Deep Listening Framework

Clandestine quantum energy, mindfulness, somatics, radical self-love, alternative anti-capitalist economics… you know, and music

This post is to give an overview of my simple methodology for discovering more music to be obsessed over, current unfair systems be damned.

How?

By remembering how to listen. By remembering who we are.

Today, most people are using streaming as their primary method to listen to music — every song in the world available at the touch of your finger yet still people are feeling disengaged with their listening… how is this possible?

The paradox of choice has turned many people into lean back listeners, people who have outsourced all the decision-making about what they like and prefer to algorithms, curated playlists, and AI so they can tune music to the background, set their day to a “mood” and move on¹.

But the essence of who you are as a person, as a spirit, as a soul, resides in the nuances of what moves you and turns you on. It can’t be outsourced. If you are feeling dull, bored, or disconnected with your music, it is likely because you are not in full contact with how you listen. You might be floating nearby to who you truly are, close by but not landed, hovering but not fully embodied and not yet fully in charge.

The benefits to getting reconnected to a catalogue of music that lights you up and turns you on is not just a more groovy playlist to bop to, it is a reignition to your personal vitality.

When you are in contact with what is interesting, curious, fascinating, beautiful, exciting, passion-provoking, sensual, and playful within you — and you likewise understand what turns you off, what you find ugly, repulsive, dissatisfying, offensive, disgusting — then you have the necessary components to start making bold choices in your life.

Exposing the weird matrix that makes you you — learning to see, appreciate, embrace, and ultimately radically love and accept yourself is revolutionary.

Not what the Grammys say you should like. Or Sony or Universal. Or MTV or the Radio or Spotify. Not your mama or your papa. Your friends or your lovers. Not your enemies or country.

You.

What do you like?

That is the quest we are on.

It will require that you begin paying attention, examining, and possibly adjusting some of your behaviors that may have been systemically overridden by services proclaiming to be convenient.

My methodology is simply, fun, and works like flowing down the river of how our brains naturally want to work instead of trying to struggle cognitively upstream.

How it works — An Overview

The Deep Listening framework is super simple, I’ll outline the steps below for you to follow along but Tip 2 and 3 on repeat and really at the heart of it all. It is a combination of clandestine quantum energy, mindfulness, somatics, radical self-love, alternative anti-capitalist economics… you know, and music.

Tip 1 — Know the Platform

Most people are using streaming platforms to listen to music — Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube top among them. In the workshop, I go over some tips and background on Spotify specifically because 1) I am a user 2) they have recently come into the news for some shady practices* that may end up being copy-catted industry-wide that may be impacting your listening experience.

I am holding vision for an alternative way to engage with music that includes a reorientation of these tools, but for now this is part of the matrix and I am using it as the tool that it is.

The most important thing you for you to understand about streaming platforms if you are a user is that they are in the business of risk-management, their business is not in showing you exceptional and novel recommendations that will blow your mind. They can only show you so many weird things before you, as a user, get frustrated and quit their service. To keep you happily paying your subscription fees, they instead serve you up what statistically they can prove you have already enjoyed in the past.

This makes for pretty boring listening — imagine if your whole life worked this way, only offering you opportunities to attempt things you’d already proved you were good at — you would be stuck in cycles of predictability, boredom, and the perception of safety but never growing or expanding.

If you want to break out of that limiting paradigm, you’re gonna have to do some things to teach the algorithm that you are not a flight-risk. Now, you might be a flight risk because they’re corporate douchebags and you don’t want to give them one more cent…I leave that to you — but as a tool, it really is one of the most incredible ways to discover new music if you know how to use it.

Streaming is one small part of a larger ecosystem of music engagement, discovery, relationship building, and creating economies of reciprocity, but when wielded well — it can be open up all kinds of portals.

Tips for getting better recommendations

• Give the platform feedback — likes, artist follows, album saves, creating playlists, adds, skips, and repeat listens are all bits of data that tell the story of what you like and don’t like. The more feedback you offer, the better. (Downside: you are giving *the machine* lots of information about your preferences which feeds further AI models and advances their technology).

• Be willing to be uncomfortable a little longer — a “play” is considered 30 seconds long, if you can hang in there with unfamiliar sounds for longer, you will get exposed to more unfamiliar sounds.

• Get off mood or background music playlists that put you on autopilot — these are also likely to be a part of the recent issues with stock music. Examples like Deep Focus, Low Fi Beats, Jazz in the Background — created by production companies and undermining artists in the worst ways and will make for terribly boring recommendations for you as a listener.

Tip 2 — Go On Listening Adventures

Now that we some of the blah-blah-blahs with streaming out of the way, we can move on to the methodology which technically works with any new music, it doesn’t have to be on a streaming platform.

Here is what I discovered I was doing and why it was working:

Back when I was working as a jewelry artist, I would often throw on music I was unfamiliar with — whether a playlist or an album — and let it play on repeat all day. My main focus was on making new jewelry and I wasn’t putting my energy into paying attention to the music, it was there in the background.

I had turned myself into a lean back listener of my own design, repeating things over and over until, by the end of the day, the best of it bubbled up to the top.

This worked because I didn’t need the music to serve me during these periods, it was ok it just be there filling the space and being a mood.

Naturally, all on it’s own, songs that started as completely unknown would start to become more familiar as it repeated throughout the day, I’d find myself singing along to some of them, or dancing, or noticing that I liked a particular riff or drum beat.

Each of these tracks would go into my “Liked” songs.

Our brains love novelty, but when it comes to music there is an edge where novelty can feel wildly abrasive because we also crave familiarity — we want to know the words, sing along, get into the emotional bridge, to take it home.

It’s hard to do that with a song that’s too new and fresh, even if it’s good. A lot of incredible songs are slow burns, they take a little time to become beloved and understood.

The low stakes listen, the time and space to absorb music in the background on repeat for at least 3 cycles, is where you get exposed and bridge that novelty gap.

Don’t try to listen to new music when you really need the music to serve you; like when you’re at the gym, or after a hard day, or when you want to blast something satisfying in the car.

Try new music when it doesn’t matter at all. Let it wash over you, and let the suds appear on their own.

Tip 3 — Integrate

Borrowing this principle from the world of psychedelics, we don’t just stop at the catharthis of the experience, afterwards we take time to integrate in into meaning².

Take the songs that bubble up in your low stakes listen, ideally saved in a playlist or in your “liked” area, and go back and do a high attention listen.

High attention means that you go back and listen to those songs again the best way you know how — do you love blasting music loud in your car? Dancing with headphones on our porch? Cranking up the stereo and cooking dinner, steaming up the house?

Do that.

Listen. Feel. Go into your body.

And this part should be fuuuuuuuuuun.

You already vetted these tracks for a high pleasure factor. It should be a dopamine ding-a-ling-long.

Feel your feelings. Feel the energy of the song. What does it mean? I mean, What does it mean?? Read the lyrics, or don’t, just vibe it. Get into the damn song.

This is the beginning of the reciprocal relationship. As you begin to truly connect with the world the artist has built and put forward, you are no longer on autopilot and doing a skipitty-do through tracks, you are now solidly in the world they have built.

Now that you are here, what do you want to do?

Do you want to go deeper? Explore their whole album start to finish? Ok — try going back to a low stakes listen with their other work.

Author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Serviceberry, Robin Wall Krimmerer³, explores the concepts of the gift-economy where “ all flourishing is mutual.”

“If our first response to the receipt of a gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.” — Robin Wall Krimmerer

The future of music might be entirely based in the gift-economy.** Music has been miscast as commerce and commodity and pushed as a market product, when in actuality it is one of the most sacred, transformational tools for human progress and reality building that we have access to — it’s quantum⁴.

How limited and meager to be limiting ourselves to transactional dynamics when we could be relating deeply in gift. To heal, to transcend, to tend peace, to contact and create other realities.^

You received the gift of the stream. Of the sound, the vibration, that world building and vision. Now your turn — what is your gift?

Are you going to go check out their music videos?

Or join their email list? You can follow them on socials but their email list is their property (especially for independent artists) that no platform owns on their behalf, it’s free way to support them that gets you in relationship with them right away.

Or are you feeling moved to share their music with someone you love?

Are you feeling resourced to make a purchase? Some vinyl or tickets?

Are you taking the message to heart and making changes in your life?

“Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.” — Robin Wall Krimmerer

Tip 4 — Create a Playlist

An extension of the gift economy, is to begin bringing your beloved treasures into a form that can be shared. Once you begin getting better and juicer recommendations, discovering music that more accurately hones in on the wild weird that expresses your uniqueness, begin making playlists to house them.

I grew up in the era of boombox mixtapes, ripping CDs, and an allegiance to mixtape ideology that was steeped in thoughtfulness, labor, and love. Theme, song order, tempo, oh the snobbery and creativity of the whole endeavor!

Those days are gone, and now I use playlists in an entirely different way — I offer my lower pressure attitude here.

I use playlists as depots for groupings of sounds, like living documents that are ever growing, evolving, transforming. Since shuffle play is often used, song order doesn’t matter AT ALL. It’s just about grouping songs loosely so I can access for a purpose and share.

That’s it!

My method consists of holding songs in my “Liked” playlist until I rehome them to a playlist.

My current playlists are divided between public and private — my public lists make more sense

Vocalists Burn it Down (singers who break the beauty myth)
Since We Were Young (my kind of love songs)
Future Sounds (sounds inspiring my songwriting)

My private playlists are more abstract, they include playlists for specific songs I am producing and are full of tracks with specific reference sounds I want to remember, like a distorted guitar sound or bongo or synth pad or a vocal riff that went somewhere unexpected.

The point of creating playlists is not just for you — it is a meaningful branch of the gift economy. It is something to offer. A way to multiply your listens by sharing with others, and a way to offer more of your true self to the world.

Let us see more of you.

Swap and share with friends, new acquaintances, online pals, someone who needs to know you better.

Note that all playlists on streaming platforms feed the AI machine tool, so if you don’t want to do that, then alternatives to creating a playlist on the platforms is making an old school mixtape or putting together a sweet handwritten paper song-list to recommend to friends.

Tip 5 — Go Down the Rabbit Hole

Desire, passion, and curiosity are leading you somewhere gravitational, let it pull you in. Whether it be a band, a genre, a region, a niche, a sub-culture, an idea, an album, a movement… what is calling you is beckoning you for a reason. Heed the call. You might find unprecedented discoveries about yourself awaiting.

I’ll be seeing you through the portal 🛸
Little Door

---

Footnotes:

I find it distracting to read articles with too many active links (it’s like FOMO as you go!), so I am experimenting with compiling footnotes instead so that you can focus on just reading to the end, and then if you feel like click-click-flickity-clackiting around you can come to this section to find all my meaty inspirations, books, articles, and other things that will take you elsewhere. I’d love to know if this feels nurturing and protective or if you really get off on edging with links that are whispering for you go somewhere else mid-sentence… I’m going to test things as I go and I welcome your feedback.

1. The work of journalist and author Liz Pelly was instrumental in bringing together some of my thoughts on Spotify, especially her recent January 2025 article The Ghost in the Machine in Harper’s. I also listened to an episode of Forum with Mina Kim and she has a book out called Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist. I don’t agree with her entire perspective (my worldview is quite aquarian and near extraterrestrial), but I borrowed heavily from some of her concepts and frameworks to explain what’s going on, including the terms lean back listener, risk-management, and the pretty banal effects of handing over your listening to background playlists.

2. My first exploration into somatics was with Luis Mojica of Holistic Life Navigation. I heard him talk on the amazing Earth Speak podcast about this concept about folks being addicted to the catharsis of psychedelics or even trauma therapy but not doing the important work of grounding it in integration. This came back to me when I thought of why I am getting so much enjoyment and meaning out of my listening experience when I do a high attention listen. I am going so deep with every new song that comes into my life, I am pouring love into it and into myself. I am feeling it in my bones, crying, dancing, singing, letting myself be moved, inspired, and taken somewhere. I am not in a superficial space, and it moves me to create relationships with the artists who make the work and offer something of myself . I’ve since explored somatics with other teachers, but Luis is a great healer and teacher if you are at all curious about your body. He has a course coming up starting March 1st (I’m not affiliated, just highly recommend).

3. *** Robin Wall Krimmerer changed my life. Period. Read her books. Braiding Sweetgrass. The Serviceberry. I share affiliate links to Bookshop.org where you can purchase books without supporting tech-oligarchs. Every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores (and a tiny kickback goes to me if you use my link). Since 2020, we've raised more than $35 million for independent bookstores.

4. I was in a rut with all of Liz Pelly’s work, feeling all disgruntled with the state of how broken everything is, when the last chapter from Ted Gioia’s self-published Substack book was released called What Can Music Do Today from the book Music to Raise the Dead: The Secret Origins of Musicology. It recalibrated my soul. Damn, I had been thinking small beans. Thanks for the reminder, Ted.

---

What song has you lit up and hitting repeat obsessively? Drop it in the comments so I can take a listen 🎧