Run the Song

""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 ""At its core, Run the Song is a brilliant example of the power--and necessity--of music criticism, coming at a time when the form feels especially endangered.""--Ryan Dombal, Hearing Things