"Music,” writes Ben Ratliff in Run the Song, “appears not to serve a measurable vital function, like air, water, light, food or love.” But “if it is less than those,” he continues, “it is also more. Music connects people and makes them understand the limits of connection. It is a medium of communication, but more importantly one of play. Music involves pattern recognition and becomes helpful in... delineating a self.” That malleable self is social by nature, and music—whether heard in a club or absorbed through headphones on a run—can be key to finding our form. “It merges you and keeps you separate.”

Ben should know. He was for many years a critic at The New York Times, where he served as our intrepid guide to what was happening in music across the city and beyond: readers relied on his discernment and prose when it came to knowing what sounds and artists to absorb or abjure in contemporary music. Since he left the yeoman grind of filing weekly reviews, Ben has stretched out in ever-edifying ways—he’s written sterling books on John Coltrane’s sound (Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, 2008); the dilemmas and boons of listening in our age of digital plenty (Every Song Ever, 2017); and now Run the Song, a new kind of opus on how music can shape our movements and selves.

Longlisted for a National Book Award, Run the Song is a book, as its subtitle says, about “writing about running about listening.” Like all the best works of criticism and of art, it’s also an essay that defies categorization. It was a joy to talk with Ben at Pioneer Works this summer about jogging in Van Cortlandt Park, Sade, and the magical mid-sections of songs that don’t end.

Ben Ratliff and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro at Pioneer Works, 2025.

I wonder if you could just tell us about how and why you came to make running a part of your daily habitus, and how the book came to be.

I've never really thought of myself as an athlete. I was a swimmer in high school. As I got older, I started to get pains in my shoulders and arms and stuff, and they weren't going away. So I felt like I needed to try something else, but I was very reluctant to turn to running. Because all I could remember of having done it before was that I hated it.

But then I tried running a couple of times, and then a few more, and I started to think about how different I was from when I was 17. Maybe it's true what they say about every cell in the body getting replaced. Running felt like it solved every problem that I could conceivably have, mental or physical. It might intensify them briefly, but then it would help make them scatter. So it became my thing, and had been my thing for about 10 years when the pandemic began.

2020 was a moment when we all started to get more deeply into our own things, and time became strange and stretchy. So I was running a lot more and running in the middle of the street and trying new things. I hadn't really thought much about running with music. Up to that point, I was really using music as a means to an end.

Or literally as your job.

Sometimes as my job, but again, as a means to an end. This was in the time of my life when I was no longer a music critic for a daily paper. I could do as I pleased, and so I'd go out for longer runs. I think there was something too about the loneliness and the strange privations of that time that made a lot of us have different realizations. And this one for me was, "I can listen to music for the music as I'm running, and it's possible that I can actually hear it better.” Because that's what was happening. I would get home from one of these long hypnotic sessions. And I would think, "Jesus, something's happening. I think I'm listening better."

For somebody who has been wanting to listen well for a long time and was sort of doing it professionally, I was like, "I have to look into this." And I figured the only thing to do was start writing about it. My first thought was that it had to do with motion. The body's in motion, and so I'm more able to get in tune with the motion that is intrinsic to the music. And maybe that is what I find most interesting in the first place—not the genre of a song, or how it starts and ends, but the real innards of it. I felt that I could access that better as a runner. Weird stuff, but true.

And I was also searching for a slightly different way to write about music, having done it for a long time. Describing my body moving through a physical space, while talking about how the music itself assumes and implies a physical space—I could let these two sensibilities somehow bleed into each other. Something was happening, and I just trusted it and went forward.

You write so eloquently in this book about beginnings and endings and the importance of middles. You describe how you can somehow feel that you are in the midst of a piece of music, and how you access this transcendence or presence. You worked for many years as a critic, and that vocation often becomes about signposting—about giving people a way to categorize or contextualize what they’re hearing. And one motif in this book is the questions it raises about criticism as a vocation, as a way to experience art or spend your life.

Absolutely. If you're writing about music for a very long time, you start to doubt the idea that this stuff can be defined by its outer edges. Or by easy signifiers like genres.

You start to think, "The truth of it is in the middle." And when you think about the middle, you start to think about eternity or endlessness or ongoingness. Doing this exercise made me think a lot about how beginnings and ends are just there because they have to be. The truth about music is that all of it could potentially go on forever. Not only that—and forgive me if I'm getting too far out here—but it's possible that most music already exists. What we are doing as musicians and listeners is just diving into the slipstream and identifying it and then leaving.

You write about how whenever we listen to a piece of music, we're creating a new sense of meaning or experience of that music—whether you’re running through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, as you often do, or sitting in a studio. There’s a beautiful quote in the book from Italo Calvino about how the quality of great literature is that we read it and feel like we've read it before—it's showing us something that was already there. You write about how your experiences of running and listening allowed you to tap into that transcendent, ongoing state. I should emphasize here that the book really runs the gamut—you listen to jazz and classical, hardcore and hip-hop, experimental stuff and dance music. “Machine Gun” and Beethoven. There's Theo Parrish's Endless Sets on NTS. You listen to all kinds of music while running.

Yes, and that became part of the practice too. It was often interesting, it felt better, if I didn't have a sense of what was coming in three and a half minutes. That way the song could open itself up to me as the road also opened itself to me.

For instance, you write about Alice Coltrane, and about how listening to her while running allowed her work to resonate for you in ways it hadn’t before. Running, in a sense, opened you up to this artist you admired, and whose music posed interesting questions, but which hadn’t inspired in you the same kind of love that, say, John Coltrane had.

Right. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t 100% wrong before, or that one needs to run to appreciate Alice Coltrane. But in various cases, running allowed me to understand something in a completely new way. And for a critic of any kind that's an enormous gift, because you do get stuck in your own set of presumptions. That's death, really. That's the kind of thing that makes you think you need to quit and get out of the way because your machine is just getting too old.

You write at one point, "After a while, the only thing that many writers wish for is the ability to change their own perception."

And as critics, we're taught to try to offer clarity or context, say, "Here are ways to understand this and where it comes from and what it does." And of course we value critics who do that well, and it's important to how we experience art. But you describe what it can be like as a critic to stop experiencing the magic and to feel hemmed by the signposts we’re given. You talk, for example, about John Berger and his amazing essay, “The Field,” wherein he writes about the cost of being a good critic—about the exhaustion he feels "at the professional practice of 'criticism,' and the social construction of 'art.'" Berger’s as good as it gets in that realm, but he still felt like there was something that he couldn’t tap into or address, in the art he most cared about, from the vantage of his vocation.

That's an amazing essay. This is a book that sort of wanders, and I did that intentionally because I felt that it was the way that I run. I prefer to figure out my route as I'm running it. And I prefer to have the freedom to change impulsively both the direction I'm going in and how long I want to go for.

Your book is also about serendipity and openness. You're writing about the ways in which music or curiosity or motion creates its own tempo. The biomechanics are not the point—you have had exultant experiences running to all kinds of music.

Right. The only writing I could find that was about both running and listening was a very small set of scientific kinesiology studies, about the beats-per-minute rate that allows for optimal running performance. I'm not interested in that. So I knew what the book wasn't—but as a result, I had to go hard the other way. I had to write about running to very slow music. I had to write, say, about this shakuhachi player I found who made a record that's extremely still. Can you run to that? And if so, why? That record was almost unnervingly gentle—but it was also violently alive. It was about breathing. About the ends of breath, the ends of the body. And I had to write, too, about running to Sade.

You talk about “Sade tempo”—about 85 BPM. And of all of us, of a certain age anyway, know that tempo—we have Sade in our minds and bodies.

I find Sade amazing because she isn’t virtuosic—and she’s keeping something for herself at all times. She's not putting it all on the plate at once. And that's part of the reason that one might feel her music could go on forever. Because her restraint is feeding the forward motion of it. I'm sworn to the notion that tempo doesn't matter, but I do like that tempo.

Yes. That restraint is part of what we respond to.

And it doesn't really matter what's coming in that song. It's not necessarily a song that you can graph out and say, "This point is the high point, and this is the pressure point." It's all one long pressure point or none of it is. It doesn't matter.

I like to think about how when I'm running, I'm in the past, present, and future simultaneously. I think that music works along the same lines. Another connection between running and time and music is the word “track.” That word applies to bounded songs on a record. It also applies to running. Sometimes you run on a track, but a track could also be proof of the past. The track could be your footsteps in the snow, or what lies ahead of you. The track is simultaneously the past and the present and the future.

Indeed. You also reflect here on listening as a kind of ethic. You write about how "listening at best may begin with desire, but transforms into something more like intention." It barely has goals. Goals are static, abstract, and removed from action, while listening is present and ongoing, part of one's perception and proprioception. And when music becomes oppressive, I take the earphones out. But the point here is that listening isn’t goal-driven.

Or need not be, anyway. That was the realization I had in writing this book. That I could listen to music without needing something definite from it. I could let it talk to me—and I could talk to it. I really do think that as music changes us, we change music. There's a thought like that expressed somewhere in the book, and a copy editor queried it: "I'm not sure I understand what you mean." So we had some back and forth about that. It's hard to verify that we can change music. But as a critic and historian of music, I'm sure of it.

One thing I want to talk to you about is the simple but complicated act of listening to music through headphones. When the Walkman came out in 1980, people got into the pleasure of having music piped into our ears. Many of us now walk around with ear-buds. You describe talking with your students at NYU how they wear headphones in the city as a matter of course. Sometimes without music playing. Just as a way to signal, "I'm not open to your harassment," or, "I'm in my own space, and this is how I go through the city." You yourself, though, very rarely listen to music while walking.

Yeah, almost never.

But when running, you do. You say there's no such thing as “earphones music,” but that we may relate to music in different ways when we listen through these contraptions.

A friend of mine read my section about earphones and said, "Uh, no, actually, I think there is earphone music. It’s the Duran Duran mid-’80s sound of gated drums.” That music was very well-suited to Walkman headphones because somebody could pass by you and know what you were listening to. They'd hear the enormous drum sounds bleeding out.

Ha, right. But otherwise headphones make you alone in public.

I don't love headphones per se, but I do love that we can use them to move with music.

Speaking of moving to music, I wonder if you could speak a little about how running to music compares with dancing to it.

Well, when you're running, you're hurling yourself forward. You're always at risk of falling over, and the only thing that keeps you from falling over is swinging your other foot forward to catch yourself. And you're actually moving from place A to place B. I call that forward, and I tend to think about music as moving forward, too. But running is just different from dancing. As I was writing the book, the phrase that came to mind was: “It seems to me that dancing aspires to be music, but music aspires to be running.” But I like dancing—it’s a great way to react around music.

It's a bodily way of listening. What I take from your writing is that running lets you cognitively access something you can’t access otherwise.

Yes, and running is also about the place you're moving through, as is music. In the case of Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East, and “Machine Gun”—obviously that record implies that room. But I'm talking about space in another sense too. Sound is physical. Music spreads out around you, and implies a place.

I'm a geographer, so I'm always down for this. A sense of place is everything, right?

Much of the music in this book shares that magical power, which is extremely difficult to write about. But it’s also about place in a more literal way—about Van Cortlandt Park, and the Bronx, where you live. There are many Bronx musicians here—Ella Fitzgerald, DMX, Thelonious Monk. The Bronx has been as generative as any place on Earth in birthing musical styles and genres, from salsa to hip-hop and beyond. Arsenio Rodríguez, one of the greats of Cuban music, made it to the Bronx and recorded “La Gente del Bronx” there.

That song is a sort of thank you to the people of the Bronx who Arsenio encountered. He was a genius who, by the ’60s, was playing old man music in his neighborhood, Morrisania. Which is sort of central South Bronx. Monk also spent long periods of time there. It's not that far from where I live. These are two of my most favorite musicians in the world. And in strange ways, they are analogous to one another. They played different kinds of music, and they never shared a stage, and they may never have heard one another's music. They probably never met, but they were at their best at exactly the same time and in exactly the same place. It made me think a lot about issues of proximity in New York, where you are smooshed together against other people constantly, and yet you may never know them.

In the way that a kid fantasizes about his divorced parents reuniting, I so much want Monk and Arsenio to be friends. And so I ran between the places they lived in the Bronx to make the connection on a bodily level.

You say that listening to a song can create a new version of you—and, too, that you're creating a new version of the song in your experience via practice, repetition, connecting dots. Music becomes a part of you—and you become music. As you write here, “music merges you and keeps you separate.” It can be key to finding who you are, and who your people are. But you also write about running as this way of being solo in public.

Yeah. Madonna said "Music makes the people come together," but I know a lot of people who define themselves by not listening to certain kinds of music. Which is powerful, too.

Listening is power. But you write quite a bit about the metaphors we use to describe listening and how many of them are visual. Can you explain what's up with Ear Goggles?

That's the name of that beautiful Theo Parrish DJ set on the NTS website. But I didn't realize until later, after running with it, that the voice is from a Jimi Hendrix rehearsal where he’s messing around in the studio and at one point says into the microphone: "I need to put my ear goggles on." Meaning, my headphones.

Amazing.

You might not hear that in the Parrish set unless you're listening really closely. But it's a term that points back to that weird fact that we have lots of words for sight and far fewer words for hearing.

And music is notoriously difficult to write about. But you have written about it gorgeously for many years. And you’ve helped us, with this beautiful book that’s like a new pair of ear goggles, think about new ways to hear and what can happen when we do. ♦

This conversation took place on June 8th, 2025, during the Second Sundays Broadcast Radio Hour.