The Headphone Session

Ninety minutes. One album each. No skipping.

There’s a particular kind of listening that requires good headphones and the willingness to actually sit still for it. This is that. You each bring one album — something you want the other person to hear in full, in order, the way it was meant — and you listen to it together. Then you talk about it. Then you listen to theirs.

The rules are simple and they’re the whole point. No shuffling. No skipping. No talking during, except for a hand on an arm if something hits. You listen to the whole thing.

Get a splitter and a pair of decent headphones each — or one good pair of over-ear headphones and take turns (a Y-splitter runs under $10; the experience is better than speaker playback for this format because it’s more interior, more committed). The physical act of putting headphones on and sharing a cord or a device does something to the dynamic. You’re both inside the same sound at the same time.

Choose your album with more care than you’d use for a playlist. Pick something you love and want explained — the album where your taste got weird, or the one from your teenage years that you’ve never quite been able to describe to someone, or the one you’ve been listening to on repeat for three weeks and want another person inside of with you. The point is revelation, not performance.

After each album, before you put on the next: tell the other person one thing. A lyric, a moment, a reason you picked it. Something that costs a little to say. This is the part that turns a music-listening session into something closer to a conversation.

What you learn about someone from the album they pick is reliable in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s not the same as asking someone about their taste. It’s something else — closer to watching them in a room where they think no one’s paying attention.

Find your local equivalent

This one lives anywhere you have a comfortable place to sit and a way to share audio. The gear involved is genuinely minimal. A splitter. Two sets of earbuds or over-ear headphones. A phone or a laptop with Spotify or Apple Music or whatever you both have. That’s the whole setup. The album you pick is where the investment is.

Some albums that tend to work

Carole King’s Tapestry holds up in full in a way almost no other record from that era does. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is better listened to straight through than in pieces. Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call is about heartbreak in a way that doesn’t feel like a cliché. Radiohead’s OK Computer, still. Whatever album changed how you understood music when you were nineteen: that one. The other person doesn’t need to have heard it before. Actually, it’s better if they haven’t.

listening  ·  staying-in  ·  any-stage  ·  music  ·  headphones  ·  album  ·  intentional  ·  intimate  ·  revelation  ·  no-screens

The whole thing hinges on a cheap little splitter. A couple dollars on Amazon.