiglietti
says. But he also senses another conver-
sation, between Buckley, who died in
1975, and his son, Jeff, who died in 1997.
“I hear it written for Jeff Buckley,
through Tim. And when I listen to Jeff
Buckley’s songs, I hear him calling to
his father through his music, and there’s
this dialogue across time.”
The show’s best moments involve
wondrous feats of listening and imagin-
ing like Famiglietti’s. What he describes
is impossible, yet it feels like a truth
around which he has organized his life.
I
f there’s a limitation to “Soul Music,”
it’s that it embodies a kind of gener-
ational sensibility. The songs skew to-
ward a middle-aged audience, with a
preference for baby-boomer “classics”
like “God Only Knows” or Procol Ha-
rum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The
most recent song to be discussed is Amy
Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” from 2006.
This season includes Massive Attack’s
1991 hit “Unfinished Sympathy,” with
an affecting story of someone who be-
friended the band, in their early club
days, and missed out on the chance to
collaborate with them. The episode sug-
gests a welcome move toward genres
like hip-hop and dance.
Yet the songs themselves often feel
secondary. “Soul Music” rarely compels
me to revisit the tracks it features. “The
Star-Spangled Banner” could never move
me as much as the memories shared in a
2016 episode: an American living in rural
France, hearing it on the radio the morn-
ing after the 2008 election; Jimi Hen-
drix’s brother, a serviceman in Vietnam,
hearing news of the famous Woodstock
performance decades earlier. The show
is about epiphanies, not nostalgia. What
you’re left with is a yearning for your own
discoveries, set to your own songs.
In this way, the show couldn’t seem
more at odds with how music functions
in our lives today. In the streaming era,
songs are a constant background thrum,
and discovery is mediated through play-
lists or algorithms, with less opportu-
nity for randomness and chance. On
“Soul Music,” several memorable epi-
sodes involve soldiers obsessing over
finding a new piece of music; the motif
reveals how precious, how formative en-
countering a song could be. These days,
we’re relentlessly encountering music,
to an exhausting degree. And, more often
than not, we’re doing it by ourselves.
What music once was—an excuse to
gather, to share, to transform together—
can seem a quaint notion.
But these life-altering moments are
always at hand, so long as we choose to
notice them. Songs can often feel like
a shelter from the world, a few minutes
lifted free from the tendrils of history
until, over time, they become founda-
tions for our own lives. “Soul Music” is
less interested in telling us how to hear
a song than it is in encouraging us to
listen. This may sound mawkish—but
how much of our inner life is first learned
through music? It’s how many of us dis-
cover the largeness of the world and our
place within it, the meaning of love or
loyalty, the poetic depths of despair.
What begins as a catchy lyric evolves
into an entirely new grammar of friend-
ship or devotion. A melody you can’t
stop humming suggests a mood that
you want to live in forever.
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