By Hope Dworkin //
Brian Goldstein is an associate professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. He is a historian of the built environment who has written extensively on the intersections of modernism, urbanism, and race in 20th-century America. He is currently working on his new manuscript, If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond, Jr, which is set to be published in Fall 2026. I met with Professor Goldstein, who also happens to be my thesis advisor, to chat about Julian Casablancas, Philadelphia, and why the 70s was such an important (and deeply odd) decade for music and social movements.
Hope Dworkin: Thanks for doing this. Just to introduce Orpheus Review: we are Swarthmore’s only music and arts publication. We’re interviewing faculty and staff about what they listened to in college, what they listen to now and how music fits into their life. The first thing I want to ask is do you have any specific songs or artists that really resonate with you from your college years, or anything that reminds you of that time, particularly?
Brian Goldstein: I will say I looked at Paloma’s interview, so I had some preview, which helped me. This is a two-part answer. Like, the answer is yes. The Strokes’ Is This It and Kid A from Radiohead and [Wilco’s] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are very specific in my mind from college and I think there’s a lot of reasons. One, New York loomed very large in my mind. I had never been there until freshman year of college, then September 11th happened right at the beginning of my sophomore year and then, as you know, New York became very important in my intellectual life. There is this moment when The Strokes embodied mostly a caricature of what New York City was, but for somebody who really hadn’t spent time there it was a very evocative portrait of this, like, downtown [persona]. And also, this is the era when the Lower East Side and East Village are becoming very important in pop culture, so I felt like [Is This It] was very much a tether to that story.
The second thing I’ll say is I graduated from high school in 2000 and Napster exploded in about 1999. I always have liked music a lot, but my formative years of listening to music were in years when suddenly you didn’t have to listen to 14 songs by the same person in a row or even wait for the radio to play your favorite song to record it. I was also shaped by this idea that you could listen to Belle and Sebastian and then Destiny’s Child and then Mos Def and then Miles Davis. And that was instantaneous. And for you, that’s, of course, like completely second nature. But at the time it was really strange that you could, it would take five minutes to download the song, but you could just download songs and listen to them. So I always have thought of that period of my life as defined by a smorgasbord also.
HD: Is This It is a great album. Do you still listen to those albums now? What’s your relationship to them looking back?
BG: I was on vacation in North Carolina this summer at a brewery and there was a young person working there who was probably your age, and she was listening to The Strokes, to that album, and it was really weird to me. I asked her about it and she said it was like “Hot Strokes Summer,” which I didn’t know that that was the summer’s identity. I guess in one way, it reflects on my mortality, but also it was a reminder that these are very good songs. So actually after hearing some of the album then, I came back to it and have reminded myself that their songs are bouncy, they’re kind of a little dirty in their sort of sound quality. You know, there’s just a sort of grittiness to them. People like Julian Casablancas became iconic, but I don’t think I realized that he was sort of playing at a persona of Lou Reed and that kind of generation. He was very captivating in some ways.
So I don’t listen to that album a lot, but I have listened to it in the last year because of this. And then I’d say of the three, actually, Wilco is probably the band that I listened to the most, although I still very much like Radiohead. But as Jeff Tweedy has grown up, the album has, in many ways, grown with my generation. So if I was to go to a Jeff Tweedy show, I’d probably see a lot of people who are also in their early 40s and live in cities and have sort of similar occupations. So I think Wilco sticks a little bit more, probably partly because it’s aged with me.
HD: Have you listened to the new Jeff Tweedy album?
BG: I’ve listened to a lot of it, yeah.
HD: Do you like it?
BG: Yes, there’s one song that I just heard on WXPN last week that I really liked. “Feel Free,” It’s long; we’ll talk about jazz at some point, but, you know, I’m very into jazz and I really like the structure of the length. I like duration and very long songs with a kind of consistent melody that’s then messed with. And so [“Feel Free”], basically every verse kind of repeats, he must say “feel free,” like 55 times in this song, but it has this kind of nice hypnotic quality as a result of that. I guess it is a single from the album, but I also feel lucky to have WXPN in my brain space. The ability to listen to good radio is something that I don’t take for granted. Anyway, that’s the part of the album I’ve engaged with the most.
HD: Yeah, we’ll get to radio soon. Maybe this will lead into the jazz section, but what are some intersections between your scholarly interests and music you listen to?
BG: In some ways, the New York thing, I mean, I was even thinking about how Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has the Marina Towers on it (the corncob buildings in Chicago). So I guess I’m very architectural in many ways, the way I think about these things spatially and of course, that also that album came out right after September 11th, so it had the two towers. There’s a lot of ways that that kind of space of my brain probably became more occupied by my intellectual projects over time. But to be more specific, I think my keen interests in the intersections of cities and the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century [come together in music]. I know that that’s a reason why jazz has always really interested me because it’s a Black American art form that is tied specifically to the movement of African Americans and the movements in which they’ve been a part. And so I do think, although I’ve listened to jazz since high school, my interest in it is often now because of this sort of, I’d say correspondence between the Black intellectual project of the ’60s and ’70s, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ways that musicians were asking questions about how they could be part of that. That’s also the thing that interests me about architects—how architects were asking about it—so I’m always interested in the ways that cultural workers are trying to think about how they can be part of these movements and certainly jazz musicians always have asked that question.
So that’s a clear and obvious way that my intellectual interests and my musical interests are intricately tight. And I do like lots of music that would be classified as jazz or Black American music, but I particularly like music from the late 60s and the early 70s, which is the same period I write a lot about. [That was] when this sort of realism has crept into the Civil Rights Movement. There’s a real grappling with the difficulty of realizing some of the ambitions of it and also increasingly ideas of racial self determination and nationalism [which] are present in both the architects I study and in musicians. So people like Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson, certainly John Coltrane (I’m sure we’ll talk about) are trying to figure out how do you put ideas like “power to the people” into musical form. And I don’t think that is always an even correspondence, but the fact that people are asking [these questions] interests me.
HD: Have you read the book about Sun Ra in Chicago?
BG: By William Sites. I haven’t read it, but it’s very much one that I’m interested in.
HD: I really want to read it also. I think [the conversation between music and urban spaces] is really interesting, especially like specific artists and specific cities. I was in jazz band in high school but we really only played bebop. When it got to kind of more funky or freer stuff, everyone was like [groan noise], but I’ve always loved listening to it. But it felt so inaccessible for playing [compared with] listening?
BG: The 70s also are, you know… historians talked about the Gulf of history, how people write about periods after a certain amount of time has elapsed. The 70s have kind of entered into, at least for jazz listeners, they’ve increasingly entered into the listening patterns, things like spiritual jazz, and the ways that people were trying to figure it out. The 70s is a really weird decade. Nobody really knows what to do after the disappointments of the 60s, although there’s still hope that something can change. So I do notice more and more I’m listening to ‘72, ‘73, ‘74, ‘75, even into the early 80s. This kind of generation of jazz musicians who often were not seen as marketable anymore. They had kept playing, but they didn’t keep their contracts with Blue Note and some of these big labels. But of course, they continued to be recording musicians. So, I’ve been listening a lot to Joe Henderson again, like Gary Bartz, later Andrew Hill, definitely Pharaoh Sanders in that era. There’s a label called Strata-East; it was an artist owned label, so the music was quite free and experimental. That’s stuff that I find myself listening to more.
HD: I took a class in high school called the Pivotal Decade and it was about the 70s. There was so much music that we listened to; my professor was like, you need to understand what was happening musically to understand what [the 70s] were. And I remember we were listening to Marvin Gaye a lot. And I’m also thinking that a Sun Ra-Chicago equivalent is like a Marvin Gaye-D.C… those kinds of relationships between cities and the artists we associate with them.
BG: Teddy Pendergrass in Philadelphia, you know, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I think also for people who love cities, it’s a way to feel closer to the place you’re living. Maybe, you know, a place that you’re not as familiar with having moved there, but then [you] figure it out through the sorts of cultural things that were happening there.
HD: Yeah, definitely. Okay, next question is if you had to choose an album or artist to design a course around, who or what would it be?
BG: It’s a good question. I think John Coltrane would be a really interesting person to construct a course around because his short life was so linked to the kinds of histories of the changes in the American city in the mid-20th century. He was born in a small town in North Carolina, part of the Great Migration, moves to Philadelphia, lives in a row home in what’s becoming a predominantly African-American neighborhood at the time. I think [Coltrane] actually had a previous house in Philadelphia that was eventually part of urban renewal in North Philadelphia and then moves to Strawberry Mansion. And eventually, [he moves] to a somewhat modern ranch house in suburban New York City. So like there’s that part of the story, but then also I would argue with anyone that he was probably the greatest American musician of the 20th century. [Coltrane was] a virtuosic innovator in a way that maybe we associate with other canonical figures, but [he] did it in such compact space, moving from sort of structured bebop to early pushing of modal jazz to what really in many ways was fully free in about 10 to 15 years.
I wish I was the right person to teach a class in the music part of it, which I may not be, but I still think there’s a really phenomenal amount of just rapid innovation happening that you can hear really well in one person’s work and, you know, as we were talking about earlier in the context of politics, I’m very interested in people who are that flexible and agile of mind who can change quickly and he was certainly one of those people. Also, I don’t know, there’s something about his charisma, his gentleness and the ways that he overcame things like addiction in his life that really defined this person who seemed in many ways superhuman. So, yeah, I could see him being a really captivating centerpiece for a class.
HD: Yeah, that sounds good. You should do it.
BG: Yes.. I don’t think I could teach it with one album, though. I think you’d have to really be inclusive of his full discography.
HD: Yeah, but I think it also shows the changes through his life you’re talking about, right? Is there anyone in the music department you could co-teach that with?
BG: Yeah, no, that would be lots of fun. I would love that. And Philadelphia was so important in his life, so it’s also a nice way to think about the city, parts of the city that are very present still, but overlooked.
HD: Okay, you can’t use Coltrane for this next answer.
BG: I won’t.
HD: You’re hosting a dinner with three musicians, living or dead: who would you invite and why?
BG: We haven’t talked about Bob Dylan at all, but I’ve always loved Bob Dylan. I mean, I love Bob Dylan for, like, the regular Bob Dylan loving reasons: great songwriter, totally relentless. And, I mean, maybe for some of the same reasons I like John Coltrane, [Dylan] just never stops. I saw him perform in D.C. in 2018 and he came out, he sat down at the piano, he played for 75 minutes without saying anything and then got up and left. And it was like, I don’t know, it’s just like something really amazing about that fact that that person is still in the world and still performing and I think is one of the great American musicians for good reason. And also, I associated him strongly with my parents, and [so] there’s a way in which he carries larger meaning for me. My mom’s Jewish from Minnesota also. So there’s this way, you know, he’s that person too.
HD: Yeah, I like Bob Dylan a lot too, but he has this cult of personality. I think it’s not necessarily his creation…
BG [interjecting]: It probably is his creation.
HD: The hyper fans really turned me off of him [at first]. And then I started to listen to it and I was like, wait, okay, this is really great songwriting and clearly he’s an incredible musician. But there’s this kind of facade that it felt I had to break through, especially because I hadn’t experienced that kind of cult of personality before. My parents are not big Dylan fans. I think for a similar reason because people that are really into Bob Dylan are kind of weird.
BG: And they were probably half a generation after that period.
HD: Yeah. He’s kind of unique in having that. Once you break through, it’s great, but you just have to get over the hump a bit.
BG: Well, and I think as you know with music culture, there’s the embrace and then there’s always the backlash, so I’m sure it all is partly a matter of when you’re born and what part of it you enter into. And certainly with him, there’s some artifice, there’s some pretension. Those things are part of his story too, but also he’s just such a weird person. Would be an interesting figure to have at dinner.
I love Andrew Bird. I’ve loved Andrew Bird for 20 years. He’s an artist that I think maybe in ways similar to Dylan, although perhaps even, I don’t want to say more earnest, but just an incredible, incredible songwriter and just a person who seems absolutely delightful to be around. So I think he’d have to be at my dinner too. And then, yeah, I would probably want a jazz musician. I was thinking who that would be. [pause]
It’s funny that I keep naming very elderly people, but maybe Herbie Hancock. In some similar ways to Dylan, [Hancock] impresses me because I actually saw him last year, and, you know, he still jumps around the stage and he’s still like playing his keytar and you know, still rocks out. But also some of the other people we’ve talked about just very much never sat still.
I’ve been listening recently to the pianist Mary Lou Williams. I’m interested in her because she starts in an early jazz era, ends up being active through the 70s, and clearly through that entire time was occupying a subject position that was very atypical in jazz culture. I know I’m not allowed to invite four people…
HD: We can let it slide.
BG: But I think if we had to have a fourth maybe somebody like Mary Lou Williams just because I could imagine that she would have a different point of view than the men in the room. Sometimes I think of people like John Coltrane; it’s tragic when somebody dies in their 30s like that because you don’t know what could have followed. And some of these other people, maybe like Hancock or Mary Lou Williams, tell you some of the paths that people would have walked after.
HD: Do you think they would all get along, or do you think there would be some friction? What do you see the social landscape looking like?
BG: I bet Herbie Hancock and Bob Dylan would get along. I bet they probably know each other. And Andrew Bird just seems like a nice person. You want to see Dylan sullen in the corner, but I bet that he wouldn’t be. I bet that he’d be good company.
HD: No, I think the sullenness is a little bit of the act part of it. It helps sell records, you know. There has to be a little darkness there to do it.
BG: I have a very soft spot for the octogenarians who remain incredibly cool. I think that that’s a really neat thing to be very old and also extremely dynamic and clearly, you know, the Herbie Hancock talking about Dylan people of this world. Maybe music is the reason they’re able to do that. But I would also just like to learn from people like that, because I think it’s hard to do that as one gets older.
HD: I have friends who play music and they’re like, I’m already sick of playing this song 30 times and I mean, what if you played it for 60 years? Does [Dylan] hate “Blowin’ in the Wind” I’m sure, right?
BG: Oh, I’m sure. [singing] “Free birddddddd” Yeah, nobody wants to play “Free Bird.”
HD: I think that despite that it’s pretty impressive that they’re still actually going.
BG: Joni Mitchell, too. I mean, there’s this group of people that I’m, you know, scared to death constantly when I open the computer that I’m gonna find out bad news or something. But, you know, Wayne Shorter was that way too, although he has left us, but there is this kind of world of the octogenarian, nonagenarian musicians who continue to be really interesting. And I increasingly appreciate that.
HD: Yeah, definitely. This is a kind of returning to the radio question. But what is your primary way of listening to music and also a place of listening?
BG: So, I love radio. I’ve also been firsthand experiencing the decline of radio. When I was in high school, there was a station in Cincinnati, like it was alternative, but probably today what we call indie. 107.1, Channel Z, that’s what it was. And then one morning I woke up to go to work in the summer, probably, after sophomore year [of high school], and it was playing Avril Lavigne or something. And I was like, what happened? This is before, I mean, we had the internet, of course, but everything wasn’t immediately communicated. It turned out that it had been bought by Clear Channel or something and then they had a contest a week later to rename it and the name was Kiss and then I quickly learned Kiss was all over the country and it was really a bellwether in many ways. So I still love the radio, but you know, increasingly find that I have to listen through TuneIn or other websites. So I listen to jazz on WRTI in Philadelphia a lot. I listen to WXPN when I’m here. KMHD in Portland. I was in Madison for a year, and my sister’s family lives in Milwaukee [so I listen to] the Milwaukee alternative station, adult album contemporary or something, [88.9 Radio Milwaukee]. So I still listen to the radio, but I do find, in D.C., where I live, there’s no good radio stations. Towson University has a good radio station. I think it’s WTMD, but I can’t get it from D.C. If I go north of the city, I can get it.
HD: Yeah, we were talking about this recently, but there’s no Georgetown [radio station], like none of the colleges or universities have radio.
BG: No, I mean, there were famous stations because D.C. was such an important place in the birth of punk and those stations all became kind of commercial. You’re lucky [in Philadelphia] because you have good radio stations but certainly, increasingly, those are public stations. So I do still listen to radio a lot, and I’m also a record collector. So I collect mostly in jazz and most nights I will listen to a record on the couch while I’m finishing up for the evening. About one a day, I would say, at about 10 o’clock. Every day pretty much, and sometimes when I’m home by myself, I’ll listen during the day, but especially at night I listen to jazz on vinyl. I like that time very much. And Spotify, well, we can talk about Spotify, but I listen to Spotify too, but not as much.
HD: But how do you choose which record you’re going to listen to?
BG: Sometimes things just pop in my head or like I always have, I’d say fifteen to twenty that I’ve purchased in the last few months who kind of sit in the left part of my shelf. And so sometimes I grab from there. I like to listen to things a few times before I file them. But sometimes it’ll just be a random thought, like, oh, you know, I’ll hear a song on the radio and be like, oh, I like that song, I’m going to listen to that album today. Or sometimes it’s how I feel some of what I have is much more quiet and relaxing and some is less so and certainly at 10pm, I don’t usually feel like listening to the limits of free jazz. But sometimes during the day I do. And famously in my family, I listen to music very loud and nobody else likes that. And at night, I can’t because my daughter’s sleeping so, during the day, sometimes I’ll put things on that are louder that I can listen to without bothering other people.
HD: Yeah, she’d go to school and be like “my dad was listening to free jazz until one in the morning. It’s so loud I couldn’t sleep.”
BG: [laughing] Yeah, yeah, no, I respect other people and I live in an apartment building, so I have to be careful about not being a bad neighbor.
HD: No, apartment music listening is tough. Not going to be able to play music loud is really hard.
BG: We have thick walls, though. And during the day, I feel less bad about it.
HD: Do you listen to music when you drive a lot?
BG: When I first started commuting to Swarthmore, I did listen to more music. I find that brain activity-wise that podcasts are better for me. They just keep me more perceptive and awake. Obviously, I don’t want to be lulled at all while I’m driving. So sometimes I’ll play music loudly. I usually listen to WXPN as I’m leaving Philadelphia or as I’m arriving. I usually listen to NPR as I’m arriving in D.C. In between, I usually listen to podcasts, but sometimes I listen to music podcasts like WKCR, that’s the Columbia station. I’m forgetting the show’s name, but [there’s] a show where they pull things from the archive. It’s [Deep] Focus. There’ll be three episodes about Woody Shaw. I listened to that. I often will put on an album in the middle of my podcasts, but I don’t usually just listen to music the whole way.
There’s also a really good one you might like, it was during the pandemic, I think it was called Erroll Garner Uncovered. So Eroll Garner was a jazz pianist, incredibly interesting, not necessarily the stuff I choose to listen to by default, but I love the podcast because it was Robin Kelly, who’s a very eminent African American historian. Each episode he would have a jazz musician, [including] Jason Moran, Terri Lyne Carrington, I think Christian McBride, and he would listen to an Erroll Garner album with them, and they talk through it, and it was very much about what Errol Garner meant to them. It was about them interpreting his music with extremely tuned ears, and it was also about a really skillful historian putting the music in context. And I loved it because it was Rashomon-esque in a way; it was 12 takes on the same musician, obviously different albums. But definitely a really neat way to illuminate this person’s work and also made me appreciate it a lot more because it was often a little bit more of a popular version of jazz, but listening to people like Jason Moran talk about it, you appreciate how Erroll Gardner was actually very innovative and groundbreaking and there was a lot going on that was beyond what you see.
HD: Yeah, I’ll check it out! Do you ever listen to music when you’re working?
BG: Sometimes when I’m reading, I don’t ever write with music, but definitely with reading it can be helpful. It can keep me more alert and it also just sort of breaks the quiet of my days. I don’t ever write with music, though, I find that too much in my brain.
HD: I was thinking about the quietness after leaving college. Even if I go to the quiet section of the library now, there’s noise. [But after college] you can make the space very quiet or not, I guess. Being able to control that seems nice.
BG: If I’m writing, I spend a lot of time alone, which I don’t mind. But, reading, I don’t know, we’re all just very tired all the time. [laughing] So it’s helpful to have something on that keeps your brain a little less sleepy.
HD: Yeah, I find that I cycle through albums and when something is too familiar, I’m like, oh, I can’t read to it. And I’m already tapping my foot too much…
BG: I will say, if I’m reading, I can’t really listen to words. It has to be jazz or sometimes classical, but definitely words screw me up.
HD: That’s one reason why I find the radio really helpful because I’m not choosing it but it’s still curated and it’s going to be hopefully not super distracting.
BG: Yes, and I am not of the group of people who have stopped listening to the news. It’s just not my nature. And I also think NPR, which I’m a big fan of, actually is very good at giving a well-rounded radio show. It’s not just politics or whatever. It’s never one note. So I also really like the discovery of listening to a news magazine on the radio and often, you know, they do have music and, you know, it’s a good way to learn about things that you don’t already know.
When Susan Stanberg died a couple weeks ago, they talked about how she set up Weekend Edition as a radio version of the New York Times Sunday. I thought, you know, that really made a lot of sense. It has a puzzle, it has arts and culture. I like those kinds of things because they introduce you to, in this case, musicians that you may not have already known about.
HD: Okay, last question. What is a song or artist that you secretly or not love that might surprise your students?
BG: [laughing] I was a very ardent fan of The Roots in high school and college. I’ve probably seen them live 15 times maybe. The album Things Fall Apart came out when I was a senior in high school and is a masterpiece. The Roots were the band that you listened to and told other people about because they were cool and, you know, everyone else wasn’t, [laughing] which I’m not claiming was my identity in high school, but I really liked them. I think now in retrospect, there’s a jazziness to them. And actually Questlove did a jazz album a couple years later called The Philadelphia Experiment, lyrically complex, also a strong sense of place. I had never been to Philadelphia, but the idea of Philadelphia was very present in their music. So it’s been a little weird to see them become a very kind of normy pop culture thing through Jimmy Fallon and Questlove becoming this massive presence in culture. But, their live shows were one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen. I don’t listen to them as much now, but I still like rap and hip hop. I just listen to it less, and also in ways that are very conventional. I find hip hop has moved directions that I don’t find as interesting. Like it’s more commercial and I still listen to Kendrick Lamar and people like that, but The Roots remain kind of a touchstone.
HD: Yeah, my first association with The Roots was Fallon, growing up especially.
BG: I had mixed feelings when that happened. It was kind of like seeing your favorite fashion brand do a collaboration with Target or something. On one hand, you’re very happy for them. On the other hand, you’re kind of a little disappointed because you know that they are now in the world and they’ll never be the same again. And that’s true. I was reminding myself last night that I don’t think The Roots have actually had a studio album since 2014. But it also speaks to what we’ve talked about earlier, right? They’re figuring out how to gracefully find a different phase of your performing career that fits your life, right? And so when you’re in your 50s and have a family and want steady income, it makes sense. Touring is probably horrendously stressful and so I can understand the desire for it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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