68 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
THE CRITICS
PODCAST DEPT.
DEEP CUTS
How “Soul Music” gets to the heart of a song.
BY HUAHSU
O
ne of the problems with pod-
casts about music is that they
compete with music. Why lis-
ten to people mulling over a song’s great-
ness when the actual song is just a few
clicks away? Some of the most popular
music podcasts, like “Switched On Pop”
or “Song Exploder,” essentially reverse
engineer a song’s magic, disassembling
it and puzzling over the constituent
parts. Yet professional judgment mat-
ters little when it comes to our own sen-
timental attachments. It’s impossible to
persuade someone that a song that re-
minds him of home, or that got him
through a rough breakup, is derivative
or bad. We don’t all have taste, but we
all have stories.
In the age of the explainer, it’s rare
for a podcast to dwell on the mysteries
of feeling and memory. “Soul Music” is
an exception. The show was launched,
in 2000, by BBC Radio 4, and each ep-
isode braids four or five interviews into
a story about a piece of music, showing
us how it shaped lives. A young girl lis-
tens to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”
and looks up at the stars, wondering if
she’ll ever escape her alcoholic parents.
A choir of L.G.B.T. Catholics, protest-
ing their exclusion from a meeting of
church leaders, perform “We Are Fam-
ily” outside the event, singing a commu-
nity into visibility. One of my favorite
episodes considers Simon & Garfunkel’s
“The Boxer,” a song that I’ve heard hun-
dreds of times but rarely contemplated.
One participant is an actual boxer—Sea-
mus McDonagh, an Irish fighter who
recalls a bout with Evander Holyfield—
but the most moving thread comes from
Leonard Nimoy’s daughter. Nimoy was
the son of Ukrainian immigrants; like
the song’s protagonist, he had to leave
home in search of new fortunes. His
daughter talks about his obsession with
the song, and how it accompanied him
from his early thirties to his deathbed.
Listening to the show can be a
dreamlike experience, and it sometimes
feels as though the voices were in con-
versation with one another. An episode
about the Talking Heads’ “Once in a
Lifetime” revolves around various peo-
ple repeating the lyric “How did I get
here?” The singer-songwriter Angel-
ique Kidjo recalls leaving the dictator-
ship in Benin for Paris, in 1983, and hear-
ing the song at a friend’s house. Its
familiar Afrobeat rhythm moves her to
dance. But there’s something ghostly
about the song, too, and she begins to
feel homesick, seized with “pure sad-
ness.” The music discloses a relation-
ship between her old world and her new
one. Meanwhile, a young man from a
poor family in Wolverhampton remem-
bers how “utterly lost” he and his friends
felt in the eighties, reckoning with life
under Margaret Thatcher. (“How did
we get here?” he wonders of his resigned
generation.) After working a series of
dead-end jobs, he goes back to school,
and his studies somehow take him to
America. The Talking Heads are his
soundtrack as he ventures south, even-
tually settling in Texas, bemused that
he got there at all.
There’s an air of mystery to “Soul
Music.” The show has no host or lead-in
music. Where most podcasts are taut
and quippy, this one is diaristic and slow,
as people search for the right words to
describe the moments of beauty or sor-
row that a song evokes. Occasionally, a
historian or a musicologist offers an ex-
pert’s perspective, but most of the voices
orbit the question of what we use music
for, and how fate delivers it to us. How
often has a friend or a radio station played
you the perfect song at the perfect time?
W
hen “Soul Music” began, it was
primarily an exploration of clas-
sical music, jazz, and hymns. During
the past decade, it has embraced pop
music, and has come to include a
broader cross-section of experiences.
Its small team scours forums, message
boards, and blogs for people’s stories,
looking for surprising resonances. (A
producer, Maggie Ayre, told me that
Googling specific song lyrics is a par-
ticularly effective strategy.) The pro-
cess is incredibly labor-intensive, and
an episode on Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll”
took five years to complete.
A new season débuted in mid-
November. The first episode is on “Ain’t
No Mountain High Enough,” written
by Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford,
and made famous in 1967 by Marvin
Gaye and Tammi Terrell. A man recalls
singing it in a convenience store, and
being joined by an older woman a few
aisles over. They duet their way to the
checkout, where she tells him the story
of how she helped desegregate a nearby
school. In an upcoming episode on U2’s
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Look-
ing For,” an Irishman ref lects on his
rags-to-riches arc, and on confronting
a spiritual deficit in his life. He was driv-
ing late one night when the song came
on the radio, and he began crying un-
controllably. He decided to choose a life ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
