Never Too Late to Listen or to Learn (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Podcasts, aka listening to people talk on the internet, are slowly growing on me. It helps to first appreciate that there are some that are very good and some that are very bad, just like every other medium that delivers information or entertainment. I tried to get interested in a popular podcast called “My Favorite Murder,” but it drove me crazy that the hosts didn’t seem terribly concerned about being factual.

I was late discovering “Revisionist History,” a truly excellent podcast by nonfiction writer Malcolm Gladwell, which just finished its second season. The title sounds like he, too, could be playing fast and loose with facts, but the unifying theme is stories that have been overlooked or misunderstood. And that’s a very broad category.

In 30 to 40 minutes — one advantage of a podcast is it doesn’t have to fit an exact mold — Gladwell has deconstructed topics as dissimilar as Vietnam War-era government consultants and the type of fat used to cook McDonald’s French fries.

All of the first 20 episodes have been worth listening to, but I was reminded specifically of the episode called “Hallelujah” when reading our recent feature story about Fayetteville architect Marlon Blackwell. “That’s the beauty of architecture. You don’t hit your peak until your 60s or 70s,” Blackwell, who is 60, told our writer, Marty Cook.

In “Hallelujah,” Gladwell goes on a wide-ranging discussion of genius and creativity. He compares the explosive creativity of Pablo Picasso with the slow, constant revisions of Paul Cézanne. Bob Dylan was a “conceptual innovator” like Picasso, Gladwell explains; he claimed to have written “I & I” in 15 minutes. Meanwhile the late Leonard Cohen, an “experimental innovator” like Cézanne, worked on his masterpiece “Hallelujah” for years, recording it just before his 50th birthday in 1984. He literally wrote scores of verses that he would never perform or record.

Even then, “Hallelujah” did not become the song most of us know (and may be getting tired of) until more years passed and John Cale and the tragic Jeff Buckley took their turns at tweaking the tone and selecting the verses that produced a more cohesive finished product. (In my line of work, this is called editing — and everyone needs it.)

Other examples in Gladwell’s podcast are Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Elvis Costello’s “The Deportees Club.” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” according to Paul Simon, “came so fast and when it was done, I said, ‘Where did that come from?’” I had never heard of “The Deportees Club,” and you probably haven’t either, because it appeared on “Goodbye Cruel World,” the 1984 album that Costello would later call his worst. Even Malcolm Gladwell, an Elvis Costello fanatic in his teens and early 20s, called it “unlistenable.”

Here’s where experimental innovation comes in. “Goodbye Cruel Word” was re-released by a small label in 1995, and in the ensuing 11 years, Costello had recreated “The Deportees Club.” He changed the melody, adjusted the lyrics and recorded an acoustic performance of the song he had renamed “Deportee.”

“You know people always say, ‘Put your failures behind you, get on with your life, never look back’? Elvis Costello does none of those things. Because he’s Cézanne; he’s not Picasso,” Gladwell said in the podcast.

“Deportee” was never a hit — it appeared only on the re-release of Costello’s worst album and now on YouTube — but it is lovely. I’m not sure I’ll ever become obsessed with it, as Gladwell clearly is, but his point is well taken: We can continue to improve our skills and our work product.

I know this is true in the business of reporting news (and writing opinion columns like this one), and I’ll never forget the banker who told me, “The first thing I look for in a lending department is gray hair.” Marlon Blackwell describes his career in architecture as “a long-distance race” in which he has “really fought any notion of being complacent.”

We can learn from our mistakes, certainly, but we can also learn from our merely mediocre work. I would think the same might even be true of podcasts. Maybe I should give “My Favorite Murder” another try.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.