Listening In

Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank, a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured and complex and cool. She listens to blues and solo singers and songwriters - like John Lee Hooker, Dylan and Nina Simone - in the personal, imagination-trawling phase when she’s conjuring up the characters for her paintings. When she’s composing her paintings - thinking in the big picture sense - she listens to opera and classical music, like Beethoven’s “Kreuzer.” Music is an intricate and orchestrated part of her creative process.

Painting above by Natalie Frank, “Portrait,” 2007, Oil on canvas, 18 by 16 in. 45.7 by 40.6 cm.

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Music is a phenomenal way to control your environment - to make a room “yours”.  More and more expectant mothers and fathers who want to make the delivery room feel more like home are bringing their music with them. Birthing clinics are starting to feature iPod docks as standard equipment, and parents come in with their “giving birth” playlists ready to plug in.

Many fathers who get involved are in charge of the technology - and so we find the new role of “DJ Daddy Doulah” - who is doing what he can to set the right mood in the room. In this piece, we speak with Eric Wallach and Belinda Blum about their experience of giving birth to Ruby (pictured) and how Eric spun the tunes. They gave the idea to Emily Conrad and Jeff Galusha - who take us through their Baby Pumpkin playlist, a week before the birth of their daughter, Blue.

We also put a call out to Weekend America listeners to tell us the songs that worked for them during childbirth. The Weekend America “Giving Birth” Listener-Generated Playlist is here.

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When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear - often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: “Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in.” I got to speak to some of the Boston Red Sox about their favorite walkup songs. Mike Lowell, Alex Cora, Coco Crisp and All-Star slugger David Ortiz (pictured) all weighed in on the tune that gets them psyched up to hit. Megan Kaiser, the Sox music programmer, was my guide to the soundtrack of a baseball afternoon on the fabled field at Fenway.

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I was watching poker on TV, and I noticed that the players, many of them, had headphones on. I was, like, “Really? You can do that? You can listen to music at the table?” And then I was wondering, “What would a professional player listen to during a high stakes game?” So I went to the Foxwood Poker Classic on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation in Ledyard, Connecticut. The Foxwoods Poker Classic is a stop on the World Poker Tour - a $10,000 ante No Limits Hold ‘Em Tournament. As the 10 hour day of play forged on, I was able to get in side the earphones of some of the pro players.

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Music seemed to play a lot of different roles for players. It’s certainly about emotional control - getting you up when your energies down, keeping you down when your energy’s too far up. It keeps you focused, like when you’re driving hundreds of miles and you need to keep mentally alert. Sometimes it’s about superstitition, sometimes its about the lyrics. Sometimes all it’s about a little humor to keep you going. “Another One Bites the Dust” - and just about anything from Queen - seemed to work well with the poker set.

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In this episode of Listening In, we put out a call to Weekend America listeners: “What is a good song for falling asleep to?” In the conversations that ensued, we heard about many different kinds of songs that worked - it wasn’t all Pachelbel’s Canon and whale songs. I sat with sleep specialist Dr. Gerard Lombardo of New York Methodist Hospital, and listened to your responses with him. Listening to songs as diverse as Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the Beach Boys’ “Whistle In” and Mettalica’s “Master of Puppets,” Dr. Lombardo and I concluded that, when it comes to sleepworthy songs, it is less about the song itself than each person’s relationship to it.

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