Although I’m a semi-professional musician, most days, I listen to far less music than my friends. I generally work in silence, cook in silence, run in silence. When I do listen to music, usually in the evening, I give it my full attention. Everybody is different, and different kinds of music work well in different contexts, but I can’t help feeling that anyone who doesn’t sometimes listen to music the way I do is missing out.

The way I do it is like this: lying on my back, wearing headphones, from an MP3 player rather than a smartphone/computer, usually in the evening in bed, after I have put down my book, but before I will be able to sleep, with, if possible, nothing on my mind.

Most good music has a story. Sometimes, a song can have multiple stories, depending on what you bring to it. I like to place my mind on the melody, the the needle of a record player placed in the groove, and stick to it and see where it takes me. Melodies are stories, and I’m a sucker for stories. Song lyrics are also often stories. And a good story isn’t just the story that’s told: it’s all the other stories that have the same shape, and the story of the negative space of what isn’t said.

Most stories are like fractals, and implied in the scale perceived is the resonance of the micro and macrocosm that have the same shape.

But even if you aren’t interested in stories, lyrical or melodic, there are good reasons to listen this way. There’s so much to hear in a good song! There’s no way I could absorb it all in one pass through, or with it on in the background. I can listen to a song dozens or hundreds of times, and still be surprised when I really hear one part for the first time.

(For more on this theme, see The Joy of Selective Attention.)

I have my music collection organized into four parts: the stuff I’m tired of or never really liked (which stays in cold storage), an “inbox” of things to check out, a collection of songs that do something really well that I could learn from but which aren’t really my thing, and then my active collection of songs that have turned my crank before. I usually start from the inbox (explore), and end with my main collection, or a specific playlist from my main collection (exploit).

If there’s a new album from an artist I like, I try to listen to it in one sitting, without multi-tasking. I still remember the day I did that with Oliver Schroer’s Hymns and Hers, and David Francey’s The Breath Between, and in my rap phase, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — and with Leonard Bernstein’s version of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which I later heard wasn’t even the best one — and was richly rewarded.

I like using playlists, but depending on how the day has gone, which songs affect me varies widely. But I can usually tell which song I need to hear within a few seconds. So I find that a playlist of a few hundred songs, all of which I have moved or inspired or amused me sometimes, is the right balance of being able to find the song for the moment, without spending too much time clicking fast-forward. And there’s something about (pseudo) randomness delivering me musical deliverance that I like. Sometimes, the song that would be just the thing is one that I wouldn’t have chosen, if the choice had been mine.

Although I prefer to listen to songs that are good (according to me) through-and-through, there are songs that I listen to just for one word. I’m a connoisseur of grittily-enunicated filler “yeah”s. The rest of the lyrics might be dumb, but the sound of that careless British “yeah” in The Cars’ Just What I Wanted is hard to beat. (Ziggy Marley’s Circle of Peace also features an exceptional yeah.) I’ll also listen to music for the electric guitar tone (I have yet to hear an overdrive crunchier than Green Day), or the bass solo (Bakithi Kumalo on You Can Call Me Al, the breakdown in Miracles out of Nowhere), or the snare tone, or the storytelling (Dispatch’s The General), or fragments of poetry (“with his eyes he said he loved them” in Circles Around the Sun), or the associations with a particular time of my life

Listening to music like this is less like sitting in front of a TV, and more like a choose-your-own-adventure game. It requires sustained attention. I know it’s an active process, because if I’m really tired, to the point that my mind wanders and my heart feels sodden, then it doesn’t work. If I don’t bring anything to it, I don’t get anything from it. Such is life.