Quiet luxuries

A short essay on music, wine and slowing down

I am the sort of person who listens to music all the time, but mostly in the wrong way. My average midweek day starts with the abrupt alarm on my phone – the wrong kind of noise, if ever there was one – followed by a quickly gulped coffee, manically figuring out what to wear, a dash of makeup, then rushing out of the front door. This is usually when I’ll be fumbling around with my wireless headphones, trying to get a song up, ready for hurtling down the hill to the station (at this time in the morning, there is a level of gravity involved). I usually make it just in time for the right train to take me into Central London, so I can arrive at work just in time. 

What song am I listening to? It doesn’t matter, as long as it is the right kind of noise for the moment, turned up loud enough to block out everything else around me. In these hurried moments, I’m not thinking about the song, the artist, the complex process of creation that lies between the two, the slow journey of becoming until the artist is finally able to breathe life into a song.

It is a different experience altogether, for instance, when I’m alone at the pottery wheel, and Leonard Cohen’s final album You Want It Darker plays in the background. Here, secluded from the noise of the city, the air thickens with Cohen’s presence. The question of his mortality – an artistic attempt to make sense of it, make light of it – emerges from the music in complex layers. Time warps. He is dying, dead, and very much alive, all at once. It’s deeply affecting. When the same songs appear during my bleary-eyed District Line journeys, I am utterly disconnected. Suddenly these songs – so full of beauty, humour and pathos – are just another facet of the machine. 

I am a terrible skipper. I often change songs halfway through, always after the next dopamine hit – something more exciting, catchier than the last song. The endless choice that Spotify presents is like a buffet of treats; I’m full but never satisfied. A sprinkle of Eurovision 2023, a touch of ’80s German pop, a blast of Noughties pop-punk. In between that, there are songs of great substance and artistry. I’m thinking of Nina Simone’s Wild is the Wind, Kate Bush’s Moving, John Martyn’s Don’t Want To Know – true masterpieces, pitifully reduced to rush-hour background noise. A means of blocking out the city’s riotous song.

At the end of the working day, the first glass of wine is a demand for slowness. It is impossible to drink wine quickly; it has a quality that asks you to savour it. Slowness is a quiet luxury (and I’m not talking about the type exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s cardigans). It’s the pleasure of curling up on the sofa with a generously filled glass – something light, fruity and red with a little spice for me, ideally – knowing you have the whole evening all to yourself, and nowhere to be but here and now.

Recently, we’ve taken to listening to vinyls again. The act of playing music aloud in this way makes you interact with it completely differently. Gone is the conveyor belt of algorithm-churned treats. The frenetic urgency and dopamine quest disappears, and in its place, a slower kind of pleasure appears – building, ebbing, drawing you in, making you feel something. The song is a bridge between the musician and the listener; slowness allows the path to re-emerge in sight.

In a similar way, I think of wine as a portal of sorts, connecting the drinker to the seasons of the vintage, the hands that tended the grapes, the ground from which the vine grows. The vision of the winemaker as artist. There’s great joy in sharing a bottle with friends, being so swept up in conversation that we barely notice the wine – it’s a great facilitator in that way. But there’s a different kind of gratification in slowing down to allow something deeper, woven into the liquid, to rise to the surface. Like music, the best sort of wines are the ones that are capable of making you feel something (and not just a bit wobbly on your feet). Every once in a while, it’s worth slowing down to listen to them sing.