Though human beings now have instant access to an endless amount of music in every style imaginable, it can often feel like streaming services are hell bent on narrowing our perspective instead of expanding it. Whether their recommendations come from algorithms or actual people, the results merely flatter our tastes, leading us to what Ben Ratliff calls "bottomless comfort zones" in his new book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty. For Ratliff, who has written about pop and jazz for the New York Times for the last two decades, this is a serious problem. But he’s got some ideas on how to solve it.

Every Song Ever is made up of 20 essays that break things down not by genre but by sound, making unlikely musical connections and encouraging listeners to think about what they’re hearing with fresh ears. A chapter on the utility of speed in music connects the dots between jazz pianist Bud Powell, 19th-century classical composer Franz Liszt, and OutKast, explaining that fleetness is "best heard as an expression of joy, and best played when it seems to have no practical purpose." When Ratliff writes about slowness, he offers more than a playlist full of drone metal or slowcore by illuminating how the music of (supposedly) unrelated artists including Marvin Gaye, Dmitri Shostakovich, Robert Johnson, and DJ Screw uses crawling tempos to "take life in thoroughly, without missing the details." The book is a jumping-off point for a more active, limitless type of listening; you would be hard-pressed to find any music recommendation service that attempts to locate the common ground between sullen songwriter Nick Drake and metal titans Slayer, as Ratliff does here in a chapter about sadness.

Since most of Every Song Ever is based on observations of sound rather than cultural context or artist biography, the book can feel heady and philosophical. But Ratliff continually brings things down to Earth, thanks in part to his inclusive spirit and his masterful way of translating music through words. At one point, he describes listening to a 45-rpm record slowed down to 33-rpm thusly: "It was as if hidden powers seeped out of the songs, as cooking bones in liquid brings out the marrow, making the animal transform after its death." Nina Simone’s voice is "not liquid and not hard but somewhere in between, a gelatin or a colloid." Musical improvisations are like "stories that we can’t completely understand, in a language we don’t speak." For Ratliff, a properly loud record "steps up to you and pulsates, like a strong setting on a showerhead, rather than flattens, like someone sitting on you." This exquisite language serves as a guide, revealing new ways to look at old favorites and spurring on explorations into songs unknown.

Pitchfork: When it comes to navigating streaming services, it seems like there’s a battle between algorithms and human curation going on right now. But this book seems to disregard both of those as generally unhelpful while offering a third way based on sound.

Ben Ratliff: This is the moment when we should be thinking about this in the big picture, because if you really like one of these streaming services you may be using it for the rest of your life, and it’s going to be the primary way you hear anything new. You're going to come to depend on it—that's the business model. But since we have so much individual agency, I wanted to write about what forms that agency can take: What does it mean to really appreciate listening widely such that you have to reorient yourself with each song? When I'm able to listen that way, it feels really creative and expands my sense of being. It feels healthy. But when I listen along the comfortable contours of what I know and who I've been, I don't learn anything. I don't grow. So, since we can grow, why not try?