Run the Song - by Ben Ratliff (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A revelatory exploration of the relationship between music and running by one of our foremost music writers

Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff's runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music.

He runs through the woods, along the Hudson River, and into the lowlands of the Bronx. He encounters newly erected fences for an intended FEMA field hospital, and demonstrations against racial violence. His runs, and the notes that result from them, vary in length just as the songs he listens to do: seventies soul, jazz, hardcore punk, string quartets, Éliane Radigue's slow-change electronics, Carnatic singing, DJ sets, piano music of all kinds, Sade, Fred Astaire, and Ice Spice.

Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he's listening to--let's run it, he'll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.

Review Quotes

"An ecstatic and eccentric blend of criticism, music, autobiography and philosophy that is knowingly caught between genres."--Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post

"Focusing on music though earphones while in motion, Mr. Ratliff gets out of his own head, which is something critics and even casual listeners would benefit from doing more often. As he runs, his connection to music becomes more spiritually attuned and, with each step, a more palpable experience...He writes with reverence about a song's 'deep middle, with many moments that make me wonder how I got there, moments of complicated grace.' That sense of a deep middle--free from ideas about opening salvos or closing resolutions, free from concerns over form--are contained in his favorite music and, fleetingly but stirringly, in his book."--Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal

"Certain writing rushes out of the mind and into the body, makes you want to slam the book shut, get up, move around. Ben Ratliff's brilliant and invigorating new book will make you want to do just that: Run the Song."--Nuar Alsadir

"Music critic Ben Ratliff's essays about listening to music while running--and the ways in which the body in motion is able to listen and understand differently than a body at rest--is a lovely meditation on the ways in which we can deepen our connection to even the things we imagine we understand the best."--Literary Hub

"Run the Song is a calm reboot of the day job, a critique of critique. ...This is a kind of criticism that doesn't exist in magazines and newspapers--one woven into and expressive of the fabric of daily life. There are not stars or thumbs-up or digits attached to these observations, and the main framing here is not the release schedule, but whether or not Ratliff thought the sounds were close enough to silence, an actually interesting metric."--Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns

"The thumping heart of the book is the author's keen attention to the music streaming through his earphones as he runs, and his ability to contemplate the motion of the music along with the motion of his body through a familiar landscape that is nonetheless different every day, as a song, no matter how known, is different each time it plays. Run the Song is also a meditation on community and the individual within it, and is at once highly pleasurable and scrupulously intelligent, a book to read closely, as closely as the author has listened to the work of the musicians that populate its pages."--Christine Sneed, New City Lit

About the Author