Ben Ratliff with James Parker: Run the Song

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.

Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

James Parker is an Atlantic staff writer, co-editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston, and the author of Get Me Through The Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive. He lives in Brookline.

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EVENT ACCESSIBILITY

This event will take place at street level. If possible, the event will be livestreamed to YouTube. ASL interpretation may be provided (based on the availability of interpreters) but must be requested at least 2 weeks in advance of the event. Seats are limited. Please email us at [email protected] as soon as possible if you require ASL interpretation, guaranteed seating, or other accommodations. We will do our best to serve your needs!

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline, United States