There’s a scene that was left on the cutting-room floor from my podcast series Ways of Hearing (2017), where I interviewed sisters Jenn and Liz Pelly together about their personal listening habits in the streets of New York. It was written for Episode 2, “Space,” and would have served as a transition between a scene with urban historian Jeremiah Moss, and one with architectural historian Emily Thompson. But my producers at Radiotopia told me the audio was confusing because they couldn’t tell the two Pellys’ voices apart. They’re twins, I explained. (I can’t even always tell Don from Phil Everly by voice alone.) And why these two young writers in particular, they asked. You’ll see soon, I said. (By the end of that year, Jenn had published a book on groundbreaking punk band The Raincoats in the popular 33 1/3 series. And Liz had published the first in a series of influential articles for the Baffler about music streaming.)
I lost the argument, …
