A Rare Breed of Listener | Ben Ratliff’s Run the Song
Reviews
By Sam Hockley-Smith
We called the office “the fishbowl.” It was long and narrow, and had windows to the outside world on one side and windows looking directly into a concrete-gray office hallway on the other, which meant that no matter what side of the room you were sitting on, you were visible. We kept a whiteboard on one wall where we wrote down writing crutches—words or phrases we overused, usually tropes or cliches we’d employ when we weren’t yet sure what we actually wanted to say and didn’t have the time to take to figure it out. This happened fairly often, because we were writing about music on the internet and we had a mandate to publish a post just about every thirty minutes, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
We were often writing about songs or artists who were so new that there simply wasn’t much background information to go on, so we were instead compelled to riff. Usually this riffing would manifest in writing about the weather. How a song was perfect for a sweltering day at the beach, or a cozy evening in, or a paranoid, sleepless night after or during a hurricane. Whatever was happening out there felt at least more concrete than dragging nebulous, unverified information from the internet to accompany a brief meditation on why a song was good or great or maybe even just interesting. It was a too-easy solution to a bigger problem. If we were often half-explaining songs by transmuting the power of their art to what was basically a soundtrack to a lifestyle, what happened if, in the process, we missed the point? What would happen after we’d treated music like an accessory too many times? When listening to music becomes peripheral—which is what we were unwittingly encouraging when we were leaning on the weather—then it exists only on the perimeter of life, subtly changing our moods and emotions without ever really getting in the way. Sometimes you have to let it get in the way.
It was in 2007—after we’d all sort of become hybrid writers/content miners, producing assembly-line writing that was sometimes bad, sometimes passable, and sometimes—when we were able to hit the right combination of frantic desperation and insight—really fun to read: that LCD Soundsystem released 45:33, an original composition of music that could be broken up into individual tracks designed to not just soundtrack a run, but control the run. When the music sped up, you were supposed to speed up too. If it was slow and plodding, well . . . it was time to plod slowly. I took the mix out with me on a run the second I got my hands on it. I hated the experience. The music was (still is) pretty good, but its quality is beside the point. 45:33 was marketed as a tool. I was using this music, not listening to this music. I found that when I ran, I wanted my body and mind to dictate how I did it. Who was James Murphy to tell me when I was supposed to be running faster?
In his new book, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (Graywolf, 2025), the critic Ben Ratliff examines how music and running are intertwined, how they become inextricable from each other, and how his relationship to not just listening to music, but analyzing it and writing about it, can change if he’s listening and thinking while he’s running. Across thirty-nine short essays, Ratliff—who was a critic at the New York Times for twenty years—draws on his considerable musical knowledge to write incisive pieces with a confidence and directness that you rarely see in music writing. In short, he knows what he’s talking about, and he knows how to write about music in a way that feels like he’s meeting it head-on.
His observations tend to lean toward poetic descriptions of music—mostly jazz, though he covers quite a wide swath of genres—anchored by a firm understanding of how music works. Early on, he writes about how musical arrangements tend to “assume a place”; in this case he’s not talking about a literal location, but a sort of semi-abstract interpretational void—a plane on which music happens, but so does silence, all contained within the parameters of a song: “The singer Jim Legxacy’s place is tight and sharply defined, but with misty, blurry contents. The composer Laurel Halo’s is open, but with divots and irregularities. The saxophonist Eric Dolphy’s is eccentrically gridded and magically coordinated.” If you are familiar with the work of any of these artists, you may realize that Ratliff’s interpretations feel uncannily accurate, despite the nebulousness of describing music (abstract, invisible) as having “divots” (physical, visible).
Because Ratliff’s writing is so rooted in understanding how music works, his poetic observations feel earned and grounded. All this is great on its own, but the core power of the book lies in Ratliff’s conceit: he is well-aware that music is, more often than not, viewed as an accessory, a utility, something to absorb while doing something else entirely. Giving music your full attention is antithetical to the moment we’re in. This is a huge problem, and it’s a huge problem because we seem to be very, very far away from a solution. How can music in a nonperformative setting reclaim a populace’s full attention? Ratliff doesn’t attempt to solve this unsolvable problem—and he shouldn’t. Instead, he examines what happens to his ears and brain and heart when he listens to music while doing something else—in this case, running—but submits fully to the music’s emotional control. To trust it. To allow its parameters, its dips and dives and swoops to shape his run, instead of vice versa. On its own, this would be a fascinating book: How do we listen when we’re moving? How does this change our brain chemistry? How does music propel us further or make us hit a wall, and further, is it actually doing any of those things or is it all psychosomatic? But Ratliff’s got more to discuss than just music and running. Run the Song is a mixtape, a recommendation engine, and a discussion of how music can mutate over time.
It’s also a pandemic book. Ratliff doesn’t really announce this fact; he just lets it subtly and immediately creep into his narrative, infecting his prose with disheveled, ominous doom, echoing the way that the rules for living were upended every day in those early months of 2020 and beyond. At various points Ratliff, on his regular runs, wants to—needs to—run through a park, but due to the looming construction of a FEMA site for sickbeds, he can only skirt its perimeter. He is constantly having to reevaluate concrete truths, remake routes and routines, try something new, or turn on a dime when he is met with the reality of the current situation. All this comes together as a sort of recognition of trust—when you’re running, you have to trust your body; when you’re listening, you have to trust that the music is taking you somewhere. If trust in either of these things is punctured, then it gets existential really quick: If you can’t trust that the music you’re listening to will get where it’s going, why keep listening at all? If you can’t trust your body to keep going, or to firmly tell you when it’s time to stop, then why even start?
At one point, Ratliff looks to the pianist and composer Mal Waldron for answers that can inform these kinds of big questions. “[Waldron] simply keeps working on his own rough and bumpy analysis, with no obvious payoff in sight, by which I mean in anticipated hearing. He does this again and again until his playing becomes, without announcing itself as such, a philosophy of perseverance. He shows up and keeps at it.” Then a bit later, he pulls a Waldron quote from a conversation with the radio interviewer Ted Panken: “I’m a rounded person. So whatever I hear, I know I can play, I know I can reach. In other words, if my technique isn’t enough to cover it, then the idea doesn’t come in my mind in the first place.” Ratliff breaks from the quote:
“What did he say?
“‘A rounded person.’
“Say again?
“‘A rounded person.’
“I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, except possibly that he knew the dimensions of his rounded field. His perseverance and the strangeness of his repetitions and the realistic scale of his desire—not his virtuosity, because he didn’t have any—suggested a future. Without having an exalted goal, he could keep doing the thing: that was enough.”
This is a striking idea, that our limitations are self-imposed not out of a lack of confidence, but an honest assessment of what we’re capable of, followed by an understanding that there’s plenty to accomplish within those parameters. It feels almost zen—or as close to zen as one can be when they’re talking about their creative limitations. More than anything, it opens up an avenue for quiet improvement that feels like a reflection of the gradual mastery of running. One day you can run for only five minutes straight, then suddenly you can do ten. Eventually you’re running marathons.
Much later in the book, Ratliff considers the rapper Ice Spice and focuses specifically on her breath control, writing that “she’s not counting her rhythms, not saving up big gulps or exhalations for the allotted spaces. She keeps a reserve of air in her chest and only lets a tiny bit out. One imagines her upright with her shoulders back, holding herself lightly but alertly.” It’s easy to see how this can be reflected in the physical world, his run echoing, shadowing, following the lead of the gulps for air he’s not hearing Ice Spice make.
Ratliff is as exceptional at writing about the innards of a song as he is writing about the process of practice, and it’s those parallels that most firmly unite the conceit of the book while reminding us of the nobility of doing something just to do it. Ratliff is an increasingly rare breed of listener who values discovery over familiarity. Which is not to say he spends the book desperately seeking new music at the cost of all else, just that he lets his ears stay open, finding new ways into familiar material, aided by the calm, clear mental state that comes from the quieting of a mind during a long, steady run, unconstrained by any personal achievement goals, other than just doing it.
I’m reminded here of the writer Harry Mathews, whose daily writing experiments were collected in the book 20 Lines a Day. Mathews took the Stendhal directive “Twenty lines a day, genius or not” and applied a deliberate misunderstanding to it—instead of writing twenty lines a day in order to slowly and deliberately finish a book, the twenty lines were the point. Mathews wrote his twenty lines each day as a way of getting around the mental despair of staring at a blank page, of moving past ego toward a subconscious way of writing. In his first entry, he transitions from the wonders of the animal world to a brief meditation on the impending death of his close friend, the writer Georges Perec, before ending it like this: “When I was fifteen, I felt the southern sun and sea like a warm, soothing grace in which to let every kind of worry go. As for the ‘twenty lines a day, genius or not’: just do them.”
Imagine that! Mathews is engaging with the mundane—in this case, the weather—as a way of tapping into a more streamlined self. A self that can have fears assuaged by the sun. A self that can actualize change through movement. An innocent self on the cusp of some greater realization that will come if he keeps writing through the moments of nothing toward something great. Ratliff, it turns out, is not just an exceptional music writer, he’s also managed to capture life and listening and the creative pursuit, and the thing these all have in common: to succeed, you must, at all costs, just keep going.
Sam Hockley-Smith is a writer, editor, and radio host based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the FADER, Pitchfork, NPR, SSENSE, Bandcamp, Vulture, and more. His radio show, New Environments, airs monthly on Dublab. He spends his spare time reading.
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