A Music Podcast Unlike Any Other

We live in a moment of so many different mediums—Op-Docs, TikToks, Discord chats—and, as a result, we occasionally experience a pleasure approaching bliss when someone lines up one of those forms with material that fits it perfectly. This congruence is rarer than you might imagine; though I’ve never made a podcast of my own, for instance, I’ve always been interested in the medium (and long ago helped conceive of what became the wonderful Web site Transom, where novice podcasters learn their stuff). But sometimes that fascination is about how badly message and medium can line up: Joe Rogan talking for many hours about his particular views of the world strikes me as a mismatch; surely the right medium here would be “barstool.” Even the true-crime fixation that often seems poised to take over podcasting strikes me as ill-fitting: the difficulty in making something sonically appealing that almost by definition went unrecorded means relying on a series of tropes (the reporter leaving a message on an answering machine, the reporter listening to the G.P.S. in her car as she drives toward the suspect’s house) that were tiresome halfway through the first season of “Serial.”

But talking about music? That works. In fact, it’s charmed—it takes music from where it often resides (in the background) and isolates it, highlights it, pins it down where it can be examined. For decades, I’ve listened with pleasure to one of the pioneers in this subgenre, “Sound Opinions,” which mixes music history with contemporary-record reviews, and over time I’ve gone on to enjoy “Song Exploder,” “Broken Record” (interviews with musicians now handled by Rick Rubin and, full disclosure, edited by my daughter), the BBC’s nostalgic “Soul Music,” and “Heat Rocks”; NPR’s ever-expanding “All Songs Considered” universe could by itself fill your listening hours. But my semi-obsession for the last year may be the best example of all: a somewhat obscure project called, quite accurately, “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.” It comes from an Englishman named Andrew Hickey, about whom I can say very little—when I wrote to ask him a few questions, he wrote back to say, “I am an *extraordinarily* private person and don’t want *any* of my private life in the public domain.” It’s possible that this stance may be shifting just a bit—he e-mailed those of us who support him on Patreon recently to say that he’d recorded an interview with Rubin for future broadcast on one of Rubin’s podcasts—but I support him entirely in his resolve: his project is so vast that it can only be compared to, say, the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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