A Communion with Music

Tadhg Hoey considers Ben Ratliff’s “Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening.”

By Tadhg HoeyAugust 30, 2025

• Music

• Memoir & Essay

SOME YEARS AGO, my friend was training for a marathon. A few Saturdays before the event, he rode the train from our apartment in Brooklyn all the way to the top of Manhattan. From there, he ran the length of the island, across Lower Manhattan, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and back home to Crown Heights. I ran regularly then myself, often through Prospect Park with this very friend, but I’d never attempted anything approaching the 16 miles he had just run. I had so many questions for him, but I needed an answer to one most of all: What did you listen to for almost three hours? He told me about the music that had helped get him through it and then, much to my surprise, said that he had occasionally turned off the music and enjoyed stretches of the run entirely present, free from technology and distraction.

No music! I was horrified. He had rawdogged parts of that run, as some of us might say today. I could not imagine anything worse than running with only my own brain and its terrifying intrusive thoughts to keep me company. I needed access to music—tons of it!—as well as podcasts, and possibly even audiobooks. At the very least, I would need a friend to shoot the breeze with. Without that, the whole running thing honestly sounded a lot like a form of Victorian-era punishment to my media-addled mind. I would not be rawdogging a run any time soon, I decided.

Ben Ratliff, a longtime culture writer and the former jazz and pop critic for The New York Times (1996–2016), has a lot to say about music, and, it turns out, running too. Running, and specifically what you might listen to as you run, is the fairly niche subject of Ben Ratliff’s latest book, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, published this spring by Graywolf Press. Ratliff has previously written a number of books on music, including Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (2016), The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008), and Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002), as well as an acclaimed biography of the legendary saxophonist, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007).

I think it might be helpful to begin by pointing out, in the interest of transparency, that Ratliff, on the advice of a friend, tried rawdogging a few runs. Luckily for us, he quickly realized that he preferred listening to music while he ran. (Say what you will, but Run Without the Song is a worse title.) The subsequent book, then, is Ratliff’s freewheeling attempt to explain his two great loves and offer an extended look at how he approaches, thinks about, and listens to music. A worthy attempt—as he puts it—to “write about running with the vocabulary of listening, and to write about listening with the vocabulary of running.”

There’s more of a relation there between the two activities than one might first expect. Even the word “track,” Ratliff tells us—which has both musical and kinetic connotations—comes from the French “trac,” a trail or a trace left behind by movement. Its earliest use as a noun—“a single bounded selection of a phonograph record” (1904)—occurred almost simultaneously with its being used to describe “intentional or organized running” (1905). The acts of listening and running—which ostensibly have nothing to do with one another—add up to something greater than the sum of their parts when done together, and Ratliff’s book argues for the value and insight that the act of running can bring to the act of listening to music. To better understand a piece of music, Ratliff often likes to run with it. This he calls “running the song,” and he describes it as “a way to engage with the music’s forward patterns, its implications, its potential, its intention, and even its desire.”

The music Ratliff listens to and discusses throughout the book runs the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Laurel Halo, from Betty Carter to Bach, from Theo Parrish to M. S. Subbulakshmi. Though he occasionally permits himself a brief digression into an artist’s life, he mostly confines himself to writing about a specific song (or two) from the artist in question, examining its rhythms and the feelings the music in question evokes in him as he runs. “I want to move the way Ed Blackwell plays,” Ratliff writes of the American jazz drummer. Of Alice Coltrane’s “Turiya” (the Huntington Ashram Monastery version), Ratliff writes that he wants “to get into her music, and to run alongside it, in its spirit. […] I want to continue moving in the space she’s cleared.”

The book is set mostly in 2020 against the backdrop of the pandemic. Ratliff treads lightly around the vigils being held in honor of George Floyd, whose recent murder had sparked protests and vigils across the country, and reflects on his privilege as a white man to do so without fear of harassment. There are a few autobiographical details littered throughout the book, but Ratliff’s gaze remains mostly on the future—on the road, field, or park ahead of him, and what he’s going to listen to as he traverses it.

Ratliff readily admits to being someone who prefers listening to music while running alone—which he does almost every day, after first stretching for 15 minutes—over running with people. While he is polite to the runners who cross his path, he cannot conceive of himself joining a running group or even, it seems at times, consider himself a “runner.” For him, running is a solitary act—a perfect opportunity to be in communion with some of his favorite music, or to spend some time with music that he’d never really given a chance. It is an opportunity to listen outside of himself, to outrun old selves or past assumptions about music, and to get beyond what he describes as the “electric fences of the habitus,” which are “snob, bore, nostalgist, narcissist.”

At times, Ratliff seems capable of turning down the volume on his inner critic and allowing himself to be present without the need for context or analysis, but thoughts on criticism—and on his position as a critic—are never far from his mind. Referring to his work as a writer, Ratliff notes that he often has to leave parties early because creating that distance from his subjects is what allows him to write about them. That cultivated distance between himself and the act of running would collapse were he to join a running group. “I take this position,” he writes, “because I like to be alone among others.” Later, he teases out this idea a little more obliquely when writing about Fred Astaire’s The Astaire Story (1952):

I have run short and long with this record, on straight, flat lines and up terrible hills, probably on every day of the week, in both the city and the country. I find that to the extent that running is hard work, the performance honors hard work; and to the extent that running is play, the performance honors play. It represents a strange and contradictory mixture of unquestioning, nearly self-erasing commitment and an awareness that living is essentially a matter of lightness, of being next to the thing rather than on it, of commenting and annotating and chiming in from the side.

More than anything, the last sentence of that paragraph is particularly instructive in that it sets out the terms of Ratliff’s approach and constitutes something of a shorthand philosophy of criticism. “[B]eing next to the thing rather than on it, […] commenting and annotating and chiming in from the side”—all of this is the work of the critic, and Ratliff is quietly making the case for putting in the time with a piece of music, which reminds me of Brian Eno’s line that while ambient music doesn’t exactly demand your attention, it does reward it. There is value to be had, it would seem, in running the song.

Repetition—as both something to be avoided and something toward which we unconsciously gravitate—recurs throughout the book. Whether Ratliff is reflecting on Theo Parrish’s DJ sets (“Parrish moves through long passages of great joy, but always with some turbulence: awkwardness, roughness, bumpiness, fragmented phrase repetition”) or even comparing the lengthy “ritualized repetition” of Catholic liturgy in Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s novel Septology (2019–21) to late-period John Coltrane (“Late Coltrane can sound like one long song, or make you wonder whether you’re hearing a song at all, rather than a sustained quality of motion”), his interest in repetition provides the book with some of its best writing.

It is apparent from Ratliff’s listening habits that, while he is constantly searching for new and unfamiliar music, he will just as easily listen to the same track, record, or mix across dozens of runs. He wants to avoid falling into the trappings of a routine almost as much as he wants to run. Ratliff understands this tension, and he knows that, though there is an alluring power in repetition, the only real way to test your chops—like many of the musicians he writes about, and the various “live” versions of their music he discusses—is to occasionally change it up, go off-piste, and experience those unadulterated moments of improvised transcendence.

But he’s not just hesitant about falling into a routine: Ratliff is also skeptical of any technology that might feed him data about his runs. He does not want to know—nor does he care—if he ran faster than yesterday, or how many calories he burned. What he does need, he has decided, is a little of the unpredictability or chaos we rarely—in our increasingly optimized lives—allow ourselves. If each day’s run had to be measured against the previous, it would become a chore. What Ratliff seems to want, then—with each listening, each run, each encounter—is a deepened connection with the source material; he wants to be reminded of the hard-won value of seeking out the new, or the newly resonant, amid the ambient noise of the familiar. It is the job of the critic, he seems to be telling us (and reminding himself), to push further into the work and to use whatever methods or tools one has at one’s disposal to do it.

Ratliff’s book is very different from another written by a jazz enthusiast turned runner, Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), which Ratliff discusses here. Although Murakami doesn’t seem bothered by what he listens to (the Lovin’ Spoonful, an American folk-rock band, is his usual running soundtrack), he is relentlessly—even grimly—concerned with pushing his aging body, whether for triathlons, ultramarathons, or faster marathons. Ratliff, on the other hand, seems happy enough to just plod along, relishing his time alone with the music. It’s also worth pointing out—for those of us who, for whatever reason, believe there’s still cause to be hopeful about our futures—that both writers published their books about running just a few years shy of 60. Perhaps a novelist needs that urgent sense of doggedness to compete (even if just with themselves) and get across the finish line. The critic’s work, on the other hand, can only begin when that finish line has been passed. Whatever the case may be, and while it might be fun to go for a beer after a run with Murakami, there’s much to be gleaned from the quiet, steady determination with which Ratliff approaches running.

If I’ve made Run the Song sound a little like an aimless run, it’s because, well, it felt like a pleasantly aimless run, one with a friend who has a lot of interesting thoughts about music and running. For people who already run, Run the Song is likely to present nothing new but may instead confirm what they likely already know: that running can be a relatively accessible, thoroughly enjoyable way to exercise, easily enriched by the act of listening to music you love, or even to that album you’ve been putting off listening to.

For those who do not yet run, Run the Song may inadvertently make the case for all of the above, or convince you that running is best done either in silence, with a friend, or perhaps not at all.