What Every Brilliant Thing taught me about my own podcast
As You, Me and An Album was approaching its fifth anniversary late last year, I decided to take stock of what I've learned from hosting the podcast. After all, I started the show to catch up on some of the music I had ignored, both in my heavy radio-listening years of my teens, 20s and 30s and in my checked-out years of my 40s and 50s, so there was much to be learned. I wrote about what I had discovered on the YMAAA Patreon, and I mostly focused on the ways in which I have become a more open-minded listener.
Four months after conducting that exercise, I felt like the list was incomplete. I knew I had gained something even more important but just couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.
A few days ago, my wife Mary Beth shared a Vulture piece on the interactive Broadway play Every Brilliant Thing. I soon found myself down a rabbit hole, as I was looking to learn more about the play's history. That exploration was what finally unearthed the important thing I've learned from YMAAA that I hadn't been able to identify.
For those who—like me just a few days ago—are unfamiliar with Every Brilliant Thing, here's a little background on the show. The Broadway version is a one-man show performed by Daniel Radcliffe, in which his character revisits moments throughout his life with the help of audience members he enlists prior to each show. Radcliffe's unnamed character also receives guidance from a list he compiled over the years of things that make life worth living—a list he began making in the aftermath of his mother's attempted suicide.
Every Brilliant Thing got its start as a much briefer monologue called "Sleeve Notes," authored by the English playwright and director Duncan Macmillan. In this version, the narrator runs through portions of the list, which ultimately reaches one million entries. While I have not seen Every Brilliant Thing—having just learned about it—I did watch a recitation of the original monologue by Frank Skinner on YouTube (part 1, part 2). The final entry on the list is a description of the process of listening to an album for the first time while reading the "sleeve notes" (or what we Americans call "liner notes").
Thinking about that last entry, I started revisiting some of the album-listening experiences that have made my life worth living. Reading the liner notes has frequently been a part of those experiences, but so has chatting with friends or simply doing nothing other than absorbing the music. Reliving those memories led to a realization. The conversations I have on YMAAA are frequently more about the experience of listening to a new album than about the content of the album itself.
It also dawned on me that many of my most memorable album-listening experiences occurred the first time I put the record on. That was apparently true for Macmillan, too, given that he made a point of having that final entry be about "listening to a new album for the first time." On some level, I have long known this is a special part of the album-listening experience, as I have made it a recurring and central part of YMAAA, even though I never once thought about why I made it such an important part of the show. With only a few exceptions, the albums my guests and I discuss are ones that I have never heard before. Though the albums are typically ones my guests have listened to many times, we always talk about what they remember from their experience of hearing it for the first time.
These conversations have expanded my musical knowledge and made me a more discerning listener. More important, though, is how they have exposed me to the different ways that my guests and I deal with the vulnerability and excitement of exploring new music. In structuring YMAAA so that this would be a recurring conversational topic, this was something I was clearly wanting to learn about, and yet I wasn't fully aware I was chasing this type of knowledge.
Many of my guests talk about their first listening experiences in ways that give me the impression they are low-stakes, risk-free events. For example, in my most recent episode with Icelandic singer-songwriter Ásgeir, he explained that he decided to give Amok by Atoms for Peace a spin because he was already a fan of Thom Yorke and Radiohead. It seemed hardly a stretch, then, for him to check out Yorke's side project when Amok was released in 2013.
Sometimes, though, an album can impact a listener in a way that they never see coming. That was the case for Olivia Barton when she decided to give Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me a try, as we recently discussed on Ep 222. When I asked Olivia why she decided to listen to the album the first time, she couldn't remember the reason or circumstance. She clearly remembered that the album was so emotionally challenging that she didn't make it through more than a few tracks on her first listen. (The album deals with Phil Elverum's grief over the death of his wife Geneviève Castrée from pancreatic cancer.) Despite the difficult experience, something about the album was compelling enough to make Olivia revisit it several years later, and she now views that second listening of the album as a life-changing event.
That is what's so magical about exploring a new album. Even if it's an artist you already know, you are opening yourself up to the possibility of being delighted, disturbed or disappointed—or maybe some combination of these experiences. There is the chance that you will feel alive in some way that you hadn't felt before. Just maybe it will even change your life.
I am grateful for all of the things that YMAAA has taught me and all of the wonderful, generous people I have had the privilege of interviewing, but this lesson alone has been reason enough to do the show.
I am going to give some thought to the first listens that have made my life worth living, and I'm going to share what I find either here or on YMAAA or Bonus Tracks. I also want to hear about the first listens that have made your life worth living. Which albums fit that description for you and why? Let me know in the comments, and if you'd like your story to be included in an upcoming episode, please let me know that, too.