BEN RATLIFF discusses his book EVERY SONG EVER with ALEX ROSS

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

​Since 1996 Ben Ratliff has been writing about music with passion and insight for The New York Times. Over the course of two decades he has been expanding his readers’ horizons and turning them on to new sounds. At the same time, the past 20 years have brought an utterly transformative revolution in the distribution and consumption of those sounds. In 1996—three years before Napster, five years before the first iPod—listeners were largely constrained in what they could hear by their geographical, financial, and historical situations. For many of us today, those constraints have largely disappeared. It has never been so easy to hear so much for so little. Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is Ben Ratliff’s bracing, impassioned response to this unprecedented situation. It is a music appreciation guide for the cloud era.

As Ratliff sees things, there are both negative and positive aspects to the current landscape. Services like Spotify and Pandora can monitor our listening practices, feeding us back more of what we already know we like. At their worst, these services encourage musical comfort-listening, a surrender of agency to algorithms. On the flipside, we’re living in an age of unprecedented access, rendering old categories and hierarchies of taste obsolete. As Ratliff asserts, a huge wealth of music is out there for all of us to experience—all we need to do is listen better than the algorithms are listening to us.

And so, in a series of beautifully composed and originally conceived chapters, Ratliff gives us a refreshingly new framework for engaging with music—one that largely ignores genre categorizations or a composer’s intent and instead places the listener at center stage. Ratliff focuses on various qualities of music that we can listen for, exploring aural attributes like repetition or speed, as well as more subjective emotions and ideas such as sadness or “the perfect moment.” Along the way, Ratliff touches on a dizzying array of music, drawing surprising connections from João Gilberto and Frank Sinatra to Aaliyah and Erik Satie (and that’s just one chapter).

Ratliff has a lot of smart things to say about the changes of the past 20 years, and there is no doubt Every Song Ever will spur debate about our relationship to music, and its role as both culture and commodity. But at its heart, this book is a celebration—of the possibilities for pleasure within music, of the diversity of recorded sound, and of the act of listening at a time when listeners have never had it so good.

Praise for Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“In this insightful guide to contemporary music appreciation, genre limitations are off the table . . . Ratliff’s scholarship shines; there’s a lot to be said for a book on music appreciation that can draw apt parallels between DJ Screw and Bernstein’s rendition of Mahler’s ninth symphony.”—Publishers Weekly

“It’s fascinating how Ratliff can bring a fresh ear to such familiar music . . . and how inviting he makes some little-known music sound . . . [Every Song Ever] makes unlikely connections that will encourage music fans to listen beyond categorical distinctions and comfort zones.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Every Song Ever jumps into the grand adventure of losing yourself in music, at a time when the technology boundaries have blown wide open. Ratliff brilliantly makes connections between the arcane and the everyday, pointing to sounds you’ve never heard—as well as finding new pleasures in music you thought you’d already used up.” —Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape and Turn Around Bright Eyes

“Everyone knows we live in an age when most people can listen to anything, anytime, anywhere. Whether that’s depressing or mind-expanding depends ultimately on what kind of attention we pay. Ben Ratliff has the gifts to help us surf this wave of sonic information, not stand there mumbling at it in a grumpy-grampy way. After all, it’s presumably not going to end until the electrical grid does.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“This is a book about one exemplary listener’s love for how many ways music can mean, set in sentences as forceful and subtle as Elvin Jones. Slayer and Shostakovich, Ali Akbar Khan and the Allman Brothers—none of them are the same once Ben Ratliff’s ears get through with them. And your ears won’t be the same once you get through Every Song Ever.”—Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996. Every Song Ever is his fourth book, followingThe Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). He lives with his wife and two sons in the Bronx.

Alex Ross has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the essay collection Listen to This, and the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.