The Year of Magical Listening Podcast Por Willie Costello arte de portada

The Year of Magical Listening

The Year of Magical Listening

De: Willie Costello
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 Reflections on the joys of discovering new musicCopyright Willie Costello Música
Episodios
  • 044 :: HERE

    044 :: HERE
    May 23 2025
    FEATURING For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) by Japanese Breakfast, released by Dead Oceans in 2025. Listen / Buy direct "Here is Someone""Mega Circuit""Picture Window"TRANSCRIPT The best music, in my opinion, simply makes us listen, captivating our attention so fully that everything else falls away. So I guess it goes without saying that that's what this music does for me, unspooling with this lush, rococo exuberance that audibly shimmers in its brilliance. Sounds upon sounds upon sounds to just get lost in. Its cup runneth over, and I just want to drink it all in. There's something new and wondrous around every corner, to hold our focus and delight our senses – even these pitchy little flutes, with their unexpected pathos. This song is like a secret garden I've wandered into and now never wish to leave. And then there are these lines, that break my heart every time: Watching you from the yard Life is sad but here is someone Someone Someone Someone Someone There are many ways to hear those lines, but to my ear they recall that experience where we are suddenly jolted out of a depressive and anxious state of mind by the apprehension of a concrete individual before our eyes, in all their particular beauty and infinite possibility. Even if only for the briefest of moments, our attention becomes fixed on something outside our selves. And sometimes that's all we need. And sometimes that's what music does for us, too. So let's keep listening. Because this music will keep holding our attention, even as it changes in its sound and its feel, and even as it turns its own attention elsewhere. If that first song was showing us a way out of life's sadness, much of the rest of the album seems devoted to cataloguing its diverse and many causes: absent fathers, unfaithful partners, or, as in this song, "incel eunuchs". It's looking the enemy square in the eye. But here, too, the music shows us a way out of this ugliness, through the sheer jauntiness of its groove. It dazzles with a cornucopia of sounds: little rattles, big drums, a pulsating synth, and a tender accompaniment on guitar. It's enough to make you forget about everything wrong with boys these days. But that raises the question: Is this song offering deliverance, or distraction? And as if on cue, the singer delivers this chilling couplet: Well I better write my baby a shuffle good Or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should In this final turn, the song presents itself as written for one of those disturbed young men, as a means of pacifying the violence within. And although this might make it seem like some gross performance, a coerced pantomime of country western swagger, what I hear is a note of radical hope: that if anything is gonna reach these boys, if anything is gonna turn their attention away from the false gods they worship, it will be music, if we can just get them to listen. And now, a different kind of struggle: a song where the narrator is the one in need of saving, and where the cause of life's sadness is the enemy within, the singer's own mind, and in particular an anxious chittering of intrusive thoughts, permeating their experience and overtaking their consciousness, like this: Are you not afraid of every waking minute That your life could pass you by? Again, it sure doesn't sound like a song about obsessive compulsion, with its soft throb of slide guitar and pedal steel. And the chorus is weirdly affirming of these mental preoccupations, with its sweet refrain of "All of my ghosts are real". There is no denial in the lyrics, only acceptance. But in the music, I hear emancipation. It's yet another juxtaposition of sadness and salvation, with music appearing as the saving grace. And really, that's what this entire album is about: the push and pull between mental distraction and refocused attention, between the forces that plunge our minds into darkness and the moments that make us come up for air and see the light. The point is not to deny anyone's reality. Life is sad, your ghosts are real. The point is to show us that there are other realities out there too – that alongside all the death and violence and infidelity, there is beauty and joy and music. There's enough out there to save us. We just need to turn our mind towards it and let it in.
    Más Menos
    11 m
  • 043 :: ABSOLUTE

    043 :: ABSOLUTE
    Apr 28 2025
    FEATURING

    Cupid & Psyche 85 by Scritti Politti, released by Virgin Records in 1985. Listen / Buy direct

    • "Absolute"

    TRANSCRIPT

    Imagine, for a moment, that it's 1985, and a British band of post-punk Marxists have decided to pivot into pop. What would you expect their music to sound like? Abrasive? Ironic? Overly cerebral? Perhaps that would be the most likely story. But what if I told you it sounded like this? Angelic, mellifluous, radiant, and undeniably groovy.

    I don't usually like to do that, to historically situate what you're hearing before you actually hear it. I like to let the music just speak for itself. But in this case, I believe the context helps, to prime us to be surprised and to notice these curious little details, like the fact that this radio-friendly bop is a love song addressed to the "Absolute". And if you're wondering if I mean, like, the Absolute in the Hegelian sense? I do, and they do, too.

    But let's not get too heady right away. Because the most important thing to notice about this song is how immediately infectious it is, reveling in its newly expanded palette of synthesized sounds to create a sonic concoction that never ceases to delight and surprise. And yes, it does have a certain sheen to it – but what a sheen it is.

    I say all this to underscore the fact that this song, for all its self-awareness, is never condescending. It's fully in it and committed; it's pop music through and through. And that's what allows it to be a little bit meta.

    So let's get into it. Let's talk about this love song to the Absolute. Because the way I see it, it's a distillation of what pop music is always actually about: the musical expression of desire, in all its thrills and throes. And here's the thing about desire: We like to talk about it as if it's for some particular person, but it's never that simple. The object of our desire is always some ideal, some figment of our imagination, some distant glimmer that beckons us from beyond what's in front of our eyes. We cannot actually grasp it; that's why we desire it. So isn't it just more honest to address your love song, not to pop's paradigmatic "boy" or "girl", but to the transcendental principle of a perfect and self-sufficient form of being?

    And if that all sounds like a little much for a pop song, the good news is that you can set all that aside and just luxuriate in the sound of this music, because this song is never overbearing with its philosophy. But make no mistake: This album is full of these bits of wisdom, these incisive one-liners that encapsulate the fundamental nature of desire better than anything else I've ever heard in a pop song, lines like:

    There's nothing I wouldn't do / Including doing nothing

    I got a lack, girl, that you'd love to be

    Now I know to love you / Is not to know you

    These are lyrics I never thought I'd hear in a pop song. But what I love about this music is that, as philosophical as it gets, it never stops sounding like this. Because it knows that this is the sound of desire, in all its ecstasy and magnetism and larger-than-life feeling. The music reifies, even as the lyrics deconstruct. It's the essence of desire made manifest. It's absolute idealism at its finest.
    Más Menos
    7 m
  • 042 :: NEW

    042 :: NEW
    Mar 14 2025
    FEATURING

    LOWER by Benjamin Booker, released by Fire Next Time in 2025. Listen / Buy direct


    • "BLACK OPPS"
    • "NEW WORLD"

    TRANSCRIPT

    I never cease to marvel at how music in an instant can evoke a feeling or create a mood – and what's more, that it's able to do so in perpetually new ways, just through the careful selection and novel juxtaposition of sounds: a lacerating guitar tone, accentuated by a reverberating chime, layered over a beat that's all fuzz and thump, accompanied by a ghostly voice.

    It's this voice that really did it for me, drew me in and made me listen, to something so immediately delicate and chilling. This raspy whisper, singing ever so softly, in a way that should scarcely be audible, and yet, pervades the mix like a miasma.

    And even as everything else gets dialed up for the chorus, the main vocal stays as it was, still just barely breathing out the words, but now doubled by a second voice, singing higher and louder as if howling from a distance, as the rest of the ensemble creaks and buckles under the weight of its own crescendo.

    It's a sonic landscape that's steeped in dread, which makes it a fitting soundtrack for the song's lyrics, which allude to the tyrannical gaze of state surveillance and its clandestine acts of violence and oppression. If this music sounds hostile, that's because it's describing a hostile world.

    But there's a little prayer inside the mayhem:

    Give a little love...
    Have a little dream...
    Hallelujah, dying fighting
    For a life I ain't had yet

    It's not quite hope, but it's a note of resistance, a counterpoint to the overwhelming sense of unease that otherwise permeates the song, a reminder to hold it together even while the world around you is falling apart, fraying at the seams, and disintegrating into noise.

    But perhaps, through the static, something new will emerge: a sound still bruised by the world's roughness, but a little softer and brighter and, dare I say, hopeful.

    The voice is just as chilling as before, though it now seems to speak with greater ease and self-assurance. Its tone is matter-of-fact, even as it addresses its own oppressor and describes its own subjugation, as if it is strangely at peace. And again, as we move into the chorus, the main vocal is multiplied, swelling into a lush choir of sonorous voices, washing over us like waves on the shore.

    What a turn from the previous song. But I can't help but hear it as a response, countering the last song's images of racial domination with a pithy encapsulation of the master–slave dialectic:

    You can't be who you are without me
    Beneath you...
    Down here

    If this song sounds breezily confident, it's because it's flush with the knowledge that, as bad as things are, this is not how they're supposed to be. And even if the singer can't say when a new world will arrive, they at least know that they are it.

    And maybe we can hear the new world arriving right now, in this music, as a strange beauty begins to form out of an assemblage of musical debris – a winding phrase from a violin, a touch-tone keyboard, a metronomic piano, a pounding guitar, a boom-bap beat, and then, the sky opens up, making way for the infinite heavens, the glittering stars, the limitless future, and one last refrain.
    Más Menos
    10 m
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