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An excerpt from Why Sound Matters

My new book Why Sound Matters is out next week, October 21 2025. (In the UK it will be released January 6 2026.) It begins like this:

As the worst of the COVID pandemic passed, I felt especially eager to get back to live music. My entire adult life has included music performance, not just my own but others’, including most of my friends — I’ve likely spent more time in bars, clubs, and small theaters around the world than in any other public spaces as a result. There were many varied shocks to the lockdown of 2020, but for working musicians like me perhaps the greatest was the ban — 100 percent — on live music.

Live music has since come back slowly, not all at once but in dribs and drabs, attempts and failures. The “new normal” isn’t normal to this day, at least to someone whose career in music started before the pandemic. Touring is freshly problematic for a number of reasons: risk of contagion, which still regularly causes illness and cancellations, but also elevated travel costs, the widespread loss of independent venues that couldn’t wait out the lockdown, and changed audience habits. Many professionals left the business altogether, from tour-bus drivers to sound engineers to booking agents to musicians who decided they just couldn’t anymore. In the United Kingdom, which keeps better official tabs on our industry than most places, 26 percent of jobs in music were lost between the start of the pandemic and its so-called end. That’s 52,000 fewer people working in music, and that’s just the U.K.¹

My own touring restarted, but fitfully — it’s possible that it may never return to what it was. So when I saw an ad to run the soundboard part-time at a club within walking distance of my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I thought, If I can’t travel for live music as much as before, maybe I could engage with more of it that comes to my neighborhood.

The ad also caught my eye because it wasn’t from just any local club; it was the storied Club Passim, formerly Club 47, which started in the late 1950s and still, incredibly, hosts live folk music seven nights a week in Harvard Square. Indeed, Passim has been a fixture for so long that I have lived in Cambridge since the 1980s and managed to ignore it almost entirely. It was never the new thing, naturally; and it never quite came back in fashion either. It just kept on keeping on, still mining the vein of music that it started with when Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and so many others put this small coffeehouse on the map.

Over the years I had been to only a handful of shows at Passim, but each was memorable. Mostly I had gone to see a folky hero who was still playing the same circuit they had in the day. I had the privilege of seeing John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee, of the U.K. jazz-folk band Pentangle; the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, from the original Boston folk revival; and Tom Rapp of the psychedelic-folk band Pearls Before Swine, with whom my partner Naomi Yang and I toured in the late 1990s and who insisted on playing this particular venue when it came to choosing one in Boston or Cambridge. Tom introduced us to a few other folk clubs too, but afterwards we went back to playing “rock” rooms and still do, even though we are essentially an acoustic live act.

The instrumentation of my music did give me some qualifications for working sound at Passim, however; I know how to mic an acoustic guitar and vocals, as well as bass, drums, and all the other instruments we have toured with or that have appeared on our records, which share a sonic palette with much of the music that comes through folk clubs. So I applied, and a bit to my surprise was hired. I ran the soundboard there part-time for about a year and half.

What I found at Club Passim was more of what I missed from live music than I expected. Because the club isn’t part of my circuit, or the circuit most of my friends play, I didn’t always see the music there that I love the most. But the room is filled with sound and people sharing that sound, which is more of what I needed than I knew.

At the start of each of my shifts at Passim, the room was closed to the public as the musicians arrived for soundcheck. They went through all the mechanical movements of unpacking their gear that I know so well. We’d talk logistics — parking, meals, merch — and we’d chat, because musicians are always good at hanging out. We’d talk about where they were last, where they are heading next, about who we know in common, about music we’re listening to or who we saw play recently. And then we’d talk about their instruments, because I was going to mic them.

I loved this part of the job. Every instrument has a story. And every musician is ready to tell it.

Let me share a particularly great one — they aren’t nearly all so dramatic, yet they often have a bit of the happenstance and magic in this tale.

The Canadian singer-songwriter James Keelaghan was unpacking his gear, comfortably settling back on a stage he’d been many times before — although this was his first visit since the pandemic lockdown. He took out a well-traveled acoustic guitar and held it in his lap. Then, with a throwaway tone, he said, Oh, do you mind if I play one song on a different guitar? You’ll have to mic it up as well. Not at all, I said. So he took another out of its case and placed it behind him on a stand.

An off-stage choir might have started singing as I looked at that second guitar. It fairly glowed — with what I wasn’t sure. It was a standard though clearly very old Martin parlor guitar, the small size favored back when folk instruments were made primarily for private settings rather than a public room like a bar or venue. Parlor guitars are “12-fret,” meaning the neck meets the body where the octave on each open string repeats — no flashy leads way up the neck on guitars like this. They’re made for quiet strumming or picking. It wasn’t elaborately appointed, no fussy or fancy details. But it looked taut, somehow — like the wood was vibrating, and sound was already emanating from it as it sat on the stand.

“What is that,” I said — My jaw might have been open as I did.

“Oh, it’s got a story,” said Keelaghan’s bass player, David Woodhead, also busy unpacking his gear.

James Keelaghan is known in folk circles for his narrative songs. He’s a great storyteller in lyric and naturally in conversation as well. He talks between tunes in his set, charming the audience with polished gems of anecdotes and jokes, making everyone feel like they’re by the fire of an old pub in Ireland. Where — in a side hustle — he takes groups of tourists on trips.

The skilled storyteller quickly sized me up before he started. “That guitar,” he said, “was at Pearl Harbor.”

I was hooked.

The guitar was even older than I had imagined, bought new in 1905 by a woman who played it in her parlor, as intended. And when this woman’s son wanted to see the world and enlisted in the navy, his mother gave him the guitar to take with him. But first she removed the thirteenth fret. For luck.

Keelaghan took out his phone and showed me a picture of a young sailor named Eugene Peck in his whites holding the guitar. It was poorly exposed and slightly out of focus, a snapshot from a Kodak Brownie, but there was a dark stripe on the neck of the guitar, just above where it met the body — the missing thirteenth fret.

This guitar went round the world with the sailor, Keelaghan said. He was crazy for slack-key music from Hawaii, and he eventually ended up stationed there on the USS Nevada.

Now you know the Nevada, Keelaghan continued, with the tone of the history buff that he is, was the only battleship that managed to sortie on December 7, 1941. But this sailor didn’t make it. Afterward, his shipmates collected his things and returned them to his mother. She put the guitar under her bed, where it stayed.

“But it has all its frets,” I interrupted. Right on cue.

Keelaghan paused for breath and went on. So after this woman passed, a nephew found the guitar under the bed. He had it restored — the thirteenth fret was replaced — and kept it with him always. You know Pistol River Friendship Hall? Keelaghan suddenly asked me. This was a kind of question I got all the time when I was working sound at Passim, but I rarely knew the reference since I don’t play the folk circuit. I shook my head and got a fresh lookover. Well, he went on, maybe a little more warily than before, Glenn Elfman there once asked me after a show — we were up late, drinking — he asked if I would play this song of mine, “Kiri’s Piano,” on an old guitar of his. Sure, I said.

Now, “Kiri’s Piano,” Keelaghan explained — I’ll sing it later tonight so you’ll hear it then — is a story I learned about a woman taken to a Japanese internment camp in British Columbia during the war. She played the piano. But when they went round her empty house to confiscate it, they found she had dumped the piano in the harbor rather than let anyone else have it.

So I sing him my song on his guitar. And only after I’m done does Glenn tell me the story of this instrument. Years later, after he died, I learned Glenn had willed it to me.

We all looked at the guitar in silence.

“How do you like it mic’ed,” I asked, after a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s the first time I ever brought this guitar onstage.”²

*

When I was asked to write a book about why sound matters, I thought of my recent experiences at Passim. The community there is built around music — a carefully, even conservatively defined style of music. But what holds it together isn’t just the music, it’s also something physical. You feel it in the room, and I believe that’s what brings people back there as much as or possibly more than any given artist.

It was that physicality I had missed during the pandemic. We all heard recorded music throughout, as much as we wanted. Yet according to streaming stats, during lockdown people spent less time with music than usual, not more.³ We weren’t able to share sounds together in a physical space, and it seems we need to.

This book is an attempt to understand better what that material aspect of sound is about. Not from a scientific point of view — I was educated before the emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), so you’ll need to go elsewhere for that kind of explanation. But there’s another materiality to the world, the one that begins with our senses and our interactions with one another. You don’t need specialized knowledge to understand that, you just need to be human. And musicians are humans who pay attention to sound every working day. It’s part of the labor we do, along with packing and unpacking our gear.

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1. UK Music, This Is Music 2022.

2. Thanks to James Keelaghan for allowing me to share his story of Eugene Peck’s guitar.

3. Caitlin Kizielewicz, “Music Streaming Consumption Fell During COVID-19 Lockdowns,” July 15, 2021, Carnegie Mellon University News.