Why I listen to the Sunday Show

When I first moved to New York, I listened to The Sunday Show with Jonathan Schwartz (and its nearly identical companion, The Saturday Show) out of pure inertia. In Boston, I listened to many radio stations in my car, but the tuner that sat in my kitchen was always on WBUR; when I set things up in New York, I just turned the dial from 90.9 FM to 93.9 FM and that was that.

Schwartz begins each show exactly as Samuel G. Freedman describes it in his profile of the gentleman-deejay for New York Times:

At precisely noon Mr. Schwartz allowed five seconds of silence, then played exactly 1 minute 15 seconds of a lilting woman’s voice, wordless and yet evocative, over an acoustic guitar.

For the first few months I lived in the city, the sound of that woman’s voice (the identity of whom “has never been revealed either on or off the air,” Schwartz says) would send me diving for the power switch. Before I moved, I had been accustomed to an NPR station that was mostly talking, and Schwartz’s predilection for light and lyrical lady singers, his obsession with Frank Sinatra, and his almost sotto voce delivery were just so different that I couldn’t deal with it. “It’s that guy,” I’d say to my roommates. Why couldn’t WNYC just give me This American Life, or Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me?

Eventually, though, inertia won out (getting up from the living room to go change the channel in the kitchen just took so much effort), and after several weeks of letting Mr. Schwartz take over my airwaves but emphatically not listening, I found that I was starting to like more of the show than I didn’t. And then, soon thereafter, I realized that I didn’t just like it, I thought it was phenomenal. This reversal came from the discovery that in amongst the airy vocalists I found so saccharine and grating, Jonathan Schwartz was hiding a master class on American popular music.

Every weekend, at least a couple times, Schwartz will play a song, and then, right away, will follow it up with a different version, by the same artist or someone entirely different. This exploration of interpretation is fascinating. It’s the kind of thing that makes Rufus Wainwright’s recreation of Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall possible, and it’s important in understanding why “Till There Was You” from the Broadway musical The Music Man could eventually make its way into the Beatles’ repertoire. Nowadays, covers are much maligned (so often they’re tired retreads that not only fail to create a new interpretation, but actually damage the song), but they’re at the heart of the concept of “standards” or the “American Songbook.” After all, a standard is only standard because everyone has sung it.

On top of this, for someone like me who grew up with CDs and MP3s, Schwartz’s shows give me grounding in minutiae like the difference between albums and EPs, the way songs for albums and single records are selected and ordered, and all of that stuff which just isn’t a factor in the way I learned to consume music. I’m not always enamored of every song he plays (those “squeaky-voiced, breathy girl singers” as a comment on this rant against Schwartz calls them do still get on my nerves), but Jonathan Schwartz has fundamentally changed the way I listen to music.

So that’s why I’m here, sitting on my sofa with a pile of manuscript, my laptop, and a radio tuned to 93.9 FM, listening to Schwartz describe Sinatra’s version of one of Harold Arlen’s songs as “an absolutely beautiful record” and waiting to hear that guitar again for the sign off. Class is in session.