How to Listen to Music

Will Sheff writes:

In my late 20s, I started noticing that I didn’t listen to music in the way I used to. Specifically, nothing about music felt satisfying to me anymore. Like all my friends, I’d gotten an iPod and ripped most of my CDs into it, so now every album I’d ever owned was suddenly sitting in my pocket, ready to be called up at any time, but I didn’t feel like listening to any of it. I could shuffle my way through every song that had ever moved me, but somehow once it came on all I wanted to do was skip to the next random song in the order. That song wouldn’t satisfy me either, so my finger would hit that “skip” button again, almost as an impulse....

So that’s where I started, with my memories of putting on a record (or, later, a cassette) as a kid and then sitting back on my bed and listening to the whole thing — and then playing it again, and again, until I had integrated it into who I was. I decided the first step in creating a system that replicated this effect on an iPod (because I didn’t have a place to live at the time, my iPod was my only way of listening to music) would be to listen to whole albums, in order to immerse myself in a musical world and not lose concentration. Secondly, I noticed that my relationship to an album changed with repeated listens; sometimes an album I thought I hated on listen one became a new musical obsession by listen three, while at other times an album that impressed the hell out of me on listen one gradually revealed itself, after repetition, to be trite or cloying, dazzling me with easy tricks but lacking in actual substance. I started creating playlists — each containing three albums plus miscellaneous songs I’d picked up here and there — and listening to them three times in a row. These playlists were all I’d allow myself to listen to unless I was with other people, and I treated them like homework; usually the albums would be related to music I was working on at the time. I would take care always to work in a mixture of music by new bands and older music that was new to me, and I would actively seek out genres of music with which I previously hadn’t been familiar.