The Anti-Explainer Insight of “Soul Music”

One of the problems with podcasts about music is that they compete with music. Why listen to people mulling over a song’s greatness 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 matters little when it comes to our own sentimental attachments. It’s impossible to persuade someone that a song that reminds 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 episode braids four or five interviews into a story about a piece of music, showing us how it shaped lives. A young girl listens 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, protesting their exclusion from a meeting of church leaders, perform “We Are Family” outside the event, singing a community into visibility. One of my favorite episodes considers Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” a song that I’ve heard hundreds of times but rarely contemplated. One participant is an actual boxer—Seamus 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 conversation with one another. An episode about the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” revolves around various people repeating the lyric “How did I get here?” The singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo recalls leaving the dictatorship in Benin for Paris, in 1983, and hearing 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 sadness.” The music discloses a relationship between her old world and her new one. Meanwhile, a young man from a poor family in Wolverhampton remembers 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, eventually 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 sorrow that a song evokes. Occasionally, a historian or a musicologist offers an expert’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?

When “Soul Music” began, it was primarily an exploration of classical 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 particularly effective strategy.) The process 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 Looking For,” an Irishman reflects on his rags-to-riches arc, and on confronting a spiritual deficit in his life. He was driving late one night when the song came on the radio, and he began crying uncontrollably. He decided to choose a life 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 trying 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 recorded by the singer and guitarist Tim Buckley in 1969. A man named Anthony Famiglietti tells us about being a “misguided” teen-ager, and about discovering new music with his best friend, whose father was an avid amateur runner. 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 speaking 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 conversation, 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 imagining like Famiglietti’s. What he describes is impossible, yet it feels like a truth around which he has organized his life.

If there’s a limitation to “Soul Music,” it’s that it embodies a kind of generational sensibility. The songs skew toward a middle-aged audience, with a preference for baby-boomer “classics” like “God Only Knows” or Procol Harum’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 befriended the band, in their early club days, and missed out on the chance to collaborate with them. The episode suggests 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 morning after the 2008 election; Jimi Hendrix’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 playlists or algorithms, with less opportunity for randomness and chance. On “Soul Music,” several memorable episodes involve soldiers obsessing over finding a new piece of music; the motif reveals how precious, how formative encountering 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 foundations 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 discover 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 friendship or devotion. A melody you can’t stop humming suggests a mood that you want to live in forever. ♦