Right after I started to create this piece, my mom’s health plummeted. I tried to record her, but she was too weak to sing. I gave up on the piece. Then, rummaging around in my files one day, I discovered a cache of recordings I had made of the two of us singing that I had completely forgotten about. I forged on, and created this piece. I interviewed my sister Gabrielle through the public radio station in her hometown in Chico, CA. I got in touch with Daniel Levitin, the neuroscientist and musician, to get some of his insights. Before it aired, my mom and I listened to it together – and she said, in her stroke-affected drawl – “Good. Very good.”

My mom passed away on December 8, 2008, 4 days after her 80th birthday. As I drove by myself to the funeral home in Kingston, NY to pick out an urn for her ashes, I noticed a call had come in on my cell phone. I pulled over to the shoulder to check the message – our piece had been selected for a program called “Best of Public Radio 2008.” I looked up and gestured to my mom, and we smiled at each other across that great divide.

Hear the original broadcast on Weekend America

Hear the original broadcast on Studio 360

Indie rocker Kim Deal from the Breeders crooned from the iPod docked in the operating room where Dr. Atul Gawande and his team were performing a thyroidectomy. Wearing something that looks like a shower cap, and booties over my shoes, I felt like another member of Dr. Gawande’s team, which is made up of several people: the senior resident, the anesthesiologist, the circulating nurse, a medical student and the scrub.

“Something of a myth about the way people understand the operating room is that it’s not all about the surgeon,” Dr. Gawande laughs, “or about whether my hands are shaking. Absolutely I have to be able to concentrate and know what I’m doing, but so does everybody else. And having a good operation for each of the patients I take care of in a day means making sure that we can all function as a team. And I find that having music helps us all perform well, as a team.”

To the strains of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” Dr. Gawande’s team busily prepared the area on the patient’s neck for the operation. In this episode of Listening In, I got a chance to go to Boston and hear the playlist that Dr. Gawande plays in the OR, and talk to his staff about how it flows with their work.

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Architect Daniel Libeskind listens to a solid block of uninterrupted music in the morning to start his day.  “It’s not something of a luxury, it’s almost a necessity.  And it’s not background,” says Libeskind.  “I don’t do it as the hustle bustle of domestic life and in the background there’s music, I sit down, when I have time, and mostly I do have time early in the morning, just to listen to a piece of music.”  In his downtown New York studio, Libeskind and I listened to the music that focuses him for the day, the music that “furnishes his mind”:  Cab Calloway doing “St. Louis Blues, ” Glenn Gould playing the Well-Tempered Clavier, the 20th organ music of Olivier Messiaen, and the free jazz improvisations of pianist Keith Tippett.
“It’s the equivalent for the soul what running and jogging would be for the body.  It’s not for the body, it’s for the soul.  But the soul also needs to be fed.  Otherwise it’s empty.  And that music, when you fill your mind with it, your mind isn’t empty during the day.  It’s furnished.”

I went to China to see what kind of musical culture I would find among the migrant workers there. I had heard that there is a floating population of over 100 million migrant workers there, mostly from the south and west, mostly coming to work construction jobs in the booming east coast cities. Every year, they ebb and flow, almost to a person returning to their hometown for Chinese New Year. Then, they head to another place, wherever the work is. It is well known that this is a hard, hard life, and hard lives often result in some special form of music – a melancholic complaint, a crying out. In the US, the hard migrant life was acknowledged in the books of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie, to some extent in the songs of Bill Monroe and the bluegrass songwriters who wrote about their lost home and life in a big, unforgiving city.

Was there something like this going on in China now, now that migration is happening there on an unprecedented scale? I tried to find out, by walking cold into construction site after construction site in Beijing, with my fearless translator Flora Wang. These migrant workers downloaded bootleg mp3s onto their cell phones, and they would listen at night in isolation in the grim little shacks that sat right on the construction site. The name “Chen Xing” kept coming up – his songs, many of the workers said, spoke directly to their experience. I sought out Chen Xing, and had a chance to record some of his songs in a casual, acoustic setting. This piece for Studio 360 is the result of those sessions.

Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank, a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured and complex and cool. She listens to blues and solo singers and songwriters – like John Lee Hooker, Dylan and Nina Simone – in the personal, imagination-trawling phase when she’s conjuring up the characters for her paintings. When she’s composing her paintings – thinking in the big picture sense – she listens to opera and classical music, like Beethoven’s “Kreuzer.” Music is an intricate and orchestrated part of her creative process.

Painting above by Natalie Frank, “Portrait,” 2007, Oil on canvas, 18 by 16 in. 45.7 by 40.6 cm.

Many fathers who get involved are in charge of the technology – and so we find the new role of “DJ Daddy Doulah” – who is doing what he can to set the right mood in the room. In this piece, we speak with Eric Wallach and Belinda Blum about their experience of giving birth to Ruby (pictured) and how Eric spun the tunes. They gave the idea to Emily Conrad and Jeff Galusha – who take us through their Baby Pumpkin playlist, a week before the birth of their daughter, Blue.

We also put a call out to Weekend America listeners to tell us the songs that worked for them during childbirth. The Weekend America “Giving Birth” Listener-Generated Playlist is here.

When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear – often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: “Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in.” I got to speak to some of the Boston Red Sox about their favorite walkup songs. Mike Lowell, Alex Cora, Coco Crisp and All-Star slugger David Ortiz (pictured) all weighed in on the tune that gets them psyched up to hit. Megan Kaiser, the Sox music programmer, was my guide to the soundtrack of a baseball afternoon on the fabled field at Fenway.

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Music seemed to play a lot of different roles for players. It’s certainly about emotional control – getting you up when your energies down, keeping you down when your energy’s too far up. It keeps you focused, like when you’re driving hundreds of miles and you need to keep mentally alert. Sometimes it’s about superstitition, sometimes its about the lyrics. Sometimes all it’s about a little humor to keep you going. “Another One Bites the Dust” – and just about anything from Queen – seemed to work well with the poker set.

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BayCHI: March 13, 2007, 7:30PM, George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA
The line between music consumer and music maker is blurring; in this middle space are design opportunities to improve the ways we discover, share and use music in our day-to-day lives. The practice of call and response between audience and performer, long an attribute of musical experience, is finding its way back into our interactions with digital music. In this talk, I am going to look at the impact new music technologies are having on our listening behavior. I will take a look at how trends in listening and sharing point to the greater role that music fans will play in the new economy of music.

Also speaking that night, talking about their awesome music discovery site:

Pandora’s Experience: Learning from Users, Designing for Users
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, & Dan Lythcott-Haims, Pandora’s Creative Director

Sketch by Bill Verplank

A piece I produced for Studio 360′s Design for the Real World series airs this week: Thinking Outside the Mouse. It features Bill Verplank, a seminal interaction designer who comes out of the tradition of human factors engineering. Bill worked at Xerox in the seventies as part of the team that brought the Xerox Star, the world’s first commercial personal computer, to market. After periods at IDEO and Interval Research, he is now at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, or “Karma”) working on new interfaces for musical expression. Verplank has a special focus on haptics, or force-feedback systems that “push back on you when you push on them.” He believes this is a promising direction for musical interfaces that will give greater expressive control to the performer of computer-mediated music.

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This October, I got a chance to go to Floyd, Iowa and meet Maurice and Pam Johnson, a fifth-generation husband and wife farm team. I rode with them and their sons, Ben and Andy, while they were bringing in the corn harvest.

I went to a field they call Kupers 80, climbed in the cab of the combine with Maurice, and talked with him while we did what he usually does in the cab – listen to the radio. We listened to the Midday Farm Report on the local country station.

In the cab of Pam’s tractor, it was a steady diet of public radio. We listened to “Science Friday” with Ira Flatow, which Pam likes because it keeps her mind stimulated and “makes her brain sparkle.” Pam is an avid reader who always carries a book with her during the harvest. She’ll take it out if there’s a delay due to equipment failure or a long backup at their grain elevator in Osage, Iowa. She was reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pallon, but there wasn’t any time to stop and read the days I rode with her. The weather was good, and they kept on harvesting until well after midnight, under the stars of the prairie sky.

Original broadcast.

Dean is now out on the North Face Endurance 50 – he’s running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. I ran with Dean in early September in San Francisco’s Presidio for a solid hour as he prepared for the run. Dean is a multitasker when he runs – for example, he dictated his book, “Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner,” into a handheld recorder during his famous all-night runs. He also is known to order a Hawaiian pizza with pineapple on it (It’s easier on the stomach than pepperoni) from Papa John’s and have it delivered on a street-corner mid-run. Papa John’s is one of the only pizza chains that is willing to deliver without a street address, according to Dean.

And… he listens to music. I ran tethered to Dean by a six foot audio cable with my recorder strapped to my side. Through my headphones, I listened to the tunes flowing into Dean’s earbuds, and we talked about what makes these songs good songs for a running playlist:
“I Ran So Far Away”– Flock of Seagulls (good lyrics, theme song)
“Ring of Fire” – Social Distortion (hill climbing song)
“Wicked Game” – Chris Isaak (song for dark moments)
“Marvo Ging” – Chemical Brothers (good running song)
“Louie, Louie”– Toots and the Maytals (stumbling in the night song)
“Bittersweet Symphony” The Verve – (song at dawn)
“Firestarter”– Prodigy – (good hill song)
“White Rabbit” – Jefferson Airplane – (death valley song)

Original Broadcast.

On August 27, 2005, Weekend America aired a piece I produced called “Pass the CD,” a portrait of a New York City CD Club called the Bobcats. The idea behind CD clubs is simple: 12 people get together, each gets a month. When it’s your month, you make a mix CD, give it a nice cover, burn 11 copies and snailmail them out. The piece ended with Bill Radke issuing an open invitation to listeners: “To join Gideon D’Arcangelo’s new CD club, visit our website and send an email to him. The first eleven to respond are in the club…”

Over two hundred emails came in. I decided to launch two clubs, each with a dozen listeners plus me. We called our clubs the Penguins and the Owls. For the rest, I emailed each of them back, told them the clubs were full, but if they wanted, I’d give them the email of 11 other listeners and they could organize their own club. Over a hundred people responded positively to this one. In the end, nine clubs were launched. The first CDs started to flow in October 2005. As of this writing, all nine clubs are going strong:

THE PENGUINS – http://thepenguins.blogspot.com – The Penguins are twelve Weekend America listeners from North and South Carolina, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, Washington, Arizona, Oregon and me in New York. The Penguins April 2006 mix, compiled by Reid Bannecker of Seattle, starts out with the following tracks:
Track 1 – “…intro (much more exciting than email)” – Bogaev/Radke
Track 2 – “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” — Bob Dylan
Track 3 – “I Threw It All Away” – Yo La Tengo…
Reid includes a link to the WA website in his extensive liner notes on the Penguins blog.

THE OWLS – http://the-owls.blogspot.com. The Owls are twelve WA listeners from Rhode Island, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Missouri, Indiana, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Arizona and me in New York. Mark Bouffard’s February mix, “Second Time Around” – which featured all cover versions of songs, prompted this comment on the blog from fellow Owl Sarah Israelit:
“i LOVE LOVE LOVE this disk. perhaps i date myself by confessing me deep affection for john denver’s music…”

GIDEON’S 13 – http://gid-13.blogspot.com/ – This is the first club to set up a blog – after I heard about this from them, I set up blogs for the Penguins and the Owls. On their blog, they keep a permalink to the Weekend America website page that launched their club:
“The catalyst that brought us together” – http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2005/08/27/bobcat.html

MIXMOO – http://mix-moo.blogspot.com/ - This club apparently launched a satellite club called MIXMOO TOO for their friends that were envious when they heard about the club.

THE GECKOS – http://geckogroup.blogspot.com/

24 EARS – (no blog) This club has been very active. I keep up a correspondence with one of its more active members, Jamie Barth of Boston.

The other three active clubs occasionally send me a CD or an email update. These clubs have not given themselves a name or set up a blog.

Original Broadcast.

That same evening, I overheard two guys in cowboy hats talking at the bar – one was good and drunk, said to the other – “You remind me of that ‘Broken Back!’ ‘Broken Back.’ You heard of that?” Another guy stepped in as if to break up a fight. The guy in the cowboy looked up at him with this thems-fighting-words look on his face and said “I wisht I never even had to think about that movie.”

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LOCATION: TA Truckstop, Breezewood, PA – intersection of Interstates 76 and 70 on the old Lincoln Highway, near the Maryland border — In this piece, we’re in the cab with Steve Grable and we get a chance to hear what makes a good road song for him. Grable’s speaks with us over the strains of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (Poison), “Is This Love?” (Whitesnake) and “Caught Up In You” (.38 Special).

About trucks, he says “They’re loud, they’re obnoxious. Nobody wants em, they’re hard on the road system. They do more damage to our highways than anything. But the bottom line is this – nobody wants to drive six hundred miles for a roll of toilet paper. And until you do want to drive 600 miles for a roll of toilet paper, this truck’s gonna have to go down the road.”

About four-wheelers (that is, the rest of us who use the road), he has this to say – Watch out! Don’t cut off a truck just cuz you can. A fully loaded truck and trailer weights 80,000 pounds, 40 times more than the average car! I promised him I would help put out the word. Every trucker I talked to said the same thing.

About road songs, he says “A lot of guys, what they would consider road songs are different. For me, the songs that I like going down the road are songs that… memories – that bring back little pieces of my life. Music like this… when I don’t have time to stop to enjoy the view, to get out of the truck for a few minutes, because I’m pressed on having to be there. I’ll put the music in and listen to different tunes that make me feel good inside because there’s a little part of that song that’s special to me, because it either meant something to me personally.
So, what’s a good road song for you? Let me know – I’m putting together the ultimate playlist for the road and I’m looking for suggestions. Tell me title, artist and why it’s a good song for the road (gideon at listeningin dot org).

Original Broadcast

Prine has written some fantastic lyrics over his 35 year career – what is your favorite line from Prine? What is your favorite Prine rhyme? Let me know at prine -at- listeningin -dot- org.

Original Broadcast