What do you listen to when you're running?I really mix it up, y'all.
Last night I listened to Back to Black by Amy Winehouse (yep, I'm a walking cliche). I found myself thinking hard about love and addiction.
One thing running does is clear your thoughts.
Musically running wise - know that Amy has/had some wickedly steady beats to keep your running rhythm. They're chilled out, so it doesn't force you to go too fast.
Tonight, it was a storytelling hour. I had a playlist of This American Life and The Moth prepared*.
Do you know This American Life? I don't always love it, but many of my favourite radio moments are from their stories. Tonight I listened to a podcast about a group of prison inmates putting on Hamlet.
It was more than incredible. You hear their stories, you feel them in the way they get their lines out.
It's the most amazing example of why theatre and radio are the most powerful mediums we have, I think. I actually burst into tears when they finished performing (sorry to my neighbour, who must have thought me a crazy woman, puffing and teary). It's super moving. Have a listen.
So I pounded out 4kms tonight, and a little faster than yesterday. It feels terrific to be back.
Do you need music when you get back? I can't wind down without it. Now playing? The Pixies, my friend.
*The Moth is pretty much my favourite listening in the world. Didn't get a chance to get to it tonight as I was so dang fast. Ha ha ha...
I can't stop listening to "Back to Black" either! Some prophetic words from Clive James a couple of years back:
ReplyDelete"Amy Winehouse's best songs really are works of art, no question. And she can actually sing them to you, in a way you would rather remember than forget. And yet she looks as if she can’t wait until it’s all over. Billie Holiday, by the end, had reasons to feel like that. But at the start, she guarded her gift. And Ella Fitzgerald sang on into old age as if her gift belonged to the world, which indeed it did. Amy Winehouse, if she wished, might build up an achievement that could be mentioned in the same breath as those two: perhaps not as varied, perhaps not as abundant, but just as unmistakeably individual, and even more so because some of the songs would be composed by her, and not just handed to her on a piece of paper.
It could be that she does wish to fulfil her vast potential, but she has another wish that conflicts: the wish for oblivion. It’s hard to speak against that wish without sounding like an advertisement for a package holiday. As this world goes, there are ample reasons for wanting to be out of it even if your personal history is a comfort, and I imagine hers has been the opposite. But she knows all this. The proof is in some of her songs. The proof is in her voice. You don’t get to sing like that unless you can give a shape to grief.
Not long before he died last week, Humphrey Lyttleton said that he admired the way Amy Winehouse sang and would have liked to meet her. Some commentators have wondered what he would have said. There’s no telling. He was the prince of joy, and he might have told her that he was glad to have lived out a long life in music. The old Etonian would surely have admitted that he had begun his career in conditions of privilege, as she had not, and that he had always had the gift of happiness, which she plainly hasn’t, or anyway does not have yet.
But he could have added that he only had to listen to a few bars of her singing to realise that she had been given the greatest gift a musician of any kind can have, and that a gift on that scale is not possessed by its owner, but does all the possessing. Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of. When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they’re misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn’t say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. “On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes”. Come on, kiddo. Give us a song."
Hi Melanie - thanks for posting. See what happens when you listen to "It's a fight" by Three 6 Mafia. This might take a few seconds off your time. You say you're a walking cliche because you listened to "Back to Black"? I had better not tell you some of the other stuff I've been running to lately ;)
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