Tag: faculty interview

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.

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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.

By Maddy Posner //

Visiting Assistant Professor Anton Svynarenko teaches Russian at Swarthmore, with a research focus on modern languages and literatures and background in queer theory and childhood narratives. On a windy afternoon, I sat down with Professor Svynarenko to discuss why you shouldn’t meet your idols, the underrated supremacy of Joanna Newsom, how Starbucks desecrates indie music, and so much more. Our very own videographer Zephyr Weinreich recorded the majority of our conversation, which will be posted on our Instagram for your viewing pleasure. 

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Maddy Posner: For the first question today, which artists or bands shaped your college years? 

Anton Svynarenko: Well, in college, I did little else. I mostly listened to music. So it won’t be an easy choice. I guess the first one I have to name would be The Smiths, because they were kind of the lingua franca, you know? Everyone I wanted to talk to spoke that language, or at least it was the most likely language to be spoken by people I wanted to talk to. It was like the Smiths had a kind of unifying force. And I actually saw Morrissey for the first time, about a month ago at the Met, and I was kind of on the fence before I got my ticket. But I thought, no, I owe it to him, and he walked out on stage with a bunch of daffodils and he had the audacity to open with “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” And I just burst into tears and I would never, never look back. The Smiths are precious and I think they mean something to everyone who is to any extent, honest with themselves. Then I have to name a band that’s just for me, that was a personal and jealously guarded act, and that would probably have to be the Go Betweens, this Australian band that I adore, that I consider kind of my own, and I share them very reluctantly. They never made it big, and they had one song that could be considered a hit, “The Streets of Your Town,” and I was once at Starbucks, and I heard a cover of [it], and it sounded like Starbucks. And I felt kind of violated. No, they should not be as famous. But they are very near and dear to me, and they continue to color all the periods of my life. There is no life without them. And then the third one, let’s say Love, because their album Forever Changes is my go-to answer when people ask me “What’s your favorite album?” You know, at first dates and such. So, yeah, my default is Forever Changes. It’s, I think, the greatest album of the ’60s, and that’s saying a lot. And it’s a very gentle, soft, psychedelic folk album that does a lot of what the 60s were known for, but also it does it in such an idiosyncratic, such an anxious and dark way that no one else could even approximate. 

MP: Great. Okay, the second question is: do you listen to music of different languages? And if so, how is the experience of listening to music different as its language differs?

AS: I try to listen to as much music and different languages as I can, but I still don’t do it enough. I think the second most listened to language in my catalogue would be French and Portuguese would be the close third. I’m really into Brazilian music, Tropicalia and whatnot. But I have to admit that I do not trust myself to love a song without understanding at least the gist of the lyrics. So every time I encounter a new album by a French or Brazilian or whatever artist – or Japanese, would probably be my fourth – I run the lyrics through Google Translate at least, just to kind of orient myself. And I only have to do it once. Then I’m in the clear. But yeah, I’m still a kind of verbally dependent person, words are my stock-in-trade. So I got to know.

MP: Yeah, that’s very fair. You basically already answered this question with your prior answer, but I’m going to ask it quickly anyway. When you first listen to a song, is it the words or the melody that have primacy? I’m particularly interested in this idea.

AS: Well, it is a trick question, is it not? It’s kind of like when students show up to my office hours and ask me, is form or content more important? I cannot separate the two and I wouldn’t advise anyone to try. But as I say, I’m a man of words, I do it for a living, and I always at least partially rely on lyrics. I’m very forgiving of lyrics when it comes to that, but still, I am not indifferent to them. And also, just as a little kind of personal tidbit, I grew up in the 90s in a newly post Soviet Ukraine, and my access to music was extremely limited. We just wouldn’t get any decent music in my mid-sized town in Eastern Europe because the original CDs from, let’s say, America or the UK, were prohibitively expensive and no one really bothered to import them, and the bootleggers, the pirates, they knew there was not enough demand, so it wasn’t worth their while to make bootleg copies of those decent albums. So my initiation into music occurred through reading and through writing, because what we did have access to were some Moscow based music journals, magazines, newspapers, all kinds of print media. So before I heard, I don’t know, Tom Waits or P.J. Harvey, of whom you would not think of as obscure artists, but they were virtually impossible to find in my hometown. So long before I heard them, I read all of those reviews and I kind of fell in love with their music, with my vision, with my ideas of music, through someone’s writing and through the act of my reading. So I think that also left a kind of imprint in the end. I am beholden to the linguistic part of music forever. 

MP: That’s beautiful. Do you see parallels between your literary and/or philosophical interests and the kind of music you’re drawn to? 

AS: Perhaps not immediately, like they’re not immediately apparent. There are some parallels, I guess, that are amusingly incidental. For example, the Go Betweens. My personal favorite, the band that I am so reluctant to share with the undeserving crowd. They have a song on what turned out to be their last album, Oceans Apart, and it’s the first song called “Here Comes the City,” and it contains one of my all time favorite lyrics: “Why do people who read Dostoyevsky look like Dostoyevsky?” And it’s a question I have also pondered a lot. Or, I don’t know, my go-to favorite song, also by the Go-Betweens, would probably have to be “Cattle and Cane,” and it’s a piercingly nostalgic song of growing up in the middle of nowhere in Australia. I am very much invested academically in different conceptions of childhood, I’ll be teaching a whole course on literary depictions of childhood. So there are those kinds of echoes that I don’t think can be formalized or systematized in any way, but they are present and if you look for connections, you can establish them. I am very fond of minimalism in writing. I don’t always teach it, but that’s a whole other conversation. But as a reader, as a book lover, right, I tend to prefer writers who are very kind of stylistically austere and, I don’t know, in Russian, I’m one of those assholes who, when someone asked them, “Are you a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person?” I say, “I’m a Chekhov person,” right? Because no one has ever thought of bending the rules like that before. I write a lot about this Russian writer, Leonid Dobychin, who is also very, very minimalist, very kind of bare bones. So if we take that as our point of departure, yeah, I listened to a lot of music that also seems to be as kind of constrained and doing so much with less. Like, I don’t know, Galaxie 500 or Young Marble Giants, a terrific band that a few people remember, they only put out one album. But I think that album is basically like a Raymond Carver story or something. So, yeah, you could do that, you could kind of push that square peg into that wrong hole, but they kind of organically flow out of one out of the other. 

MP: Really quick, follow-up question based on that. Do you grade your students’ essays better when they’re sparser or more simplistic? 

AS: So simplistic is a word that I would grade down for…Yeah, I appreciate elegance, I appreciate sparseness and yeah, opulence, I think, is harder to earn in one’s writing. It can be done, right? But like it’s a tall order to to make your paper worthy of its ornaments. 

Zephyr Weinreich: Typically Swarthmore students specialize in brevity. 

MP: If you could design a literary course around an album, which album would it be and why?

AS: Okay I actually have an answer to that question that I didn’t need to doubt or second guess. It would be any album by this band called 16 Horsepower. They only had four albums, so maybe either their first “Sackcloth ‘n’ Ashes” or their last “Folklore,” doesn’t matter. It’s a Southern Gothic band, although they come from Colorado of all places. But I have a soft spot for Southern Gothic literature, and they would just pair up so nicely with all the American Lit that I never get to teach because I teach Russian Lit. But I’ve always been a fan, I grew up reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and so all of those people are kind of my literary idols. I think the music of 16 Horsepower as a perfect sonic equivalent of what they do in their literary work. So, yeah, that would be a very dark and funny class, I think.

MP: If you could host a dinner with three musicians, living or dead, who would you invite and who would the soundtrack be? Challenge: One of the three has to be one of the three that aren’t in your top three bands.

AS: Oh, I definitely would not invite Morrissey to my dinner party. No, he’s so hard to please menu wise. Okay, so Jonathan Richman. Hands down. That’s the most kind of personable, companionable, amicable musician I know, he already feels like a friend, I think, to know him is to love him, to listen to him, is to befriend him. There is just no other relationship possible between him and his listener. Then I would choose Laurie Anderson, an old, wise and wise cracking lady, Lou Reed’s widow, who is just a tremendous musician in her own right, and she always has a treasure trove of anecdotes to tell and the way she tells them in her music – as well as in her performance art and in her filmmaking – the way she tells those anecdotes is such that they all are effortlessly turned into poetry, and any little trivia bit that she shares becomes a haiku, and I just venerate the woman. And then the third one – oh, I would invite Chris Knox, of one of my favorite bands, not from Australia, but from New Zealand, Tall Dwarfs. Also very little known, undeservedly so. He has fallen on some hard times, he had a stroke and there are benefits thrown for him every once in a while, so I think he could use a good meal. And also, if they don’t know him already, maybe if he meets Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Richman, they could collaborate or at least help him out somehow. So I think they would all get along famously. And also Jonathan Richman is really handsome, that doesn’t hurt either. And the soundtrack, well, I would play Tall Dwarfs to convince Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Richman to lend a hand to Chris. 

MP: That’s very gracious of you to want to help him out in your dinner. Give us some music related reading recommendations. Ideally fiction, and maybe throw in a nonfiction if you have one.

AS: Number one, that would be Long Players by Peter Coviello. Pete was one of my professors in grad school. He’s a 19th century Americanist, he mostly writes about Henry James and Melville, but somehow, being really prolific and just hardworking, he squeezed in a personal memoir called Long Players, published a few years ago, about his tenure at Bowdoin and the dissolution of his family and [how] his friends also became family in the wake of that personal collapse. So each chapter is narrated through a song, and it is just heartbreakingly beautiful, and it is also a marvelous testament to music as precisely an instrument of memory and an instrument that grants life cohesion. Pete taught me a lot about academic stuff, more than most people. But he also taught me a lot about music, and thanks to him, I don’t think I discovered a lot of bands, but he did something even more valuable. He taught me how to love bands that I had heard, and I knew I wanted to love more, but couldn’t bring myself to. So, for example, Superchunk. I always kind of had felt some affinity, but then he really kind of brought it home for me. Number two, Marianne Faithfull. I adore Marianne Faithfull, and she sadly passed away earlier this year, and that was when I finally picked up her memoir called, simply, Faithfull. It is just a breathtaking account of the British 60s, of Swinging London, and it is rife with anecdotes, with stories about everyone and their brother from Mick Jagger – whom she dated for a few years – to Bob Dylan, whom she only saw a couple of times, but all those anecdotes are just priceless and the tone of her voice is completely inimitable. She’s just the coolest woman that ever lived. It’s a manual on coolness, that memoir. She had a really tough life and she did a lot of drugs, but not in the way that musicians sometimes do, she was homeless for a while. And so she is really steadfast, she’s really a staunch in her refusal to sentimentalize her addiction or her entire past, which kind of encapsulates the entire rock and roll lifestyle with all its excesses and indulgences, and the toll taken by [them]. But at the same time she refuses to deny that, you know, it was a great deal of fun to be there at that particular moment in time. It’s a terrific book, and in her coolness, she ends it with a little recipe. She says, even if you regret having read my book, even if you think that you have not learned anything, here is something to make it worth your while. Here’s how I make lemon chicken or something. So she was another hero of mine, and she’s a very versatile musician, but also a really kind of sharp-witted writer. 

ZW: Could we get a fiction work?

AS: One of the most regrettable decisions in my life was reading Bob Dylan’s novel, Tarantula. I like his Chronicles, I don’t think he’s an outstanding prose writer. His novel was just kind of college writing at its most pompous and I’m afraid I would have to say pretentious. Really, really sophomoric stuff. So, yeah, maybe I could, if I could get away with a piece of advice, don’t, you know, don’t meet your idols, don’t read your idols. At least not Bob Dylan. Actually, I have a counterexample. Leonard Cohen. I read both of his novels and they are both pretty great, especially The Favourite Game. Yes. So no, Cohen could do it all. Dylan cannot.

MP: What song would you choose as the theme for your life right now?

AS: Right now? “Antenna” by Sonic Youth. I’ll explain, if I may. So it’s a song. It’s the highlight of their last album, The Eternal. And I had been putting that album off for years, if not decades, because I knew it was the last Sonic Youth album before they broke up. So all these years, I subsisted on the illusion that I still had one more Sonic Youth album left and that meant that they had not broken up. That meant that there was still some kind of imaginary future for one of my favorite bands. And I’ve been a Die Hard fan since, well, ever since I can remember. So I’ve finally, I don’t know, I don’t remember what motivated me to give that album a listen, but now I am kind of basking in it and I’m protracting it. I’m trying to make it last because then I will have no more Sonic Youth left, and who wants to live in a world with no Sonic Youth.

MP: Did you just listen to this recently for the first time?

AS: A couple of months ago, yeah. And now I’m kind of hung up on it, especially the song “Antenna,” which is Sonic Youth at its most wistful and least abrasive. They are in their Thousand Leaves mode more than, I don’t know, Daydream Nation. So, yeah, I’m not letting that one go for a while. 

MP: I had a more specific question I wanted to ask. In a recent class, you referenced spending a long while trekking across California and New York. You framed it as being inferior to teaching Crime and Punishment. Who would you say composed the soundtrack of that time of your life?

AS: Well, lately, I’ve been on a massive Joan Shelley kick, Joan Shelley is also a contemporary musician, it turns out like a lot of contemporary music. She is exactly my age, actually. And I saw her live a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine from Swarthmore. And he had not heard her music ever before. So when I asked him afterwards, how did you like it? He said, I would put my head on her shoulder. And there was nothing remotely sexual about it, but her music is just so comforting, so soothing, so kind of nurturing that it is a perfectly legitimate reaction to elicit. She is a very talented songwriter whose music is kind of modest and unassuming, but also very richly detailed, if you know where to look for it. And speaking of, you know, friendships, imaginary friendships with musicians, I think she’s one of my kind of gal pals. I mean, we’ve never even talked. But she started putting out albums the year I moved to the States and kind of, you, started my career here. And I saw her live in Chicago years ago, and she while her opening act played she was just hanging out in the room, and she was in the back of the room, so when it was her time to go on, she had to like push through the crowd and she kept saying, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, but, you know, I’m the headliner. I’m going to play the show that you bought your tickets for.” And all of that, just contributes to this personal connection that I feel to her and, yeah, she has eight albums and over the past couple of months, I’ve listened to all of them, like countless times. I didn’t want to leave her side, to, like, part company with her. Yeah, so, yeah, Joan Shelley, terrific singer songwriter from Kentucky. I think they moved to Michigan. Her husband is also in her band. So, yeah, next time she’s in Philly. Check her out. 

MP: Okay, I will have to. Is there a particular song or artist you would urge everyone, especially your students, to listen to.

AS: So, number one…. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Why? Because Swarthmore students are all so smart and they are going to get smarter and they may lose their capacity to appreciate simple, dumb, angry music. So I think they should jump at that opportunity. That train is leaving the station, right? While you can still enjoy punk rock, enjoy your punk rock. Okay, number two, I don’t think a lot of students realize how open-minded and tolerant – musically speaking – they currently are. The human mind ossifies, grows rigid, and I am 40 years old now, and I know that I only need my perfectly crafted, three minute pop songs, and I don’t want to overwhelm myself with any experimental stuff. So while you still can, once again, while your hearts are spacious and welcoming and your minds are nimble, listen to some weird out there stuff, and my personal recommendation would be Robert Wyatt, especially his 1974 masterpiece, Rock Bottom, which I think is a very nice entry point for kind of proggy, jazzy, soundscapy, kind of music, because it also contains gut wrenchingly beautiful melodies. My mom, for example, who is 67, and has pretty orthodox taste in music, adores this album. So if she can do it, so can you. And then number three would be The Replacements, because I think that even when they were very young, and they started out very young, probably younger than most Swarthmore students, they already were kind of wise beyond their years and they already saw themselves and their peers from a kind of anachronistic distance, from the future. As Paul Westerberg grew older, he remained kind of perpetually interested in what it means to be young, and interested in it without any condescension. If you wanted a punch line, The Replacements are the band that I believe understands youth, the best of all, and the band that is most respectful of youth as a category, as a concept. 

MP: And don’t we all want that? Okay, thank you so much for those recommendations. I will be listening, and our entire audience should. Of the music that the kids are listening to these days, what appeals to you the most? What appeals to you the least?

AS: What do you listen to these days? I’m always relieved when I find out that my students are listening to something that I’m familiar with. I recently was talking to a friend of mine about new music and how we’re all screwed and how music is over and of course I agreed for the most part. We had a good run. Now is the time, I think, to catch up. There is no need to make new music. And we have plenty to revive, to rediscover, to revisit . . . but to finish up that story, I was talking to my friend and he asked me, what was the last album that you heard and you thought, okay, this was an old-timer. This is a keeper, right? And I said, well, that would have to be Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens, which to me – that conversation took place maybe a couple of months ago – that almost still feels new. And then I went to Pitchfork and decided to read their review of Carrie & Lowell and I discovered that they had already reviewed the 10th anniversary special edition of that album, and it was reviewed on a Sunday, you know, when they do those kind of retrospective . . . So it is already a kind of stone cold classic, but I’m not even sorry to say that I have not really kept up because every time I try to, I don’t really know what’s going on, but every time I try to rectify that, I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know, what is going on? What I do know is I really strongly dislike those algorithms and playlists. No, music is meant to be listened to in album form, as God intended, and also exchanged between friends and we should not delegate that beautiful duty of connection to a machine. Who are you cheating, right? No, you should discover your favorite band from a friend or a wannabe friend, or from someone who is desperately in love with you, or maybe even from a professor, right? But not from an algorithm.

MP:  I would agree that sites such as Instagram and other online platforms have made [music] less intimate, made it less meaningful, made it feel more random and absurd. But I would also argue that in striving to make or discover the music of [my] age and generation, there would be something really important and something really valuable in that, especially given the ways that the Internet and technology has, in many ways, deconstructed the way that music is, quote unquote, meant to be disseminated or discovered. Because there is no “meant to.” I mean, there’s the one that you know and the one that, like, older generations are accustomed to.

AS: I know. Then, okay, then let me rephrase. Less like an old fart, let me put it this way. Don’t – if I’m here to, you know, give out advice – don’t limit yourself to what goes viral, right? Which, by the way, is something, the one thing that, if I have to name one thing that I appreciate, that would be those sudden instances of those resurgences, that, for example, that strange Kate Bush renaissance, that took place recently because of some viral fluke. A lot of music that I grew up loving is making a comeback and through these platforms that I don’t really care for, right? But, you know, desperate times. We can’t be too picky. I went to a Slowdive show last year, I think, and there were people with their parents. They were all kids. They were all kids and Slowdive were active in the early 90s, right? Well, then they reunited. So I’m all for that. Whatever it takes. If it’s TikTok, that brings Pavement back, well, okay, fantastic. I’d rather it were things were different, but you can’t be too choosy. So that is wonderful. However, I would urge our many listeners and readers to not confine themselves to Spotify because, first of all, not everything is on Spotify. You might think that everything is – no, a lot of it is, but not everything. And, you know, just go to your local record store and rummage through the crates, fish out a completely forgotten, obscure, soul record issued by Stax Records or Motown or a much smaller much less renowned label, just grab it and run. I mean, pay for it. Right, but there are scenes that are just so reliable that you cannot go wrong and that opens up your horizons, right? And I assure you that this garage band from 1965, that disbanded in 1966, and hailed from some one horse town in South Carolina, right? They are probably musically much more exhilarating than whatever got a 9.2 on Pitchfork last week. Okay, that’s my spiel.

MP: Thank you for the spiel. Are lyrics literature? Whose lyrics have, in your opinion, the greatest literary merit?

AS: Yeah, of course they are. That’s a no brainer to me. That doesn’t mean that they can or should be read apart from their respective music, right? I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but where they are, where they belong in their proper musical context, of course. Okay… Joni Mitchell. There are days, and they are not rare, when I listen to, let’s say, Hejira or The Hissing of Summer Lawns or Court and Spark or Blue, basically any album from her stellar run between Ladies of the Canyon and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and I think to myself, okay, she is not just on par with the likes of Dylan and Cohen, she is actually superior to them. Then, number two, let’s do a little plug for Joanna Newsom, who is not on Spotify and therefore virtually unknown to the younger generation. She’s contemporary and yet already forgotten. Yeah, I don’t think anyone in her, our, generation can hold a candle to her, lyrically or musically, for that matter. She is up there with, I don’t know, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell and so on and so forth. And then, let’s keep it consistent, let’s think of a third woman, Liz Phair. I love Liz Phair and I think she was one of the greatest and insufficiently acclaimed lyricists of the whole 90s indie rock scene, and she can be very crass, but not in an ostentatious way. Like she never . . . she knows how to swear. She knows how to put profanity to good evocative use. And even in her filthiest songs, she is always gently, tenderly, poignantly, profane. And I think that’s a very rare skill.

MP: Thank you so much for meeting with us today. It’s been really great talking to you.

AS: Thank you. Oh, it was such a relief after all those meetings.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.