Soul Music

Soul Music is a Radio 4 series that follows a song out of the speakers and into the lives it has attached itself to. Its recent titles read like a mixed playlist: 'Make You Feel My Love', 'Cranes in the Sky by Solange', 'Yellow by Coldplay', 'Porcelain by Moby' and 'Bésame Mucho'. That covers ground from Bob Dylan to Solange, and from Coldplay to a love song written by a Mexican woman in Mexico. What holds it together is method. Contributors say who they are, then go straight to the moment the music landed. Jogula, a First Nations composer and artist living on Gadigal land in Sydney, remembers hearing Bob Dylan's song on the car radio with mum and describes it wrapping its arms around the listener. The background comes too: singing lessons from a grandmother, Pamela Herring, years of classical training, many languages, and no pop songs allowed. Doug Markowitz, a journalist raised in South Florida, sets 'Cranes in the Sky' in the Miami of 2008, a city in the middle of a boom-and-bust cycle of towers and speculation. Dylan Bode first heard Coldplay at eight, lonely after a big move, and describes the words of 'Yellow' surfacing again years later as he came out and went through an upheaval with the church that left him feeling kicked out. Felicia Narhe, also known as DJ Damselfly, traces a lifelong musical taste back to an Uncle Peter and the electronic music studio in his attic. Peter and Felicia's dad had played in an industrial band together in the 1980s. Music journalist Steve O'Brien adds the record's history: 'Porcelain' was the sixth single from Play. That balance is the point. In 'Bésame Mucho', the title is glossed as kiss me much, or kiss me passionately, and the song is heard as one long swoon with a hint of sadness to come. A commentator ties it to the densely chromatic Broadway writing of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen, then follows the melody as it climbs, peaks and settles. The same episode holds a passage of stark grief, as a speaker addresses someone loved and lost and chooses, out loud, to keep living. Soul Music at 25, a compilation introduced by Keris Matthews, marks a quarter of a century of these stories by arranging them as a journey through a lifetime. In it, one woman recalls around five years of IVF, a playlist carried to the clinic, and Bill Withers' 'Lovely Day' playing when she held her newborn daughter in the morning sun. The register is intimate and plainspoken, closer to a letter than a lecture. What a listener takes away is a familiar song heard fresh, through someone else's memory of it.