Music that could melt into a landscape music that had not been produced so much as conjured. I found myself pulled toward albums that were elemental, tender, free-music that felt genuinely of the world and not like a mediated reflection of it. Those experiences colored the way I heard and metabolized new records. I found that my partner has a secret voice-higher-pitched, goofier, almost quaking with joy-that he uses when talking to a baby. In the predawn darkness, I listened happily as she cooed to herself in her bassinet. When I wasn’t using my stereo, I sang made-up tunes to my daughter-badly-and watched her discover her wild, throaty cackle. Specifically, this term is used when referring to popular music some musical genres make little use of the human voice, such as jazz. There has always been a lot of beautiful sound in the world, things so plainly lovely that it feels humiliating even to type them out: songbirds at sunrise, a creek after a storm, boots on a gravel driveway, a blooming bush beset by bumblebees. An instrumental is, in contrast to a song, a musical composition or recording without lyrics or any other sort of vocal music all of the music is produced by musical instruments.
I like that way of thinking-gently separating the idea of listening from the purposeful consumption of so-called music. I thought often about something the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders said, after my colleague Nathaniel Friedman asked him what he’d been listening to: “I haven’t been listening to anything.” He eventually elaborated: “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t. Or perhaps it was a delayed reaction to the psychic tumult of 2020-my wounded spirit forcing me to account more quietly for what we’d collectively endured (and are still enduring). I had a baby, in June, and took several months of maternity leave surely those events played some part in the decision not to have new releases blaring at all hours. The act itself-putting a record on to fill the room-felt significantly less compulsory to me. This past year, for the first time ever, my listening habits shifted. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.