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When Getting Older Means Letting Go of Music

Most of us move away from the soundtracks to our earlier lives. Thank God for the invention of podcasts.

Illustration: Katie Carey

I’m not sure when it started, but at some point over the last several years I replaced listening to music with listening to people talking. Looking back, it must have happened slowly, in increments. First, I began passing over the usual rotation of songs in my iTunes library in favor of some addictive podcast like Serial or S-Town. Instead of Tom Waits or Aimee Mann accompanying me on my daily errands, I’d find myself on the edge of my subway seat waiting for a murder (along with the social, economic, and psychiatric conditions surrounding it) to be endlessly parsed and potentially never solved.

Later, the political climate turned following the news into something like a round-the-clock assignment. So I dutifully stuffed my brain with news analysis — everything from The Daily to the Slate Political Gabfest to good, old-fashioned NPR (yes, on the actual radio) — in the hope of hearing something that would help me make sense of the world. That effort being the fool’s errand that it obviously is, I’d load up on even more podcasts, many of them analyzing the analysis itself. Whereas once I might have listened to a classical music station…