💡 sing your song

The majority of my work within professional sport has involved basketball in recent years, but my playing/coaching background is in baseball. As part of my efforts to re-ignite opportunities in the sport I know best, I have watched more major league baseball this season than I have in the last 10 seasons combined. I grew up in St. Louis and now live in central New York state, so I tend to watch the Cardinals in the National League and the Yankees in the American League. The Cardinals opened the season with a rookie at second base, JJ Wetherholt. In only his second game, Wetherholt came through in the 10th inning with a walk-off hit. In the post-game interview with St. Louis broadcaster Jim Hayes, Wetherholt credited his walk-up song with helping him manage the moment:

Hayes: First big league game in the opener. First big league homer today. First big league walk off base hit...Talk me through that.

Wetherholt: I was just going up ready to hit, honestly. I was in the zone, singing my walk-up song. It’s a good spot to be. Just trying to walk in the situation and do anything it took to help the team win.

Hayes: When you’re walking to the plate, what’s running through your mind?

Wetherholt: I mean, honestly, I’m just singing my song, getting in the zone, trying to drown out the noise. Just trying to lock in and be aggressive early.

The common advice for helping athletes get to the present typically involves the breath. The breath, which sport psychology GOAT Dr. Ken Ravizza called “the mental game’s most versatile tool,” is always available. It is something an athlete can control. It’s in no way a bad answer to the question of managing the moment!

In big moments, however, the breath can get away from you. Your heart rate can spike. But the BPM of your walk up song? That stays constant. So, by all means, use the breath. But use the song, too. Let it help in your effort to manage your breathing rate and regulate your heart rate. Or, as Wetherholt noted, as a focus that helps you drown out the noise and remind yourself of your intention in the moment (e.g., be aggressive early). Because managing the breath isn’t the end but the means. You manage the breath in an effort to relax so you can direct focus to achieve some goal-related behavior. When the pressure is on, however, it may take a lot to manage the breath. The intention in the moment may get lost. Using a song you know well to anchor the routine and focus, however, may free the athlete’s cognitive resources to remember the intention. In this example, Wetherholt outsourced staying present to the music, and freed himself to lock in on his goal for the at-bat.

More recently, I observed the effect of the walk-up in a very different setting: 12u softball. I serve as an assistant with my daughter’s team, although my coaching “duties” generally consist of shooting the s*&% with whoever is riding the bench and doing deep dives on athlete snack-choices. Several of the players had inquired about walk-up music, so I volunteered to manage it. An assistant coach told me about an app called Ballpark DJ, so I gathered the athlete requests and got to work. During the game, the players really got into it. There were several moments where players on the other team were visibly dancing along to the music as our player readied for the at-bat. In one instance, the opposing pitcher even started dancing. And when one player couldn’t decide between two walk up songs? We gave her both at the same time!

Was anyone specifically using the music to lock in and manage the moment like J.J. Wetherholt? Unlikely. Even so, focusing on the music at least kept them from focusing on things that would not be helpful (e.g., 95% of the adults attending the game). It kept the mood light. It helped them relax. It brought the group together around a shared experience and helped those who were not at the plate direct their attention toward supporting those who were. Moving forward, it also provides a placeholder for a more intentional effort to stay present. As the athletes progress and mature, their relationship with their walk-up songs can do the same.

In a 12u recreational softball experience, catering walk-up music to player preferences may be enough to move the needle. At J.J. Wetherholt’s level, player preference alone may not be enough. In that setting, an athlete could use the walk-up music to intentionally direct their physiological and psychological responses in ways that help them achieve the sort of relaxation and focus that works best for them. This could be as simple as asking an athlete to subjectively rate the feelings they have when hitting, to identify the way they want to feel (or feel when hitting their best), and to provide specific tracks that produce that ideal feeling. It could be as complex as using a combination of published inventories to assess music preferences/responses and technology to measure actual physiological responses to music. Or it could be something in between. Regardless of the approach, there is value in working within the parameters of a practice that most players embrace anyway. The breath can get away from you very easily. But the song remains the same no matter how tense the game becomes.

Full disclosure: Not everyone agrees with me on this topic!

🎶 september album club

The chordinnate album club will meet at 6:40p EST on a TBD Thursday in September to listen to a PRACTICE, an EP from retired-NBA player now house/EDM producer/DJ Rony Seikaly. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

sign up to attend

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

🖭 playlist / mixtape

For this playlist, I took inspiration from J.J. Wetherholt and the 12u athletes who both seem to understand the value in singing ahead of an at-bat. Enjoy a short playlist of songs about singing on YouTube or check out the extended playlist on Tidal. As per usual, drop any tracks you would suggest adding in the comments.

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Note: We have shifted from Google Meet to Discord as a meeting platform, so be sure to check the invite for info on joining the server.

The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

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In the previous issue of the chordinnation, I highlighted songs that came very easily to the artist and the lessons we can learn about sport from those epiphanies. entered the comments with a great addition to both the issue and the corresponding playlist:

My first thought? Max had nailed the movement and music connection more thoroughly in a single comment than I had in the entire issue!

My second thought? I completely missed the movement and being moved connection when I previously recounted a Johnny Cash interview about finding inspiration as an artist.

There seems to be a connection between movement and being moved, and reducing human movement to just the physical element is to miss potential sources of inspiration. A biomechanical explanation of Johnny Cash walking in the woods - or of Mitski walking around or of Neil Young walking off into the woods and returning with OHIO - doesn’t explain what that movement helped unlock. I worry that, all too often, in the pursuit of athletic excellence, efficiency becomes an excuse for eliminating the very things that would sustain the effort needed for that excellence.

It reminds me of an account I once read (at a now dead link) about legendary shoe designer Tinker Hatfield’s visit to a college course on shoe design. Hatfield, the architect of my personal favorite basketball sneaker of all time, the Grape Jordan V, shared three criteria for shoe design: (1) performance, (2) the personality of who he’s designing for, and (3) inspiration from anything that isn’t directly related to the project. In the case of the Jordan V, you end up with a basketball shoe designed for Michael Jordan and inspired by WWII fighter jets. A design based on basketball performance alone would have been less. Even a design that married performance with MJ’s personality would have been unlikely to reach the heights of what Hatfield achieved with his concept. It required an additional ingredient that inspired him enough to make it meaningful and appealed to the athlete enough to have it included.

Sometimes, to do the thing well, you need to spend more time not doing the thing at all. That isn’t always the message that athletes hear, however. They are often sold the idea that more time on task is the answer to every issue. But that doesn’t work for everyone, and I have data to support it. I have used a motivation inventory with athletes for the last decade (i.e., the Reiss Motivation Profile). It assesses how an individual prioritizes 16 intrinsic desires. One of those desires is Power. Among other things, the Power scale reflects singularity of focus, with individuals who score low for the desire often needing time away from their primary task to avoid burnout and frustration. Surprisingly (to me at least), many of the professional athletes I have profiled have scored low on the scale. For those athletes, they thrive when sport is one thing they do but not the only thing - and perhaps not even the most important thing. I have witnessed athletes who flourished because they were self-aware enough to recognize this relationship, as was the case for a golfer who decided to cut his practice time by 80% so he could pursue other hobbies. I have witnessed others who flourished after being given permission to embrace other interests, as was the case with an athlete who used the time during pre-game stretching to listen to podcasts about building his business. And I have listened to athletes describe seeing this play out for teammates, as was the case with a professional basketball player who couldn’t get his head around a teammate who started playing better when he replaced half of his typical pre-game preparation with reading for pleasure.

Tinker Hatfield nailed it. Know who you are. Know how you want to perform. And know yourself well enough to determine if you are someone who needs to find inspiration in a completely different place to stay motivated. And if you find yourself stuck at any point, try moving.

🎶 july album club

The chordinnate album club will meet on a TBD date in July to listen to a TBD album. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

sign up to attend

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

🖭 playlist / mixtape

For this playlist, I went with the literal and searched for songs that included some version of ‘move’ in the title. Check it out on Qobuz and drop any suggestions that you feel deserve to be included in the comments.

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I launched the chordinnate album club just over a year ago with the idea that it would be nice to get together with other humans and discuss an album, much like you would meet to discuss a book. I would schedule and organize the virtual meeting space, but attendees would rotate picking the album and leading the discussions. Since that time, the club has been hosted by a variety of individuals - , , and to name a few - and every meeting has been a great experience. It has also evolved. introduced listening guides at some point last year, and this year we moved it over to Discord and added a pre-discussion listening session to the mix. I am better at generating ideas than following through on them, so the club’s evolution has been more of a testament to those who have signed up than club leadership!

This truth was on display again at the most recent meeting to discuss Pale Jay’s BEWILDERMENT. arrived with a mood board to share via Milanote, which included additional information on each track, alternate performances, and videos. It was awesome. In that mood board, highlighted a quote from Pale Jay in relation to the 8th track on the LP.

I love this quote because it illustrates what can happen when the conditions are right. In sport, we often assume that it needs to be difficult. We talk about grinding and outworking the opponents. But, as Pale Jay noted, there are times when it can so easy. And that doesn’t make it bad. In fact, some of the best songs seem to arrive that way. They just show up, fully formed.

Less than a week after the club meeting, I went to my daughter’s 12u softball game. As per usual, the adults involved created conditions to make it difficult. They barked instructions from the sidelines and argued over rules in an attempt to find loopholes they could exploit to their team’s advantage. Teenage umpires had to absorb it all. Players got reprimanded for daring to be distracted by things that brought them momentary joy. Girls danced to the other team’s walkup songs only to be reminded to “focus.” To their credit, the kids dealt with it rather well. They supported each other and still found ways to have fun in an environment that seemed to have declared war on the very concept. After the game, they were praised for “fighting” and “battling,” with the adults doing the praising seemingly oblivious that it was only so goddamn difficult because of the environment they had created!

As a coach and parent, I can decide whether my job is to create conditions that make things arbitrarily hard for athletes or to create conditions that increase the odds of the sport equivalent of Pale Jay’s lyrical outburst. I can choose to focus on producing knowledge about, which is learning at the explicit, informational level, or focus on producing knowledge of, which is learning at the implicit, experiential level. I can create conditions that force athletes to grind it out and struggle to decipher in-depth explanations. Or I can create conditions that invite creativity and increase the likelihood that athletes stumble into solutions that I hadn’t even imagined.

’s inclusion of the quote from Pale Jay was a great reminder of what can happen when the conditions are right for such creativity. That means shifting from telling to teaching. From explanations to instructions. From commanding to coaching. From dictating desired outcomes to creating environments that invite those outcomes without ever stating them directly. And that effort on a coach’s part isn’t easy at all. But the payoff is potentially immense. In short, if I want athletes who can play freely and easily when the game starts, I might be best served by helping them experience that combo as often as possible.

Currently, the kids don’t have it easy. Look at the mess we are leaving them. Life is hard because of things largely outside of our control. But sport is mostly a reflection of the choices we make. So why make it harder than it needs to be? Grease over grind. Relax through over fight through. Play easy over work hard. Take a deep smile over take a deep breath. Create the conditions for fun and development, and get the f&%@ out of the way.

🔬 research spotlight

As I was finishing up this issue, a colleague shared a summary of a new study on the effect of big rewards on learning. It felt relevant to the issue spotlight. The short version is that researchers found that learning can happen much faster than previously thought and with less variability among participants than previously witnessed (i.e., rather than huge differences in how long it took participants to learn a task, all participants learned at a similar, quick rate). But instead of plagiarizing the entire summary here, just go read it yourself. And to incentivize doing so with a big reward, I promise you that reading this will change your life in ways you could never anticipate!

🎶 july album club

The chordinnate album club will meet on a TBD date in July to listen to a TBD album. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

sign up to attend

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

🖭 playlist / mixtape

For this playlist, I started with Pale Jay’s DON’T FORGET THAT I LOVE YOU and Tom Petty’s WILDFLOWERS, two examples of songs that came easily to the artist in a burst of creativity. I added other songs that have been reported to have arrived similarly, and finished it off with the instrumental to DON’T FORGET THAT I LOVE YOU. Enjoy it on Qobuz. And feel free to suggest additions if you know of tracks that reportedly arrived with similar ease!

Leave a comment

sign up to attend

Note: We have shifted from Google Meet to Discord as a meeting platform, so be sure to check the invite for info on joining the server.

The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

Subscribe now

Having made the mistake of participating in bracket challenges for the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball championships, I ended up watching a lot of both tournaments. As I listened to the narratives around each result, lyrics from THE CONTROLLERS1 came to mind.

Somebody’s gotta win
Somebody’s gotta lose
Somebody’s gotta play the fool

Somebody’s gotta laugh
Somebody’s gotta cry
Somebody’s gotta almost die, ooh

the controllers SOMEBODY’S GOTTA WIN, SOMEBODY’S GOTTA LOSE

In sport, we understand that the game will produce a winner and a loser, but I think we are too easily tempted to attach meaning to those positions that isn’t warranted.

Take the case of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball champions. When UCLA won, I heard a lot about their “decision” in the off-season to be national champions. But I am sure there were other teams who also made that decision. And worked just as hard. And sacrificed just as much. And had the talent to pull it off.

On the men’s side, I didn’t see a team who “wanted it less” when I watched UConn take Michigan to the edge of the edge in the national championship game. It brought me back to watching the 2022 Olympics and seeing Serbia push the USA men’s basketball team to its limits. In that case, I don’t think there was a question to who “wanted it more.” It was Serbia. But will has its limits, one of which is talent.

Winning isn’t a reflection of character. It isn’t a question of who wants it more. It isn’t the guaranteed reward for whoever works the hardest or gives the best effort. The truth is that it often comes down to talent, luck, officiating, injuries, and so many other variables that have nothing to do with the person. After all, sport history (and human history) is littered with complete assholes who won23. The truth is that the games are finite and someone will win. And winning doesn’t mean anything other than that you were ahead when time ran out. Humanity and competitive superiority may occasionally collide in a way that feels meaningful but to pretend they do so with any consistency or pattern is to misread the spectacle. Somebody’s gotta win. Somebody’s gotta lose. And, most of the time, it isn’t any deeper than that.

🎶 may album club

The chordinnate album club will meet again on Thursday, May 21st. Shanté will lead a discussion of BEWILDERMENT by Pale Jay. Join for the listening party at 6:30p and/or the discussion at 7p EST.

To attend for the first time, click on the button below to sign up. It will take you the chordinnate website, where you can register for the club. If you have signed up in the past, you are good to go; no need to register again.

sign up for club

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. The chordinnate album club runs every other month and typically meets on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST. If you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

📀 borrowed treasure

The past couple of months have been a time to follow the trail of musical recommendations from several of my favorite follows on Substack.

Thanks to , I now have Dojo Cuts in my rotation!

has delivered repeatedly lately, with Boy Golden’s BEST OF OUR POSSIBLE LIVES and Grace Ives’s GIRLFRIEND receiving the most repeated play on my end.

continues to push new music my direction, and this particular Charlotte Day Wilson track - HIGH ROAD - has been a favorite since she recommeded it.

put August Ponthier’s EVERYWHERE ISN’T TEXAS on my radar, and I owe him a thanks for that!

Finally, I have to thank and her Electric Radio Club for reminding me that there is much more to Gary Numan than just CARS!

🤾🏾‍♀️ music for sport performance

Note: In the March issue, we looked at how music’s impact on your emotional state can inform choices you make around its use within sport. For this issue, I highlight the role that motivation can play in the process.

My graduate training in sport and exercise psychology offered me the standard view of motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you do something for its own sake. It is good. Extrinsic motivation is when you do something for some external reward. It is bad. This makes perfect sense but also proved to be perfectly useless in my graduate research and work with athletes.

During my first academic job, I stumbled across a different view of intrinsic motivation from Steven Reiss. It was back in 2012, and I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, MOTIVATING ATHLETES THE GERMAN WAY. It detailed a weightlifting coach’s use of an instrument called the The Reiss Motivation Profile, which assesses an individual’s degree of motivation across 16 universal intrinsic desires. According to Reiss, extrinsic motivation isn’t even real. Instead, there are instrumental motives and intrinsic motives. If we do X to get Y, X isn’t motivating the behavior. Only Y is. Y is the intrinsic motive and X is merely an instrument. Reiss developed an empircally-based list of those Ys. These intrinsic motives (i.e., the Ys) - are universal, but the degree to which someone values each is unique and will shape personality and behavior.

Back in 2012, I added the WSJ article to the undegraduate Sport Psychology course I was teaching and the students, many of whom were collegiate athletes, all responded to it. Eventually, I took a job at a new university and used startup funding to get trained on the Reiss instrument. That coincided with some opportunities within the NBA around pre-draft player interviews. Over the next several years, I had the chance to use the Reiss survey with hundreds of professional basketball players. To date, I have used it with around a thousand professional athletes across multiple sports and have found it so much more valuable than the theories on motivation that were presented as gospel during my graduate training.

For example, consider the report on the athlete below, which was informed in large part by the results of his Reiss Motivation Profile.

This athlete was defined by a desire to move (i.e., he scored in the 90th percentile on Physical Activity), a desire to be practical (i.e., he scored in the 7th percentile on Curiosity), and a desire for respect (i.e., he scored in the 85th percentile on Status). An athlete interview and discussions with coaches confirmed the survey results.

A common issue with athletes who score high in Status is a tendency to play their best on the biggest stage but sometimes fail to show up against perceived lesser opponents. This can produce upsets at worst and inconsistent performance at best. Because this particular athlete values action over words, music could be a valuable tool to guard against this tendency. We know he values respect and status, so songs that contain a lyrical message of being the best and earning respect may be useful in his pregame playlist. If those tracks can include themes around consistency and not underestimating opponents, all the better. In a perfect world, this would be an opportunity to throw a bag of cash at the athlete’s favorite musical artist to create a track specifically designed for this purpose!

Short of that, it may also be possible to reverse-engineer the state that produces the athlete’s biggest performances. How does he feel ahead of a big game? How does he prepare for the biggest stages? Who is he when he is at his best during those performances? Once those questions are answered, we can go looking for musical selections that help promote those same thoughts and feelings. And because many athletes already listen to music ahead of a competition, this wouldn’t require him to add anything or pause from the physical preparation that is most meaningful to him. He can keep moving while still moving himself toward a state that will help him show up at his best.

🎹 musicking while old (mwo)

After 5 years of bouncing from table to table, room to room, and closet to closet, I finally have a dedicated home office space. It may be in a basement. It may be cold. It may be furnished with a recliner that was found on the side of the road. But it has walls and a door so it counts!

My major music-related accomplishment since the March issue was relocating my keyboard to this new office space. It is in the tradition of what has emerged as one of my guiding principles for life: when you can’t move forward, move furniture.

🖭 playlist / mixtape

While searching for songs for this issue’s playlist, I stumbled into the J Dilla track TWO CAN WIN. The title seemed to be a perfect alternative to The Controllers track - sport can include competition and cooperation among everyone involved without a need to assign unwarranted merit to any victory. I also loved that Dilla was the artist referenced in DJ Jazzy Jeff’s “die empty” sermon, which I highlighted in an earlier issue. In addition to searching for “win” songs, I also dug for “lose” and “draw” songs. My initial effort produced a 45-track playlist just south of 3 hours, which you can check out on Qobuz if you are so inclined. I put no effort into song order so I suggest starting with track 1, hitting shuffle, and using skip liberally. I gave that initial a listen and narrowed it down to a more digestible version for YouTube. I have my personal choice for “most likely to listen to on repeat,” but would love to hear yours!

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The world may not be ending, but I am increasingly convinced that this version of the world is. So while “helping people do better at sports” doesn’t feel particularly important during a polycrisis, I need to believe that there are ways to pursue the work that align with what I hope is on the other side of this moment.

In the course of working through the dissonance, I exchanged messages with , whose in-person album club (Columbus, Ohio) to benefit The Scatter Joy Project felt like a perfect example of how to do what you do well in the service of something bigger. Alex suggested that I consider a Pay What You Can (PWYC) model, which differs from the typical business advice. I have long been a proponent of zagging when the smart move is to zig, so I decided to give his suggestion a chance and offer Pay What You Can pricing. But I can also take it one step beyond that and look for opportunities to partner with organizations doing important work to offer a seemingly unrelated service within sports in exchange for client donations to the designated organization.

The chordinnate website now reflects a PWYC approach, so please pass along the info to any athletes or coaches who you think may benefit from working to better understand who they are and how that can impact their preparation and performance. And if you know of organizations within your community who may be interested in fundraising collaborations that target local athletes and coaches, send them my way.

In a world that pushes productivity, it can be easy to forget that one way to separate from the pack is to quit trying to keep up. Musicians and athletes alike have long recognized the power to use their particular skillset to fight injustice. Moving forward, my hope is to find more opportunities to use my skillset within sport to impact things beyond the typical sport outcomes. AI, analytics, and the professionalization of youth sport keep pushing athletes toward being more and more machine-like. But sport has no meaning outside of that which we assign it. If we want it to, it can be a vehicle to promote inclusion, recognize our mutual humanity, and provide opportunities for all members of the community.

🎶 album club

The chordinnate album club will meet again on Thursday, May 21st. will lead a discussion of BEWILDERMENT by Pale Jay. Join for the listening party at 6:30p and/or the discussion at 7p EST.

To attend for the first time, click on the button below to sign up. It will take you the chordinnate website, where you can register for the club. If you have signed up in the past, you are good to go; no need to register again.

sign up for club

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. The chordinnate album club runs every other month and typically meets on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST. If you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

🤾🏾‍♀️ music for sport performance

In the February issue, I looked at how your personality may impact the music you are drawn toward. But what you prefer may not always be what is best to prepare for performance. Take my case. As predicted by my personality profile, I was drawn to high arousal, negative valence music. In retrospect, however, I probably would have been better suited to go against personality ahead of competition. I have vivid memories of driving to my college baseball field in my 1991 Nissan Maxima with four questionably wired subwoofers assaulting my ears with music that put me on the edge of the edge prior to stepping on the mound. I also have vivid memories of many early exits after sub-par performances! Given my current understanding, I may have been better served by choosing music that helped me lower my emotional temperature and induce a state of relaxation. In other words, sometimes steering into the skid isn’t the move.

For an athlete looking to make the best choices around pre-competition music, it may be helpful to systematically examine how they respond to music. In APPLYING MUSIC IN EXERCISE & SPORT, Costas Karageorghis describes his use of a self-report instrument to help athletes gauge how music moves them emotionally. The Music Mood-Regulation Scale (MMRS) was developed by Ruth Hewston to assess the perceived effectiveness of music to regulate someone’s mood. A tool like this can be a useful addition to what we already know, which is that the brain, heart, and breath all entrain to music. In my case, I likely would have done better with a lower BPM than what I naturally chose, but I also would have been wise to examine how the music I selected impacted me emotionally.

Although subjective, the MMRS allows athletes to reflect upon their individual response to music and perhaps make more targeted choices ahead of competition. Athletes respond to 28 items to produce a responsiveness score across 7 categories (Anger, Depression, Fatigue, Tension, Calmness, Happiness, Vigor). A higher score indicates a greater potential for music to impact the category. Athletes can map specific songs from their own musical library to each category, and then use what they know about their preferred pre-performance state to achieve a desired mindset ahead of competition. In short, it can help athletes move from simply choosing music that reflects their personalities to selecting music that directs their focus.

🎹 musicking while old (mwo)

Note: I promised an update on my quest for pitch recognition but have nothing to report. I wasn’t joking about standing still over the past several weeks. So I will have to punt to the next issue and hope that Future Dave does a better job than Past Dave did!

🙏 special prayer request

I no longer live in my hometown of St. Louis, MO, but a friend on the ground in my recently sent me this.

Luckily, the Life Church website takes prayer requests. If you feel so inclined, join my effort to request that they pray for their own souls: https://lifechurchstlouis.org/prayer

🖭 playlist / mixtape

I searched for songs related to standing for this issue. Check out the playlist on Qobuz or YouTube if you are so inclined. I was up against a deadline so I am sure there are many that I failed to include; send them my way if you have suggestions!

Leave a comment

K.T.S.E.’s length - 22 minutes, even shorter than the pint-sized ye -makes it feel like a blip on the bloated timeline of Kanye West’s 2018 when it should really be Taylor’s turn at musical stardom. But within this brief album are all the small secrets of Teyana Taylor just waiting to be delivered on a massive stage.

Pitchfork Review

The second chordinnate album club meeting of 2026 will be hosted on March 12th by and feature a discussion of Teyana Taylor's K.T.S.E. Because this album clocks in at under 23 minutes, we will experiment with a pre-meeting listening session for those who are interested. Join us to listen at 6:30p EST or just join for the discussion at 7p EST. Sign up below and look for an invite with details on how to join.

sign up to attend

sign up to attend

The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

Subscribe now

A key concept within modern approaches to skill acquisition is understanding the difference between knowledge about and knowledge of movement.

[K]nowledge about the environment involves perception which is indirect or mediated by language, symbols, pictures, instructions to facilitate analogical reasoning of what an information source means…Knowledge of the environment involves the pick-up of perceptual variables that directly constrain functional behaviors…Through exploratory actions, perceptual systems become progressively more ‘attuned’ to the invariants in the environment through direct experience in specific contexts. (16)

Duarte Araújo and Keith Davids. (2011). What exactly is acquired during skill acquisition. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, 3-4, 7-23.

In other words, knowledge about is more of an intellectual act. Knowledge of operates at the implicit level, allowing direct learning to occur.

I was reminded of this distinction as I re-engaged in beginning piano instruction over the past few weeks. There is so much knowledge about. I am taught the names of the notes. I am taught the symbols used to tell me which notes are played and for how many counts. All of that is mapped to the piano keys at the intellectual level. I am supposed to decode the name of the note on the scale and then decide which piano key to strike, all while listening for the concurrent auditory feedback that will either confirm or reject my choice. Consider how that compares with an approach suggested for children in Joan Keonig’s THE MUSICAL CHILD:

To awaken pitch awareness in very young children…we have a fun-filled multimodal process. Musical pitches - what most people think of as ‘notes’, since musical notes denote a specific pitch - become animals or objects, each with a distinct personality: Do-domino, Sol-sunshine, or the frightening Fa-phantom. Each note has a short, highly recognizable musical motif: Fa has eerie, ghostly music, for example. (96-97)

According to Koenig, this kind of training should ideally take place during the same time frame as early language learning. She argues that children can learn to distinguish pitch just as easily as they learn to distinguish colors if given the opportunity. She also notes that music students most often encounter ear training courses far later in life than is ideal, making the skills difficult to master. That smells like a challenge to me, so I have decided to spend some time over the next few weeks engaging in the musical hide and seek game Koenig suggests for parents. Can I learn to distinguish among the starting five musical notes (i.e., Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol)? Check back in the March issue for an update.

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We are about to witness what is perhaps the biggest annual collision of music and sport: the Super Bowl halftime show. For those who value humanity, the selection of Bad Bunny means celebration. For those married to a past that never existed, the selection is just the latest cause for outrage.

Full disclosure: Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) was not on my radar prior to either his selection as the half-time performer or his recent Grammy wins. So I am doing my best to listen up, read up, and catch up. He got a huge boost in my mind when, in a pre-Grammy red carpet interview, Gloria Estefan told a reporter that a Bad Bunny win was important beyond music. As a child of the 80s, that was enough for me to start paying attention! Once the ceremony started, Bad Bunny’s willingness to meet his moment by speaking out against ICE only confirmed my instincts.

On the other end of the tolerance continuum sits Robert James Ritchie (aka Kid Rock). Because he is not a kid and does not rock, that will be my only reference to his stage name. Ritchie is headlining the alternative half-time viewing for those whose favorite thing about the founding fathers is their racism. Ritchie, now known for some version of country-rock, first entered the music industry as a rapper. And not just a rapper, but a rapper who was discovered by Derrick T. Jones (aka D-Nice). Jones was a member of Boogie Down Productions at the time, and is also credited with discovering KRS-One. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the music of KRS-One should realize immediately that there is no universe in which Ritchie could be honoring his industry origins in his present form.

Perhaps, much like America, this is who Ritchie has always been1. And like the man he now follows, perhaps who he has always been is a shape-shifting grifter. Maybe rap provided the quickest entry into the industry so he went with it. Once in, Ritchie crafted the persona that eventually emerged on his multi-platinum DEVIL WITHOUT A CAUSE. By that point, he had perfected a rock-rap style that claimed a heritage in the trailer park and landed well with the emerging Limp Bizkit demographic. In reality, Ritchie grew up the son of a car dealer in Romeo, Michigan. His boyhood home was north of 5,000 square feet. It reportedly included a stable. In other words, he had a f***ing pony!2

Post-pony Ritchie, however, found an audience for his ahistorical persona. One that embraced his pivot into country and classic rock territory. The hits stopped at some point after I ceased paying attention, and now he exists as one of the has-beens who orbits the president. They are the sort of people who became famous for something mildly creative but now only seem to exist to pitch extended auto warranties or some other likely scam. In Ritchie’s case, he now peddles patriotism, ‘Merica, and, despite his poor track record of doing anything worthwhile with it, the English language. It is just the latest grift. Looking back, maybe the title of the album that made him famous was both a confession and a foreshadowing of what would come.

🎶 march album club

The next meeting of the chordinnate album club will take place in March. Details are TBD but there is no harm in getting on the list now. Sign up below and then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

sign up to attend

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

🤾🏾‍♀️ music for sport performance

In some cases, athletes realize that the music they instinctively reach for ahead of competition may not be serving their best interests within competition. Maybe they choose high-energy, aggressive music to match their excitement, but then quickly crash and burn once the game begins. Or perhaps it is the opposite. They opt for music that relaxes them but then find it hard to enter a competition with the desired level of energy. I have experienced this personally and heard numerous athletes describe something similar, but only recently came across a study that provided a potential explanation for why athletes might reach for sub-optimal musical choices ahead of a game.

In the 2016 study The Song Is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality, Greenberg and colleagues explored the connection between song preferences and personality. Noting that previous research was limited by reliance on genre-based categorization, Greenberg and crew decided to instead address 38 perceived psychological attributes, ultimately resulting in a 3-factor method of categorizing music based on Arousal, Valence, and Depth.

• Arousal

  • High Positive Loadings: intense, forceful, abrasive, thrilling

  • High Negative Loadings: gentle, calming, mellow

• Valence

  • High Positive Loadings: fun, happy, lively, enthusiastic, joyful

  • High Negative Loadings: depressing, sad

• Depth

  • High Positive Loadings: intelligent, sophisticated, inspiring, complex, poetic, deep, emotional, thoughtful

  • High Negative Loadings: party music, danceable

Participants in the study also completed a Big 5 assessment, which allowed Greenberg and his team to compare the musical attributes of preferred music with personality measures. In the end, personality predicted musical preferences, even beyond demographic variables. So while we may be tempted to think of musical preference as clumping around age brackets, personality may be a bigger influence.

Specifically, several key relationships emerged (see graphic below or full text for detailed results):

• Neuroticism was positively associated with preferences for arousal in music and negatively associated with valence

• Extraversion was negatively correlated with arousal

• Openness was positively associated with preferences for valence and depth in music

• Agreeableness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal and valence in music and positively associated with depth

• Conscientiousness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal in music and positively associated with depth

Note: Greenberg and colleagues also reported on facets within each Big 5 category; because the short Big 5 survey I will introduce below does not include that level of detail, I won’t report those findings here (although you can see them in the graphic or the full text)

The results help me understand why athlete instincts around music may not always serve them competitively. The choices may accurately reflect their personality but those choices may not provide the ideal pre-game direction. By learning more about personality tendencies and reflecting on competitive needs, however, athletes can learn to make different choices. But, because I favor an approach rooted in acceptance, maybe that starts with music that reflects their current state. The only way out is through, after all. Once they find music to nail down their current state, they can shift to tracks that direct their focus and energy levels in ways that best serve their needs ahead of competition. Regardless of the choices made, they will have been part of an intentional effort to recognize what they are experiencing, compare it to what helps them ahead of games, and use music to get as close to their ideal state as possible.

The level of analysis within the Greenberg study is beyond what most can do, but the availability of quick Big 5 inventories allow anyone to reflect on personality, musical preferences, and alignment with ideal pre-competition states. I personally enjoy the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) from Gosling and colleagues, in large part because they state on the website that anyone can use it without permission. That is my kind of academic! Score yourself using the instructions below to see where you fall out. The lab website has translations for multiple languages, so check it out if you have a need or interest.

Ten-Item Personality Inventory-(TIPI)

Instructions: Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.

1 = Disagree strongly
2 = Disagree moderately
3 = Disagree a little
4 = Neither agree nor disagree
5 = Agree a little
6 = Agree moderately
7 = Agree strongly

I see myself as:

1. _____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.

2. _____ Critical, quarrelsome.

3. _____ Dependable, self-disciplined.

4. _____ Anxious, easily upset.

5. _____ Open to new experiences, complex.

6. _____ Reserved, quiet.

7. _____ Sympathetic, warm.

8. _____ Disorganized, careless.

9. _____ Calm, emotionally stable.

10. _____ Conventional, uncreative.

TIPI scale scoring (“R” denotes reverse-scored items):

Extraversion: 1, 6R; Agreeableness: 2R, 7; Conscientiousness; 3, 8R; Emotional Stability: 4R, 9; Openness to Experiences: 5, 10R.

In my case, the data lines up pretty well. I score high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion. In plain language, I am an a*****e! And true to my profile, I remember opting for high-energy, angry/depressing, aggressive music ahead of pitching performances in college. I also tended to listen at an extremely high volume. In retrospect, I probably wasn’t helping myself with those choices. I wasn’t a hard thrower. I did well when I stayed calm, changed speeds, and frustrated opponents by pitching backwards. And at baseline, I was a mental and emotional mess. I didn’t need a push! WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE might have been perfect for a roided-out Eric Gagne ahead of taking a major league mound, but it set up collegiate Dave for some quick hooks!

Do your scores and preferences line up with the research?

🎹 musicking while old (mwo)

A key concept within modern approaches to skill acquisition is understanding the difference between knowledge about and knowledge of movement.

[K]nowledge about the environment involves perception which is indirect or mediated by language, symbols, pictures, instructions to facilitate analogical reasoning of what an information source means…Knowledge of the environment involves the pick-up of perceptual variables that directly constrain functional behaviors…Through exploratory actions, perceptual systems become progressively more ‘attuned’ to the invariants in the environment through direct experience in specific contexts. (16)

Duarte Araújo and Keith Davids. (2011). What exactly is acquired during skill acquisition. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, 3-4, 7-23.

In other words, knowledge about is more of an intellectual act. Knowledge of operates at the implicit level, allowing direct learning to occur.

I was reminded of this distinction as I re-engaged in beginning piano instruction over the past few weeks. There is so much knowledge about. I am taught the names of the notes. I am taught the symbols used to tell me which notes are played and for how many counts. All of that is mapped to the piano keys at the intellectual level. I am supposed to decode the name of the note on the scale and then decide which piano key to strike, all while listening for the concurrent auditory feedback that will either confirm or reject my choice. Consider how that compares with an approach suggested for children in Joan Keonig’s THE MUSICAL CHILD:

To awaken pitch awareness in very young children…we have a fun-filled multimodal process. Musical pitches - what most people think of as ‘notes’, since musical notes denote a specific pitch - become animals or objects, each with a distinct personality: Do-domino, Sol-sunshine, or the frightening Fa-phantom. Each note has a short, highly recognizable musical motif: Fa has eerie, ghostly music, for example. (96-97)

According to Koenig, this kind of training should ideally take place during the same time frame as early language learning. She argues that children can learn to distinguish pitch just as easily as they learn to distinguish colors if given the opportunity. She also notes that music students most often encounter ear training courses far later in life than is ideal, making the skills difficult to master. That smells like a challenge to me, so I have decided to spend some time over the next few weeks engaging in the musical hide and seek game Koenig suggests for parents. Can I learn to distinguish among the starting five musical notes (i.e., Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol)? Check back in the March issue for an update.

🖭 playlist / mixtape

In a perfect world, I would deliver a continuous mixtape for issue 35. In this world, you will have to settle for a YouTube playlist. Enjoy these devil-related songs. Based on my personality profile, I know that I will!

1. tom petty & the heartbreakers FRIEND OF THE DEVIL (LIVE)

2. robert johnson HELL HOUND ON MY TRAIL

3. gil scott-heron ME AND THE DEVIL

4. pj harvey THE DEVIL

5. big k.r.i.t. KEEP THE DEVIL OFF

6. john mayall THE DEVIL MUST BE LAUGHING

7. vince staples SHAME ON THE DEVIL

8. surfjan stevens IN THE DEVIL’S TERRITORY

9. charles mingus DEVIL BLUES

10. the pharcyde DEVIL MUSIC

11. justin townes earle IF I WAS THE DEVIL

12. robin trower SHAME THE DEVIL

13. the reverend horton heat THE DEVIL’S CHASING ME (LIVE ON KEXP)

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Note: This is the second addition to the 2026 version of the newsletter. It will recount my specific efforts to learn to play the piano and highlight general principles around learning that anyone could apply toward musical mastery. For context, my PhD focused on the psychology around the learning and performance of motor skills. Playing a musical instrument is a motor skill, and the principles that work for enhancing practice within sport also apply to music. My 45 years may be categorized by multiple failed attempts to gain competency across several instruments, but my education at least lets me diagnose where I may have gone wrong!

—

My daughter took up the piano about 2 1/2 years ago. In possession of rudimentary musical knowledge from my elementary school days with the clarinet1 and a couple of decades of playing the same damn open chords on the guitar, I figured I could attend the lessons, pay attention, and keep up with her progress. I quickly realized that wasn’t in the cards, so I signed up for lessons, too. My daughter gave it the year and change we demanded and decided musical theater was her preference. I couldn’t justify the continued expense, but vowed to continue my studies on my own. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

Prior to quitting, I had been making progress. And I was enjoying it. So I set 2026 as the year to renew my self-study and see what I could do. I am in possession of both the child and adult versions of the curriculum my daughter’s piano instructor was using and YouTube has a video for any lesson in the books. Smart money is on failure. But I have never been smart with money so I am heading into this venture with optimism. In this section of the newsletter, I will provide updates on my progress, but, more importantly, insights into learning that apply to anyone trying to learn a new movement skill. It can be hard to connect with the novice state of mind once you achieve proficiency, so experiencing the struggles of a new learner often provides the best window into the learning process. In other words, sometimes the best teachers are your fellow learners.

Upon returning to the instructional materials, I was reminded of something that struck me during the year that my daughter and I were simultaneously receiving piano instruction. The curriculum for the child was full of analogies, imagery, and externally focused instructions (i.e., external focus cues are those that reference the impact of a movement on the environment or direct attention away from what the body parts involved are actually doing; internal focus cues, on the other hand, reference the body parts involved). The adult version, however, ditched those approaches in favor of methods that research in motor learning would suggest are far less effective!

Children’s Curriculum
Technique: Lion Paw
Cue: Loud, warm tone on the piano; heavy, loose Lion Paw arm; down-up motion

Adult Curriculum
Technique: Arm Drop
Cue: Drop with a heavy, loose arm; use a slight down-up motion with the wrist as you play each note

This example brings up a key consideration with learning movement skills: explanations are not instructions. The child version was great. It gave a powerful analogy that conjured up rich imagery. It referenced the effect of the movement (i.e., the sound produced) rather than movements of the body parts involved. It was perfect. And, yet, we often feel compelled to make things more complicated for older audiences simply because the older audience can perhaps understand the complexity. But the goal of an instruction isn’t necessarily understanding. It is to produce a desired response. In this example, you want the learner to move in a certain way to create a certain sound. Lion Paw is a perfect instruction. It contains multitudes. Arm Drop may be technically superior in terms of information, but may be a far less effective cue. The children’s version leads to implicit learning and is experiential. The adult version pushes explicit instructions and an intellectual approach. But those things don’t necessarily translate to doing, which is the point. As important, intellectual approaches may be less robust under the stress of live performing. If you are in the business of trying to learn a movement skill or trying to teach one, consider whether you are providing information or instruction. Whenever possible, try moving your communication in the direction of instruction and see what happens.

Information: descriptions, explanations, internal focus cues, intellectual approach

Instruction: imagery, analogies, external focus cues, experiential approach

Personally, I am going to take a run at re-learning the piano with the children’s version at the forefront of those efforts. I will still use the adult version as a resource, but I am betting that the child-centric cues will make for better learning. After all, cues don’t need to be complex (or even technically accurate) to be effective. It all reminds me of the first time I went skiing with my daughter. She was 8. I was 41. But in terms of skiing age, we were both zero. They paired us with an instructor. He kept it very simple. He said to make a slice of pizza with our skis to slow down and make french fries to speed up.

He didn’t describe anatomical relationships. He didn’t say anything about our body parts. He kept it simple. He used analogies. He helped us direct our focus to the external experience. And you know what? We were both skiing within minutes. Unfortunately, he didn’t have similar tricks for successfully navigating the exit for the ski lift, which is why our first ski season turned out to be our last!

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My first memories of Bill Walton are really my father’s. I only knew Walton as an announcer, but my dad remembered “The Big Redhead” as one of the most dominant college basketball players of all time playing for perhaps the most dominant college basketball program to ever exist. So I knew the basic story. Great college player. Played for John Wooden. Followed . Great when healthy as a pro. Betrayed by his body and injuries. Re-emerged as an announcer. But that was the extent of my understanding for most of my life.

That changed in the summer of 2017. I was in Chicago with my wife for a Tom Petty concert at Wrigley Field. For reasons that still defy logic, we thought it was a good idea to take our daughter to the show. I loved Tom Petty1. And my daughter fell asleep each night to the Sleepytime Tunes: Lullaby Tribute To Tom Petty. Our tickets were in the last row of the stadium. We had noise cancelling headphones. She would listen to a couple songs and fall asleep. What could go wrong?

Chris Stapleton was the opening act, and we could hear his set as we approached Wrigley Field on foot. Suddenly, the sky turned dark and it started raining. Hard. Those of us outside the stadium quickly made our way through the turnstiles to the concourse. Unfortunately, everyone sitting in the uncovered infield had a similar thought. I had never felt the possibility of being crushed to death, but it definitely crossed my mind as an outcome in that moment. Wrigley Field was not designed for the modern human, much less so under those particular circumstances. I scooped up my daughter and took my wife’s hand. We pushed through to get to the ramp and away from the crowd. As we made our escape, however, I noticed someone coming our way who was a foot taller than everyone else. It was Bill Walton! He headed toward the exit, all the while having to negotiate high fives and greetings from potentially inebriated admirers. Walton had serious mobility issues and the look on his face confirmed that he was on a serious mission. He was also a pro, however, so my memory is of a concerned giant still graciously high-fiving whoever raised a hand in his path.

Eventually, we found our seats. But the damage was done. It was a legitimately scary experience and my daughter was justifiably over the whole thing. We managed to get through Rockin’ Around (With You) and Mary Jane’s Last Dance. But You Don’t Know How It Feels proved a bridge too far, and we found ourselves walking back to our hotel before it ended. Once we arrived, we got ready for bed to the tunes of the Lullaby Tribute to Tom Petty (as per usual), and my daughter started singing along - something she had never done prior. And the damn thing is all instrumentals, so she was really rubbing it in! No biggie, I told myself. We will get a sitter the next time Petty performs. There are rumors of a Wildflowers tour. It will be great!

Petty, of course, died a few months later. There would be no do-over. But I didn’t know that at the time. So I tried to look on the bright side and count my wins. We hadn’t been crushed to death. We technically saw Petty perform at Wrigley Field. And there was the Bill Walton sighting! It turned out that Walton was in town for the Dead & Company shows on the following two evenings. Walton was a long time supporter and friend of the Grateful Dead, a fact that I was only vaguely aware of at the time. Not that Walton was shy about his love for the band. His memoir featured the band’s logo on the cover, and Walton was frequently asked about the connection in interviews. Plagued with a stutter for his entire playing career, he finally found his voice in retirement as both an author and a basketball announcer. And Walton used that voice to sing the praises of the Grateful Dead whenever he had the chance!

In the four part ESPN documentary on Walton - The Luckiest Guy in the World - Walton equated the Dead’s music to playing basketball. The argument is compelling. Playing a team sport is a lot like performing in a band. Especially a jam band. They are both motor skills that require you to manage your own movements while collaborating with others. There is a general idea of what you are doing but every performance is unique. You have to remain connected to yourself and one another to remain in sync. And when everything comes together, you can be left with levels of performance that could never have been planned and can never be replicated. And that could never be achieved outside of the group.

As I thought more about Walton’s insights, I felt the power in his argument. So often, sport is seen as players running plays or executing a coach’s vision perfectly. But what if you approached sport in the same way a band like the Grateful Dead approached performance? Would it be as efficient as if you methodically enacted prescribed sequences as per your coach? Most certainly not. But perhaps it would be a lot more enjoyable. Perhaps you would discover levels of performance that would not have been possible otherwise. Perhaps you could more easily access your potential. I don’t have the answers, but as I recently watched basketball montages set to the music of the Grateful Dead, I certainly felt like there were some questions worth asking!

—

Walton’s connection to the Grateful Dead, and the Dead’s connection to basketball, inspired me to select one of their albums for the first chordinnate album club of 2026. Check out the details below and join us if you can. And if you have time, check out the clips below. The first recounts the time when Walton took the ‘86 Celtics - minus Danny Ainge - to see the Dead. The second recounts the story of how the Grateful Dead funded the 1992 Lithuanian Men’s basketball team’s trip to the Olympics.

🎶 january album club

The first meeting of the chordinnate album club for 2026 will take place on January 29 at 7p EST and it will be a discussion of the Grateful Dead’s BLUES FOR ALLAH. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

sign up to attend

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

🤾🏾‍♀️ music for sport performance

Note: This section is new for 2026. It will walk readers through the process of understanding their musical preferences and explain how to use that information to make exercise or sport more enjoyable.

—

The relationship between music and movement is well-known, so much so that researcher Costas I. Karageorghis developed a model to describe its effects on exercise and sport. And they are numerous. Music has been shown to influence mood, dissociation, arousal, flow, enjoyment, imagery, and even self-talk. It can influence how hard someone feels they are working (i.e., Rating of Perceived Exertion or RPE) or even the output of that work. It can help people move more efficiently or adhere to exercise for longer periods. It can even influence recovery. And, unlike a lot of psychological interventions, it can do all of these things almost instantaneously.

Note: Check out Pearl Jam, Basketball, American Football & F1 from for some specifics on Karageorghis’s work as well as some killer Pearl Jam / sport anecdotes. It is a great read!

And yet, in all of my academic training2, I can’t recall it being covered as a viable intervention with athletes looking to enhance performance or increase enjoyment. Even more telling is the typical response I get when approaching colleagues about the use of music. The most common retort is something along the lines of, “Big deal. My athletes already listen to music.” They also already think. They already eat. They already breathe. They already sleep. Could they not benefit from a more intentional approach to each of those things? Why is music any different? And if most athletes are already using it, wouldn’t that make it a potentially more powerful intervention? You aren’t asking someone to do more. You are simply helping them do what they do more effectively. The habit is already in place. You are just helping them modify it so that it works for them to its fullest extent.

Part of me wonders if they lack of interest in musical interventions has to do with how individualized those efforts have to be. The Karageorghis model clearly indicates how personal and situational factors moderate musical characteristics to influence outcomes. Music isn’t nearly as neat as a box-breathing or self-talk intervention. It demands knowing athlete preferences and history. It requires that athletes possess a level of self-awareness and interest around both their performance tendencies and their musical influences. It admittedly involves a level of subjectivity, and may be seen as creeping to close to art as opposed to science. In a professional sport (and all too often amateur) landscape that favors (supposed) objectivity/efficiency over creativity/exploration, perhaps musical interventions are seen as both time-consuming and frivolous. Luckily, I love wasting time!

Adding music to the performance mix requires two things: (1) a Mental Game Profile and (2) a Musical Profile. In other words, we need to understand who the athlete is at their best (and less than best) and their relationship with music.

Mental Game Profile (MGP)

A mental game profile consists of information about those things which are often lumped into the “intangible” category. Things like confidence, motivation, leadership, resilience, work ethic, etc. I have participated in NBA pre-draft player evaluation since 2017, which has helped me get a good handle on how to understand an athlete’s mental game. I personally prefer a combination of (more) objective measures and athlete reflection/discussion. In my experience, athletes are willing to talk about who they are, both in terms of where they shine and where they shrink. So despite self-report’s bad rap, I have had the opposite experience with it. In short, the expert on the athlete is the athlete. If you honor that, you tend to get solid insights. Every situation is unique, but in an ideal world, I like to gather information on as many of the following factors as I can:

• Personality | relatively stable patterns of emotion, motivation, cognition, and behavior

• Attentional Style | typical direction of focus

• Stress Response | typical anxiety response

• Motivation/Drives | intrinsic desires, goals, and values

• Moods | sets of feelings; clusters of emotions

• Cognitive Performance | neurocognitive capabilities (e.g., reaction time, executive functioning)

• Competitive Performance Self-Audit | self-reflection on factors related to both best and worst performances

Musical Profile (MP)

A musical profile describes an athlete’s connection to music, both in terms of what they like and how they respond. Similar to the MPP, it involves (more) objective measures (e.g. Music Mood Regulation Inventory) and subjective reflection (e.g., Musical Ratings).

• Music Mood Regulation Inventory | assesses capacity for music to influence feeling and emotion

• Musical Preferences | what they like to listen to (and what they don’t)

• Musical Ratings | how they respond to various musical elements across genres

• Musical Aptitude | musical knowledge and skill

Once you understand who an athlete is, what they prefer musically, and how they respond to music, you can help them use music to address any challenges. For example, I once worked with a runner. Like many athletes, she found it challenging to dial down her energy post-race. This made it challenging to recover and to sleep post-race. For a single event, this wasn’t a huge barrier. But when attempting to qualify for a national team, it proved problematic. She had to run 3 races in a 4-day period, and ideally needed to be at her best for the final race. Because brain waves, heart rate, and respiration rates all entrain to music (Karageorghis, 2016), I selected music from her preferred artist that had BPMs appropriate for slowing heart and breathing rates. I also added binaural beats to the track at a frequency consistent with research on producing relaxation/recovery. She was going to listen to music post-race anyway, but tailoring it to assist in recovery helped the music serve a purpose beyond just enjoyment or distraction. I was also able to select songs with personally meaningful and motivational lyrical content, an added benefit. Heading into the event, she had a goal of making it to the finals to have a chance at making the national team. Although she didn’t make the team, she did make it to the finals and put up a personal best time in her event. Did the musical intervention make a difference? Only God knows that! But the intervention aligned with the best evidence available and was consistent with the athlete preferences. In the messiness that is a real-world application of the science, you can’t hope for much more that!

🎹 musicking while old (mwo)

Note: This is the second addition to the 2026 version of the newsletter. It will recount my specific efforts to learn to play the piano and highlight general principles around learning that anyone could apply toward musical mastery. For context, my PhD focused on the psychology around the learning and performance of motor skills. Playing a musical instrument is a motor skill, and the principles that work for enhancing practice within sport also apply to music. My 45 years may be categorized by multiple failed attempts to gain competency across several instruments, but my education at least lets me diagnose where I may have gone wrong!

—

My daughter took up the piano about 2 1/2 years ago. In possession of rudimentary musical knowledge from my elementary school days with the clarinet3 and a couple of decades of playing the same damn open chords on the guitar, I figured I could attend the lessons, pay attention, and keep up with her progress. I quickly realized that wasn’t in the cards, so I signed up for lessons, too. My daughter gave it the year and change we demanded and decided musical theater was her preference. I couldn’t justify the continued expense, but vowed to continue my studies on my own. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

Prior to quitting, I had been making progress. And I was enjoying it. So I set 2026 as the year to renew my self-study and see what I could do. I am in possession of both the child and adult versions of the curriculum my daughter’s piano instructor was using and YouTube has a video for any lesson in the books. Smart money is on failure. But I have never been smart with money so I am heading into this venture with optimism. In this section of the newsletter, I will provide updates on my progress, but, more importantly, insights into learning that apply to anyone trying to learn a new movement skill. It can be hard to connect with the novice state of mind once you achieve proficiency, so experiencing the struggles of a new learner often provides the best window into the learning process. In other words, sometimes the best teachers are your fellow learners.

Upon returning to the instructional materials, I was reminded of something that struck me during the year that my daughter and I were simultaneously receiving piano instruction. The curriculum for the child was full of analogies, imagery, and externally focused instructions (i.e., external focus cues are those that reference the impact of a movement on the environment or direct attention away from what the body parts involved are actually doing; internal focus cues, on the other hand, reference the body parts involved). The adult version, however, ditched those approaches in favor of methods that research in motor learning would suggest are far less effective!

Children’s Curriculum
Technique: Lion Paw
Cue: Loud, warm tone on the piano; heavy, loose Lion Paw arm; down-up motion

Adult Curriculum
Technique: Arm Drop
Cue: Drop with a heavy, loose arm; use a slight down-up motion with the wrist as you play each note

This example brings up a key consideration with learning movement skills: explanations are not instructions. The child version was great. It gave a powerful analogy that conjured up rich imagery. It referenced the effect of the movement (i.e., the sound produced) rather than movements of the body parts involved. It was perfect. And, yet, we often feel compelled to make things more complicated for older audiences simply because the older audience can perhaps understand the complexity. But the goal of an instruction isn’t necessarily understanding. It is to produce a desired response. In this example, you want the learner to move in a certain way to create a certain sound. Lion Paw is a perfect instruction. It contains multitudes. Arm Drop may be technically superior in terms of information, but may be a far less effective cue. The children’s version leads to implicit learning and is experiential. The adult version pushes explicit instructions and an intellectual approach. But those things don’t necessarily translate to doing, which is the point.

In short, if you are in the business of trying to learn a movement skill or trying to teach one, consider whether you are providing information or instruction. Whenever possible, try moving your communication in the direction of instruction and see what happens.

Information: descriptions, explanations, internal focus cues, intellectual approach

Instruction: imagery, analogies, external focus cues, experiential approach

Personally, I am going to take a run at re-learning the piano with the children’s version at the forefront of those efforts. I will still use the adult version as a resource, but I am betting that the child-centric cues will make for better learning. After all, cues don’t need to be complex (or even technically accurate) to be effective. It all reminds me of the first time I went skiing with my daughter. She was 8. I was 41. But in terms of skiing age, we were both zero. They paired us with an instructor. He kept it very simple. He said to make a slice of pizza with our skis to slow down and make french fries to speed up.

He didn’t describe anatomical relationships. He didn’t say anything about our body parts. He kept it simple. He used analogies. He helped us direct our focus to the external experience. And you know what? We were both skiing within minutes. Unfortunately, he didn’t offer similar instruction to navigate the exit for the ski lift, which is why our first ski season turned out to be our last!

🖭 playlist

In lieu of an issue-specific playlist, I decided to tee up the featured content for this month’s upcoming album club. For my money, “Franklin’s Tower” takes the prize for “Most Likely to Put on Repeat for Hours.” Give it or the whole thing a listen; maybe it will inspire you to sign up!

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BLUES FOR ALLAH is the Dead’s unique vision, a deeply humane parable that framed their own artistic renewal in the most inclusive, expansive terms. Fifty years later, it remains one of their most musically successful and resolutely experimental albums.

Nicholas G. Meriwether, Executive Director of the Grateful Dead Studies Association

The first chordinnate album club meeting of 2026 will feature a discussion of the Grateful Dead’s BLUES FOR ALLAH, which was originally released on September 1, 1975.

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BLUES FOR ALLAH followed an extended hiatus from playing live, which left some wondering whether the band would even continue. They obviously did continue, but took a different approach when recording the album.

We kind of made a ground rule for that record: ‘Let’s make a record where we get together every day and we don’t bring anything in.’ .... The whole idea was to get back to that band thing, where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we’d go into the studio and jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up we’d say, ‘Well let’s preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can’t do something with it.’ And that’s how we did most of the album.

- Jerry Garcia

Reviews upon release weren’t entirely positive - see Rolling Stone - but opinion seems to have shifted over time. What Rolling Stone labeled “a good try” is now seen as a “remarkable, transformative…masterpiece” and “one of their finest non-concert LPs.” This more positive contemporary take is in line with the opinion of our guest host for the club, Bill S. Bill has graciously prepared a detailed listening guide to provide both context for the album as a whole and track-specific insights to assist the listener. I will let Bill take it from here!

intro

I saw my first Grateful Dead concert in the Fall of 1988 when I was only 14...kind of hard to believe now, and I had been collecting and listening to all the live tapes and albums that I could get my hands on. I remember that BLUES FOR ALLAH (1975) seemed hard to find for some reason. Once I found it, it became one of my favorite studio albums, which notoriously as a whole take a back seat to the Grateful Dead's live recordings.

AMERICAN BEAUTY and WORKINGMAN’S DEAD (both 1970) will often get pointed to as two of the Grateful Dead's best albums. BLUES FOR ALLAH is much more off the radar, and has a very different jazz infused sound. When I rifle through all the studio albums in my mind, this one just stands out near or at the top as containing some of the most engaging and interesting songs the band wrote in terms of music and lyrics, most of which became warhorse but always exciting concert staples. Phil Lesh's unique bass playing is especially pronounced on this album, and the sound of a Rhodes electric piano is a brief flash in this period. There's also some performance intrigue around some of the songs that after almost 40 years of ensconced listening and concert going, I can recite details about in the same manner that others might be able to rattle off obscure baseball statistics.

a little more context specific to Blues for Allah

The album recording you are directed to is the relatively recent (still in my mind) 2013 remaster, which is the album in its pure form, and seemed most appropriate for this occasion. The very active Grateful Dead enterprise just released in 2025 a 50th anniversary edition with a lot of additional material on it, but I did not want you to get distracted. I will talk a little about that as well as another older, but very closely related release when we meet.

BLUES FOR ALLAH was released in 1975, and recorded over a period of 6 months (a long time by almost any standard) in band member Bob Weir's home studio. They had no record company to answer to because they had been running their own label at the time. The album reached #12 on the Billboard Pop Album chart. 1975 is also commonly known as the band's "hiatus" year when they took a year off from touring, performing only 4 times in the San Francisco Bay area, and it not being clear at the end of 1974, even to them, whether they would ever get back to touring. This year also marked the return of Mickey Hart, the 2nd drummer who left in Spring of 1971 after having joined in 1968. He came back to the band during the recording sessions BLUES FOR ALLAH. The band had plenty of time to be experimental, and some of the manifestations of this include the use of exotic percussion and even live crickets that were miked in a box for the title track. Below is a brief listening guide to the album...

listening guide

Help On the Way--> Slipknot!-->Franklin's Tower

A musical suite that became a monstrous concert staple, really two songs connected by an instrumental interlude (Slipknot!). Although Franklin's Tower was a pretty permanent live fixture from it's inception through 1995, for multiple years it stood alone (1978-1982 and 1986 into 1989), appearing in different spots in the setlists until the full suite was brought back for good in October of 1989 and remained through the end of the Grateful Dead 1995. The studio version really captures Phil Lesh's unique bass style.

King Solomon's Marbles/Stronger than Dirt/Milkin' the Turkey

Commonly just referred to as "King Solomon's Marbles", a driving instrumental with very hard to distinguish named sections. Only ever performed live a couple of times in 1975. It was later on played a number of times between 2009 and 2014 by post Grateful Dead offshoot bands The Dead and Furthur.

The Music Never Stopped

A concert staple with a great, driving beat and poetic lyrics

Crazy Fingers

A gentle, lilting image rich song with a variety of percussion peppered in.

Sage and Spirit

Interesting, delicate instrumental etude developed out of one of Bob Weir's warm ups. Played only in 1975 and acoustically a few times during a series of 1980 acoustic sets.

Blues for Allah - Sands Castles & Glass Camels-Unusual Occurrences in the Desert

Musically, this particularly experimental sequence may well be the most challenging part of this album to listen to. That definitely goes for me. Blues for Allah adds much to the Middle Eastern feel of the album, and the lyrics were written with the 1975 assassination of Saudi King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud close in the mind of the band.
In preparing for this Album Club, I listened to the whole thing straight through for maybe the first time in 35 years. I will still probably rarely choose to listen to it, but I do have a refreshed appreciation. Some of you may really get into the Blues for Allah cluster. I will be interested to hear your own reactions!

Give it a listen below (or wherever you get your music) and sign up for the club to join the discussion!

And if you want to hear the tracks live, check out ONE FROM THE VAULT, which was recorded on August 13, 1975 at The Great American Music Hall.

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The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

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issue 33 will be the final edition of the chordinnation for 2025. It will return in 2026, Luka-Dončić-style (i.e., slimmer, more focused). Year 1 was all about consistency and exploration of the connection between music and sport. Year 2 will look to build upon the things that worked in Year 1 (e.g., the album club) and use the lessons learned to provide actionable insight about enhancing performance and increasing enjoyment. Year 1 was about the what and why; Year 2 will be more about the how. Year 1 was about quantity; Year 2 will be about quality. Year 1 was about showing up; Year 2 will be about sticking around. You get the idea!

I don’t anticipate anyone who enjoyed Year 1 not enjoying Year 2, but want to make the information more useful to individuals desiring something they can put into practice. I realized early on in 2025 that my initial goal for a weekly newsletter was a bit ambitious. Even scaling that to twice monthly proved difficult. Too much filler, not enough - or perhaps any - killer. So 2026 will look to bring more intention to the chordinnation, with an “at least once per month” approach that provides insights and information across a few areas:

• The newsletter will drop monthly, and will likely retain a similar format. Rather than highlight just the connection between sport and music, however, it will also look to deliver specific direction for how performers can better understand who they are and how they can use music to increase enjoyment and/or performance. Think of this as a shift from abstract to action. Specifically, I will look to offer application across 2 areas:

  • Using music to enhance sport performance - I provided a lot of abstract advice in Year 1. For Year 2, I want to walk readers through the process of understanding musical preferences and using that information to make exercise or sport more enjoyable.

  • Using contemporary ideas about practice to enhance musical efforts - My PhD focused on the psychology around the learning and performance of motor skills. Music is a motor skill. The principles that work for enhancing practice within sport also work within music. As someone who has spent a lifetime trying unsuccessfully to learn musical instruments, I may be the perfect guinea pig. So look for insights into the practice of practice that specifically apply to learning an instrument. If you are an adult looking to pick up music, this component may be especially interesting.

• The album club will continue to meet at a TBD frequency, continue to be free, and continue to welcome anyone with an interest in music and/or sport. It has been a great way to connect with others, discover different music, and escape the clutches of the algorithm, even if just for an hour per month. If you have attended or think you might like to, please complete a short survey to help me inform how the 2026 version of the club operates! And if you want to catch the last meeting in 2025, sign up here!

  

  album club survey

• The other components will show up when, and if, they make sense. Rather than try to force create across all categories for every issue, I will look to supplement the primary components with additional elements (e.g., audio experiences, playlists, relevant research, collaborations, etc.) as needed.

🔬 research suggestions

Got any studies that you think would be a good fit for a future issue of the chordinnation? Send them my way!

🤾🏾‍♀️ athlete suggestion

Got any athletes that you think should be featured in a future issue of the chordinnation? Send the suggestions my way!

📝 lyrical suggestions

Got any lyrics that you think should be featured in a future issue of the chordinnation? Send the suggestions my way!

🖭 issue playlist

With that, I will see anyone who chooses to remain in 2026. Until then, enjoy this playlist with my favorite tracks from Year 1 of the chordinnation. Any song that made an appearance in issues 1-32 was fair game. I tried to give you 4 mini-playlists within the larger playlist, so hopefully that comes through. Enjoy!

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Confidence gets most of the attention when people talk about elite performers in sport, but acceptance might be even more important. Without acceptance, confidence may be nothing more than self-delusion. At best, it is a bluff. At worst, it is going all in on a hand you haven’t even seen! Acceptance, on the other hand, allows you to honestly assess the situation and your experience of it. It is the practice of what a colleague of mine refers to as self-honest self-observation, which he makes even easier for athletes by having them start with the prompt, “When I tell myself the truth…” Once athletes take the time to honestly reflect on their current experience, they can shift their focus toward what they want to happen next. It becomes less about believing absolutely in success and more about accepting uncertainty but still committing to the effort fully. But, as that same colleague also likes to say, thinking is remarkably inefficient in this process.

This is where music enters the equation.

For no reason whatsoever1, I recently re-read my sister’s book on the women in John Brown’s family who made his (questionably planned) raid on Harper’s Ferry possible. It was supposed to be a break from investigating music and sport, but it proved otherwise in a section about the lasting impacts of Annie Brown’s direct involvement in the lead-up to the raid:

Decades later Ruth recalled, ‘Annie’s grief was terrible to see. She had known every man who fell in the fight, had been present at all their conferences, and was like a sister to many of them….She went about the house pale, silent, and tearless. She neither slept nor ate, and I feared for her reason.’ Concerned, Ruth arranged for a local music teacher to play ‘The Dying Warrior’ while Annie was around. She recalled how ‘the pathos of this sweet old song broke up the fountain of Annie’s grief, and she cried with a passion I shall never forget. She often said afterward that had it not been for that song she would have certainly gone insane, but the fit of crying relieved the tension of her feelings.’

from THE TIE THAT BOUND US: THE WOMEN OF JOHN BROWN’S FAMILY AND THE LEGACY OF RADICAL ABOLITIONISM by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

The music did what Annie’s mind wouldn’t let her or perhaps couldn’t handle at the conscious level. But it had to be seen to be killed. Or, in this instance, heard to be felt.

In working with athletes, I typically recommend some form of post-game reflection to help accept whatever happen and move on from it. This can be as simple as putting a number rating on the performance or as complex as an athlete decides to make it. Regardless of the form it takes, it seems to allow athletes to learn from what happened. It helps them hold on to what was positive and let go of what wasn’t.

The Annie Brown story makes me wonder what function music could serve in this process. Athletes often listen to music in the lead-up to a game, but I haven’t had many describe using it post-game. Perhaps it would be helpful, especially if it allows athletes to match their feelings at a level that goes beyond what they can articulate. You could even have each team member choose a song after each game to create a shared playlist where all could process the experience while enhancing community. Taking the idea a step farther, it would be interesting to create a playlist over the course of the season based on the post-game selected track that best captured how the athlete felt about the performance. At the end of the season, an athlete could listen to the arc of the whole experience much like they would an album. Or you could do any other number of creative things using music as the tool for reflection. Maybe it would help them accept whatever happened and move on with confidence to the next year!

Note: The issue art is a drawing of a cat looking in a mirror. My daughter recently added a mirror to her room and her cat is obsessed with it. It reminded me that reflecting is good, but you don’t want to spend too much time in that state. See issue 15 for a more detailed discussion of that idea.

🔬 research spotlight

Iballa Buranat, Anastasios Mavrolampados, Deniz Duman, Friederike Koehler, Suvi Helina Saarikallio, Geoff Luck, & Petri Toiviainen. 2025. Memory bumps across the lifespan in personally meaningful music. Memory, 1196-1216.

summary: The authors of this study explored lifespan patterns in music-related memory, with a particular interest in whether the ‘reminiscence bump’ - the peak in emotional connection to music from adolescence and early adulthood observed in Western populations - held up globally. They recruited 1891 participants from diverse geographical backgrounds and analyzed the release years of personally meaningful songs. The authors found support for the reminiscence bump observed in other studies, with emotional attachment to music peaking around age 17 for participants in the study. Males tended to peak a bit earlier (i.e., 16) and females a bit later (i.e., 19). Additionally, the researchers found that, across cultures, younger listeners tended to bond with music produced around 25 years prior to their birth (i.e., cascading reminiscence bump). Older participants also exhibited a recency bump, which led to some cases of more recent music overshadowing the adolescence bump from their youth.

potential application to sport: I see two applications for this research. The first is straightforward: learn what music athletes connect to most emotionally and incorporate that into their preparation. I once worked with a runner who found the most meaning in a song that he would listen to as a high schooler with his team ahead of meets. His experience lines up with this study, as he was exactly 16 at the time. The second application is conceptual. I wonder if athletes have a similar reminiscence bump with respect to their sport participation. In other words, is there an age when the connection to sport is most likely solidified? I have often had athletes refer to finding it helpful to reflect back to a time when the relationship with sport was about freedom, exploration, and joy. Whether that is a baseball athlete reminding his 30-year old self that his 12-year old self would take a year of rehabbing Tommy John on a Major League IL any day of the week or that runner who would reconnect with the feeling of just competing that he had at 16.

Check out a summary of the study at https://neurosciencenews.com/music-memory-neurodevelopment-29830/

🤾🏾‍♀️ athlete spotlight

Legendary swimmer Michael Phelps’ use of music was well-documented throughout his career. Phelps used music ahead of and between events to help him focus, manage emotions, and control his levels of energy.

Check out one of the many articles detailing his use here or listen to an old clip of Phelps explaining his relationship with music below:

subscription spotlight

I subscribed to a Substack from a while back and have enjoyed his posts around music therapy. Leone, who is a board-certified music therapist and the director of medical music therapy at A Place To Be in Northern Virginia, dropped one recently that fit in nicely with the issue’s theme:

For more, check out his Substack below. Enjoy!

Music Therapy/Music Musings

Explore the healing powers of music and music therapy!

By Raymond Leone

📝 lyrical spotlight

Acceptance means squaring up with the truth. Which brought some George Clinton lyrics to mind. Because the only way out is through!

So wide you can’t get around it
So low you can’t get under it
So low you can’t get under it
So high you can’t get over it
So high you can’t get over it

funkadelic ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

🖭 issue playlist

I searched for songs related to memory or mirrors for this playlist. Didn’t think too deeply about it beyond that but definitely enjoyed listening to some songs from the past and learning about some that were new to me!

🎶 album club

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club runs monthly and typically meets on a Thursday at 6p EST early in the month. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

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Listen to the album and join us on Thursday, December 18th at 6p EST to discuss. Or, better, yet, listen to both STAY PROUD OF ME and NoSo’s latest, WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING?, which suggests may be necessary to truly understand STAY PROUD OF ME. Based on how the two albums came to be, the argument seems compelling.

Hwong began writing When Are You Leaving? almost immediately after the making of Stay Proud of Me wrapped in 2021. Though the debut was helpful for Hwong in exploring his gender identity, there was more he had to unpack. Transitioning helped Hwong put down his armour and become who he wanted to be. But even after becoming that person, he still had both old wounds and new left to process.

NoSo and the Other Side of Fantasy by Laura David

Max describes STAY PROUD OF ME as “the closest thing…to an album-length document of transitioning being amazing but not a complete balm.” The thematic similarities between it and the more recent WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING? support this argument, so if you have time to digest both ahead of the meeting, please do so. And if you only have time to listen to one or some or even none, you are still welcome to attend!

Max also shared content from both album cycles, so check these if you like to couple your listening experience with the written word.

STAY PROUD OF ME cycle in 2022

• Paste Review by Max Freedman

• The Line of Best Fit Review by Alexander Williams

• NPR Music Review by Elle Mannion

WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING? cycle in 2025

• Lavender Sound Review by Max Freedman

• The Line of Best Fit Feature by Laura David

• Atwood Magazine Interview by Mitch Mosk

• The Forty Five Interview by Geena Ling

Max has brought a lot to album club meetings as an attendee, so it should be a great discussion. Join us if you can. Share this with anyone you think might be interested. Hope to see you there!

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And even if you can’t attend in December, fill out the survey for the 2026 version of the album club to be included moving forward.

2026 album club survey

The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

Subscribe now

The November meeting of the chordinnate album club will feature Kane Smego and his album POT LIQUOR. In a previous email exchange with Kane, he referenced the track SLOW COOK as a metaphor for playing the long game as a creative. I responded that I thought the concept would likely transfer to the sort of mindset that I hope to foster in the athletes I work with, so I would revisit it in a later issue. Then I completely forgot about the conversation! When I dipped into my email archive while prepping the listening guide for the album club, I was reminded of my promise, which led me to abandon the half-baked spotlight I was cooking up for in favor of Smego’s.

Check out the track below (and consider the athlete-related wordplay a nice bonus):

In Smego’s version, you cook until “it falls off the bone.” In sport, the parallel may be trusting the process until it pays off. When athletes are at their best, it seems to be happening without effort. In other words, they don’t have to cut the meat from the bone; it just falls off! So as much as we hear about athletes “pushing through” or “fighting harder” or “wanting it more,” the answer is usually oppositional to those ideas.

Relax through.

Go softer.

Care less.

Ignore the perceived costs or rewards of performance. Instead, decide what matters ahead of a contest. Control what you can in relation to those ideals. Observe the results. Learn from them. Adjust as needed. Repeat. And even if you never get to where you thought you would be, perhaps it won’t matter. You will have likely enjoyed the ride. And you will probably still end up somewhere tolerable - perhaps even preferable - to where your immature ideas of success would have placed you.

Full disclosure: Kane’s message felt like it landed on a personal level as well. I have previously addressed the ups and downs of a career in sport - with an assist from Mac Miller - but that effort was more about a diagnosis than a remedy. The back-to-back tracks PEDESTAL and SLOW COOK serve as a reminder to identify the ingredients in my personal definition of success and stay the course!

If you want to continue to engage with Kane’s music, check out the listening guide for the upcoming album club meeting and consider signing up to attend.

🤾🏾‍♀️ athlete spotlight

After the October Album Club, shared a clip of Tyler, the Creator’s athleticism on display.

It got me thinking about the crossover between music and sport. On the one hand, it makes sense that athleticism and rhythm would be connected. But if you grew up watching Rock N’ Jock on MTV or have ever tuned in to Dancing with the Stars, you know that the relationship between musical rhythm and athleticism isn’t nearly that clean! For some, however, there does appear to be a substantial overlap. Pulling on the DWTS string took me to an article outlining all the athlete appearances on the show, which lead me to a name who certainly deserves a spotlight: Iman Shumpert. Shumpert was an NBA champion during his professional basketball playing days and finished 1st on Season 30 of DWTS. Additionally, Shumpert was actively making music throughout his career as an “escape from the floor” and continues to make music post-playing career. Take a listen below!

📝 lyrical spotlight

Kane Smego’s SLOW COOK, which inspired the issue spotlight, reminded me of two non-rap tracks that hit upon similar themes.

Might work my feet to the bone
But I don’t mind it
We all got our own way of growing
Ain’t gotta justify it

emily nenni LONG GAME

It doesn’t matter when you bloom
It matters that you do

secret sisters LATE BLOOMER

🖭 issue playlist

This playlist started with the tracks featured in the issue and built from there. Does it make sense? Who can say. Does it matter? Of course it doesn’t!

🎶 album club

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club runs monthly. The next meeting is November 19th at 8p EST. We will be discussing Kane Smego’s POT LIQUOR and will be joined by Kane himself. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

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the backstory

Kane Smego entered my orbit in 2014 because of sports journalist Bomani Jones. I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, about to enter my second year as a college professor. Michael Brown, Jr. had been shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, with the resulting protests getting national coverage. One of those on the street, journalist Wesley J. Lowery, offered the best real-time information through his Twitter feed. I hadn’t been on Twitter previously, but joined in an effort to stay informed about the developments in my hometown of Ferguson, MO. I noticed that the ESPN-associated Bomani Jones was tweeting about the events, so I started listening to his non-sport focused evening podcast. At some point, Jones referenced the producer for his theme song, North Carolina-based Petey Greene. A search for Greene took me to Bandcamp and Greene’s collaboration with Kane Smego, SOUL TRAIN ROBBERS. I gave it a listen, and, having thoroughly enjoyed it, purchased it. When what I thought was an automated thank you email arrived from Smego, I replied. And he actually emailed back! That was enough to hook me as an invested fan, so I kept track of his releases in the years to come. Fast forward to 2023 and my initial efforts to marry music and sport. In an effort to get a musician’s take on the idea, I hit up Kane on IG. Consistent with my previous experience, he responded. He was up for a conversation and has been gracious with his time since. When I saw that he was releasing a new album, I thought it would be a great way to help promote his work and allow the club attendees to discuss the art with the artist.

the artist

Kane Smego is an international touring poet and hip hop artist, educator, and National Poetry Slam finalist. Kane’s one-man hip hop theatre show, Temples of Lung and Air, was produced by Playmakers Repertory Company and StreetSigns Center in 2018, the Detroit Public Theatre in 2019, and featured at the United Solo Theatre Festival in NYC. As a recording artist, Kane has released multiple hip hop and poetry albums. He has been featured on Grammy Award-winner King Mez’s debut album My Everlasting Zeal, and topped the Spotify Viral 50 billboard in May 2017 featuring on the song “North Cack” with G Yamazawa and J Gunn. Kane has also been a TEDx speaker and a featured performer at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, the Def Poetry Jam Reunion, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the Shriver Report Live hosted by Atlantic Magazine.

In addition to his creative work, Kane is the Associate Director and an artist alumnus of Next Level, a cultural diplomacy program that sends American hip-hop artists around the world to use music and dance in promoting cultural exchange, artistic collaboration, and community building. Additionally, he delivers writing and performance workshops at colleges and K-12 schools in efforts to promote the arts, social justice, and community engagement. Check out this spoken word performance from Kane, which includes a snippet at the end where he describes some of his educational work.

For more about Kane:

• Interview with Canvas Rebel

• UC-Berkeley Bio

• Interview with UNC-Chapel Hill

• Article about workshop at Central Florida

• Interview with Let’s Talk Durham

• Talk at 2014 NASW National Conference

• Article about workshop at Ransom Everglades school

• Street Poets Interview

• Article from the Detroit News about one-man show

the album | POT LIQUOR

When I caught up with Kane several months back, he gave me a preview of POT LIQUOR in his own words. I had zeroed in on some lyrics from his previous album (i.e., COLLARD GREEN MUSIC) to feature in issue 10 of the chordinnation (i.e., creative people have to be fed). When I reached out to confirm he was good with that, he alerted me to the topical connection to his forthcoming work. So rather than me tell you about POT LIQUOR, I will let him!

The word Pot Liquor is culinary and refers to the nutrient and flavor-rich broth that is cooked up with a pot of greens. You can eat it with the greens or drink it like a soup. So this album is kind of a thematic sequel to Collard Green Music and the intro/title track that just dropped is very on topic. The hook is “Catch me in the stu/stew, brewing up the pot liquor,” and the second rendition is “catch me in the stu/stew, with the roux to make the plot thicker,” playing off of stu as in studio and stew as in soup. The video actually has clips of me cooking up the greens with the broth and then serving a mock up bottle of “liquor” with Pot Liquor label on it as a round of drinks during a game of spades at a homie’s house. All of that to say, please feel free to include the song in your playlist and newsletter…I’ll also follow up with you because there is one other one that is very thematically tied to food as well called “Slow Cook” that uses the metaphor of building a career as a creative being the long game or a marathon hustle that we “slow cook till it falls off the bone.” Think you’ll dig it!

Kane was correct in his assessment of my assessment, which is why I selected POT LIQUOR for the album club! He also explained the concept in more depth on his IG, so check that out and then give it a listen.

The 9-track album features several producers and featured artists, so check out the post below from Kane that links to his collaborators on the effort.

the videos

Kane shot and produced videos for first two album tracks. I personally enjoyed both and especially love how he embedded captions of the lyrical content. Check those out below.

Because I went down the Kane Smego YouTube rabbit-hole, I found two videos for tracks from his previous album, COLLARD GREEN MUSIC, that were produced by Phil Cook, the man behind tracks 3 and 7 on POT LIQUOR, two of my favorites.

Finally, here’s a throwback to 8 years ago and a G YAMAZAWA track featuring Kane…

the only logical conclusion

If you have made it this far, you have no excuse for not joining us on November 19 at 8p EST to discuss POT LIQUOR with Kane himself. Sign up below!

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The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

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1

Which means that we will be running the club according to Road House Rules of Order

I recently started reading Daniel Levitin’s I HEARD THERE WAS A SECRET CHORD: MUSIC AS MEDICINE. Within the first few pages, Levitin hit upon something that I have often thought about in relation to sport:

We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective. Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world. Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy. It is no accident that word ‘motion’ is part of the word ‘emotion.’ Both come from the Latin emovere: to move, move out, or move through. As music moves through us, it signals, exercises, and invokes emotions.

Levitin packs a ton in that short section but a few things jumped out at me:

• Latin for the win - My old man was the product of a Catholic education that left him ready with the Latin origin for most situations1. As Levitin points out, the Latin roots force you to acknowledge that emotion is part of movement whether we want to admit that or not. So perhaps it is smart to embrace it rather than fight it.

• Movement in all respects - I often describe my interests around sport as two-fold: how athletes move and what moves athletes. Reducing athletic skill to technique or science may be the most efficient method of moving. But what gets lost with that approach? All the things that make movement meaningful. That make it unique. That make it a form of expression or catharsis. I know that the future is trending toward full-robot, but I am not on board.

• Pursue truth - I once had a colleague who argued that you couldn’t go wrong in research if you made sure to keep pursuing truth. Scientific truth is only half of the story. And often leaves you looking for proof rather than truth. Truth is more than perfect technique. It is more than made baskets. It is much deeper and more personal than that. I will always favor a sporting reality that allows for meaning beyond a box score.

• Perception is personal - The recent explosion in motor learning around keeping perception and action coupled is admirable. And I agree with it. But what frames perception and how we make meaning? Emotions. Motivations. Athletes are humans who bring their own past and current intentions to movement situations. It isn’t just about recognizing the environmental cues that will lead to optimal athletic outcomes that you have prioritized as a coach. It is about recognizing the person (or people) at the center of the movement experience and the meaning that they are making with their performance.

—

I had a conversation the other day with an athlete who grew up in Spain. As she described basketball in terms of joy, feeling, freedom, and creativity, I couldn’t help but wonder how she would have described her sport had she grown up in the U.S. system. Personally, I will take expression over efficiency any day. I can still remember pitching against a team in college that had two hitters near the middle of the lineup.2 Landon Hoffstettler was a 6 and half foot left-handed slap hitter. Such a waste. Both in terms of what physics set as his ceiling and how beautiful a left-handed swing can be when fully unleashed.3 Max Douglas was a 6 foot right-hander who swung out of his rear on every offering. I feared for my life with every below average fastball I threw toward the plate when Douglas hit, but I loved how he played the game. And although I remember both of those opponents, only one brings a smile to my face some 25 years post-playing!

🔬 research spotlight

Imtiyaz Ali Mir, Moniruddin Chowdhury, Rabiul Md Islam, Goh Yee Ling, Alauddin A.B.M. Chowdhury, Zobear Md Hasan, Yukihito Higashi. 2021. Relaxing music reduces blood pressure and heart rate among pre-hypertensive young adults: A randomized control trial. J Clin Hypertens, 23, 317-322.

summary: Researchers divided 30 pre-hypertensive young adults into two groups: (1) a music group received both music therapy and a dietary plan, and (2) a control group that received only a dietary plan. Music therapy consisted of passive listening to music for 30 minutes/day, 5 days/week for 4 weeks. Both groups followed the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) plan, which was rich in fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and unsaturated fat. Additionally, both groups limited sodium intake to less than 100 mmol/day. The control group did not show any changes in blood pressure or heart rate from pre- to post-testing. The music group showed significant reductions in systolic blood pressure and heart rate, and non-significant reduction in diastolic blood pressure.

potential application to sport: I recently watched the lead-in to Game 7 of Major League Baseball’s American League Championship Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners. The commentators - Dontrelle Willis, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and Derek Jeter - all discussed their Game 7 experiences. Ortiz acknowledged wasting energy during a sleepless night ahead of his first Game 7 and learning from that experience ahead of his next one. Dontrelle Willis admitted seeing how invested some fans were in the outcome and being glad that a teammate would be pitching the final inning rather than him! One of them - and I can’t remember who - said something to the effect of, “The most important thing to do is to manage your heart rate.” In sport, a relaxed body and a clear mind generally puts you in the best position to succeed. Often, relaxing in big moments involves slowing your breathing and your heart rate. If music can be a tool toward this end, why not use it!

🎨 artist spotlight

Keni Thomas is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work often addresses sport and music. I found Keni via the beer can designs for Lucky Hare Brewing Company. It is quite possibly the only positive that ever came my way from drinking! I liked his social commentary and tendency to weave wordplay into his art, so I enlisted him to design the chordinnate logo (and eventually the Tom Petty is My DJ logo). He was great to work with so hit him up if you need art and want to feed a human rather than an algorithm!

📝 lyrical spotlight

I will never pass on an opportunity to highlight a lyric from Tom Petty (the Christ). It may not reference medicine, but definitely speaks to music’s therapeutic powers!

How ‘bout a cheer for all those bad girls?
And all the boys that play that rock and roll
They love it like you love Jesus
It does the same thing to their souls

tom petty & the heartbreakers HAVE LOVE, WILL TRAVEL

🖭 issue playlist

I brainstormed medical-related terminology, saved several dozen tracks, and then narrowed it to down to 15 that felt like it worked as a progression.

🎶 album club

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club runs monthly and typically meets on a Thursday at 6p EST early in the month. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

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Last night was the seventh meeting of the chordinnate album club, as we met to discuss Tyler, the Creator’s IGOR. facilitated a great discussion around both what people loved about the music and their conflict with some of Tyler’s behaviors, lyrics, and lack of accountability. It was a great time, so get on the list if you think that kind of a thing sounds like something you would enjoy!

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At one point, Alex mentioned having previously put together a playlist from songs Tyler mentioned as influences in an interview. I had already started chasing down tracks that were sampled for IGOR, so Alex’s comment prompted me to continue down that path. I am relying on the sometimes questionable internet for accuracy, but have done what I can to link tracks below that showed up in some way or another on IGOR. As I get older, I find myself increasingly drawn to the music that was sampled in the music from my youth or is being sampled in the music of today’s youth. And I am in the homestretch of an effort to learn more about the music that shaped my favorite artist, Tom Petty. It started as a way to escape the clutches of the algorithm, but has been a great way to learn about so many artists that I likely would have never explored otherwise. The album club has done the same, but also been a great way to connect with actual humans in the process.

Thanks to Alex for taking the lead yesterday. Thanks to all who attended for a great discussion. And if you want to explore the music that inspired IGOR, check out the YouTube Playlist or the individual tracks below.

The chordinnate album club is a community where athletes, artists, and any interested humans come together to explore and discuss music. It's like a book club, but instead of reading books, we listen to selected albums ahead of each meeting and then discuss our thoughts and insights. Sign up here.

And if you are interested in exploring more about the connection between music and sport, consider subscribing to the chordinnation.

Subscribe now