Want to Enjoy Music More? Go For a Run.

The episode opens on New York City Marathon day with producer Lena Richards asking Central Park runners what they are listening to. Their answers range from Tony Bennett with Norah Jones and The Strokes to Radiohead, Bad Religion’s Christmas album, Jimmy Eat World, motivational speaker Eric Thomas, and fast, beat-driven mixes. The runners describe music as a way to relax, set a pace, stay motivated, save energy for the end of a run, or distract themselves from how much running remains. One runner says music lets her pretend, briefly, that she is not running at all. Ben Ratliff, a former New York Times music critic and author of “Run the Song,” has a reversed idea: he runs in order to make the music better. Rachel Abrams introduces the conversation as an exploration of how running can make someone a more attentive listener, rather than treating music as a tool for exercise.

Ratliff tells Rachel that he first wanted to write about music after seeing Miles Davis as a teenager. Davis played short melodic phrases, left long silences, wandered around the stage, sometimes turned his back to the audience, and once pressed his hand onto a keyboard to produce a strange chord. Ratliff found the performance mysterious but loved it, and writing about it for his high school newspaper seemed like the only appropriate response. In college, a writing class with Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddens helped set him on a professional path. Ratliff began pitching small magazines and eventually was surprised that The New York Times trusted him to choose what music to cover, even when it was not popular. He especially remembers performances at the Village Vanguard, a club that has existed for about 91 years. Because it is underground, he says, the club felt detached from ordinary life; he loved hearing improvised music reach moments where neither he nor the musicians seemed to know exactly what would happen next. Although the Times later assigned fewer performance reviews, Ratliff says live performance remained what he loved most: seeing something happen in real time and using it as the basis for an essay.

Ratliff describes a turning point at a Maine recording studio run by mastering engineer Bob Ludwig, whose name appears on thousands of well-known records. Ludwig placed Ratliff in his special listening chair and played “So What” from Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Ratliff knew the piece extremely well and expected the studio’s equipment and acoustics to let him get closer to it than ever before—to feel as if he were inside the recording or even present in the 1959 studio session. Instead, he was not blown away, and the experience left him wondering whether he had forgotten how to listen. Ratliff says audio specialists often describe recorded sound using the language of space and atmosphere, as though a recording were a place the listener could inhabit. He wanted the music to be physically inside him, not merely something he could hear, but the special room did not produce that feeling. His conclusion was that he needed to find a new way to listen. That same weekend he went running with a friend, though the two events were initially unrelated. Running had always seemed like punishment to him, based on unpleasant memories from high school, but as an adult he discovered that it made him feel “like a million bucks”: he thought better, wrote better, and came home with unusual sentences, syntax, and vocabulary. At first he ran in silence because he used running to empty his head before writing.

During the pandemic, Ratliff ran for longer stretches and could run in the middle of streets in the Bronx. One day he listened to music while running and returned with the conviction that he had listened better than ever before. He realized that most people use music to become better runners—to set a tempo, get pumped up, or forget the discomfort—but wondered what would happen if the relationship were reversed and he ran in order to become a better listener. Ratliff began calling the practice “running a song.” A song became not just an auditory object but a place and a form of motion. Running made any recording feel like live music because the listener was physically inside a performance moment. He advises listeners to imagine a piece as a space: ask what is to the left, right, or behind you; identify what is at the bottom, such as drums or singing; and look for the element that is the music’s essence—the sound, intention, or philosophy that, if removed, would make the whole thing collapse. For Ratliff, this kind of attention turns music from a means to an end into the thing itself. He says the process is especially valuable in an earphone culture where music is often used mainly to make workouts or daily life go faster.

Ratliff gives Rachel an example from “Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot,” a 1961 jazz recording he had loved for years. In “The Prophet,” Eric Dolphy’s saxophone solo is followed by Booker Little’s trumpet solo and then a roughly four-minute piano solo by Mal Waldron. Ratliff had always found Waldron’s section oblique and treated it as a blank spot in the recording, mentally checking out for its duration. Running to the record changed that. He began hearing Waldron’s tentative opening, his repeated phrases, and the slight changes he made each time. Instead of seeming off-putting, the solo became a study in a musician who did not need to know exactly where he was going. Unlike the other soloists, who create a strong sense of forward motion and resolution, Waldron simply persists. Ratliff connected that “non-virtuosic perseverance” to running and felt he could continue indefinitely if the solo did. He says proper listening does not require wanting a particular outcome; it means attending closely to each moment without knowing what comes next. Running alongside Waldron’s adjustments helped Ratliff understand the solo as an act of sustained attention and movement.

For the New York City Marathon, Ratliff created a five-hour playlist organized around the course’s five boroughs. He begins with Staten Island and the instrumental version of Wu-Tang Clan’s “It’s Yours,” because “Staten Island is Wu-Tang.” He chose its repetition and lack of vocals for the crowded start, when runners need to stay aware; the title also supports his idea that the race should belong entirely to the runner, not to social media, Strava, or someone else’s approval. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he selects Chic’s “Chic Cheer,” connecting the area to “Saturday Night Fever,” the former disco 2001 Odyssey, and Nile Rodgers’s history playing in Staten Island. Its whistle, rhythm, open instrumental sections, and repetition are meant to build momentum. For Queens, Ratliff chooses Run-DMC’s “Slow and Low,” because runners around mile 13 must stop going too fast and accept a sustainable pace. In the Bronx, he picks “Canto Ebbioso,” a Cuban rumba by Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nueva Yorkino, whose relentless energy, overlapping drums and voices, and slightly untidy interplay suit both running and the sensory overload of the city. Finally, for Manhattan, he chooses Ashford and Simpson’s instrumental “Bougie Bougie,” a glamorous, steadily developing track that evokes the borough’s dreams of success and a new beginning. He also recommends taking the headphones off at times to hear the crowds and the city itself.