Fifty-Two Fridays

Ten things a year of letters taught me about listening, and about the people who still do it

By Rafi Mercer

The house is still dark when the first side goes down. It's a little after five, the hour I've kept for most of the last two years. The record does what records do at that time of the morning: it fills the room slowly, from the floor up, before anything else in the day has started. The coffee comes later. For now there is the needle, the low hiss before the first note, and a blank page with a Friday at the end of it.

In a fortnight that Friday will be the fifty-second. One letter a week, every week, for a year. By then a little over five thousand people will open it. I didn't plan that number any more than I planned the letter, or the site behind it, or the book that grew out of both. Most of what has happened here happened because something was already in the room and I stopped long enough to notice it.

So rather than a list of highlights, which would mostly be numbers, here are the things the year has taught me. Ten of them. Some I suspected. Some I had to learn twice.

The first is that listening comes before everything else. I didn't read or write properly until my mid-teens, so I learnt the world by ear long before I learnt it on paper. I've built Tracks & Tales on that same order without quite meaning to. Listen first. Then read. Then look. Then, if you must, watch. It sounds like a small thing. It turns out to be the whole thing.

The second is that the bars were the doorway, not the room. I set out to write about listening bars, those dim, careful spaces in Tokyo and London and New York where the record matters more than the conversation. They're still here, and still loved. But somewhere in the first few months it became clear that what people were looking for wasn't a venue. It was permission. Permission to sit down with an album, all of it, in the right order, and give it an evening.

The third is that a letter only works if it's written to one person. Five thousand is a large number. It's also an abstraction, and you can't write to an abstraction. So every Friday I write to one reader, the way I'd write to a friend I hadn't seen in a while. Hello there. The list grows; the letter doesn't. One is enough. That has been the discipline, and I suspect it's the reason people write back.

The fourth is that length is a gift, not a cost. Everything here is written to take somewhere between three and six minutes, an uncomfortable amount of time to ask of anyone now. I chose it because attention is a muscle, and muscles only grow under a little strain. The algorithms ask for seconds. We ask for minutes. It's a gentle rebellion against the system, hard to see from the inside, but it adds up.

The fifth is that every city listens differently. People have found their way here from 171 countries and more than six thousand cities, and what has surprised me isn't the reach. It's how differently they hear. I learnt this first in the Virgin buyers' office in the nineties, when Cesária Évora's Miss Perfumado came on and stayed with me, and later I found myself in Lisbon, opening a shop, discovering that the city's pace and its calm made complete sense against a record I'd already lived with. You can know a place before you arrive. The right album gets there first.

The sixth is that not everything is for everyone. Each Listening Club session is meant to be something unexpected, a record you might not have reached for on your own. That means some months someone decides it isn't for them, and leaves. I find that hard. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But a room that tries to please everybody ends up sounding like nobody, and I'd rather keep the room honest.

The seventh is that disagreement is more interesting than agreement. The New York bars that set all of this in motion worked because young and old, rich and poor, cool and ordinary sat in the same room, and the room needed every one of them. Taste works the same way. Put Miles Davis, Massive Attack and Radiohead side by side and people lean in, precisely because they don't fit. When everything agrees, nobody listens. No one place. No one rule.

The eighth is that the best ideas are already in the room. The book is the clearest example. It began with no cover at all. Then it had one. Then the Listening Club started, the people watching the sessions sent back their own thoughts, and the book grew to hold more of them. Then it took on a colour. Then a dot, which I only later recognised as the centre of a record. None of that was designed. It was noticed.

The ninth is that giving things away changes the conversation. Each week the record from The Listening Album goes to whoever wants it; they cover the postage, and that's all. Every copy of the book leaves with a note in my handwriting. And lately the letters have started coming back the other way: readers telling me their home listening city, where they found their first album, the record that stayed. Some tell me they've passed the letter on. That exchange has become the most valuable thing here, and it can't be bought.

The tenth is simply to turn up at the same hour. Most of what you see here was made between five and eight in the morning, alone, an album a day, for momentum rather than nostalgia. Around four hundred days of writing without stopping to ask whether it was good enough. Not every morning produced something worth keeping. But the mornings themselves were worth keeping, and the work came out of them.

The first side has finished now. There's that small silence while the arm lifts and the room adjusts to being quiet again, the same silence every Listening Club session is built around. It won't be light for a while yet. Somewhere ahead there's a Friday, the fifty-second, written to one person.

I'll turn the record over.

What is the Tracks & Tales Friday letter?

A weekly email from Rafi Mercer, written as a letter to a single reader rather than a broadcast. Each one carries a Listening Album, a listening city and the quieter corners of music culture, and readers are invited to write back with their own stories and one album recommendation. It's free to join.

What happens in a Listening Club session?

On the last Sunday of every month, one album is played on vinyl from start to finish, opening without words, hosted by Rafi on a private channel and archived for members. Each session's listening sequence is also published on streaming services for those who'd rather listen without the video.

What is a listening bar?

A bar or room built around careful listening to recorded music, usually on vinyl through a serious sound system, where the record matters more than the conversation. The tradition grew from Japan's jazz kissa and now runs through cities from Tokyo to London to New York.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe or click here to read more.

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.