Craig Havighurst - Listening Is a Creative Act | MCP #311

There’s a moment in this conversation with Craig Havighurst where it clicked for me that we weren’t really talking about music anymore — at least not just music. We were talking about attention. About empathy. About what it means to show up for something that doesn’t immediately flatter us or, at least, ask very little of us.Craig has spent decades thinking about American music from every angle — as a musician, a journalist, a radio host, and now as the author of Musicality for Modern Humans. In this episode, we talk about why America has produced the richest musical culture the world has ever known… and why we’ve simultaneously trained ourselves to listen to less and less of it. Algorithms, convenience, declining music education — all of it plays a role. But none of it lets us off the hook.What I found most helpful — and honestly, most challenging — was Craig’s insistence that listening is not passive. That to really listen is to be vulnerable. To risk being confused. To sit with something long enough for it to change you. We get into jazz, classical music, jam bands, bluegrass, and pop — not to rank them, but to understand what each offers us as listeners and as humans.This is the kind of conversation that reminds me why The Morse Code Podcast exists in the first place. Creativity doesn’t only belong to the people onstage or in the studio. It belongs to anyone willing to participate — by making something, by paying attention, by supporting the artists who are trying to move culture forward instead of backward. I think this episode will help you listen differently. Maybe live a little differently too.If you’d rather experience this conversation visually, the full episode of The Morse Code Podcast with Craig Havighurst is available on YouTube.→ Watch the episode hereBehind the paywallBelow the paywall, I share a personal reflection on this conversation — and a small confession.At the heart of The Morse Code Podcast (and really, everything I make) is a desire to encourage people to let art play a more active role in their lives. Not as content. Not as background noise. But as something that makes us feel more awake, more alive, a little less numbed out by the world.Talking with Craig challenged me in ways I didn’t expect. Even as a working musician — someone who knows the theory, hears the chords, and listens “like a pro” — I realized how often I don’t let myself fully experience the music. How often listening turns into work. How easy it is to lose the mystery.There was a moment during the taping where something cracked open. Call this a firsthand account of what art can still do when we give it our full attention. Hoping for more moments like that — and wanted to share why this one mattered.I make the Morse Code Podcast every week and write here because I believe this work—these conversations, this city, this way of paying attention—matters. Paid subscriptions help cover production costs and keep the project sustainable. If you read regularly and haven’t subscribed yet, that’s the way to support it.Joy Fatigue and the Return of MysteryBasic to my intention — with this podcast, with the Morse Code project generally, and even in my actual writing and music — is my desire to encourage and inspire people to make art a part of their own lives. Sometimes that takes the form of me breaking down a piano arrangement for a Gillian Welch song, or just sharing a meaningful family moment with as much detail as I can. The underlying intention is pretty simple. I want people to feel more alive. I want to bring some kind of encouraging spirit to a world that can be cold and mean and worst of all, boring.It was obvious talking to Craig that he shares a version of that desire. Early on in Musicality for Modern Humans he makes a claim that it’s musicians that listen most intently to music. For Craig the guys you see at the club, nodding along with fixed stares and arms crossed— those guys are the gold standard. Craig wants you to listen with that same intensity, background knowledge, technical finesse — and he has some practical ideas on how to increase your sensitivity to music’s deeper pleasures.So yay I’m a musician who listens with some of the active ingredients Craig wants to put in everyone’s gigbag. But coming off this taping, I realized something serious: I have a lot to learn. First, a caveat: I probably do listen with more active attention than, say, your average Swifty. I mean, ever since I was exposed to the circle of fifths (and its more practical cousin, the Nashville number system), I can’t hear a song without automatically clocking its chord progression. For most of the songs you and I listen to, that’s not very hard. Still, I suppose that puts me more in the green room than the mezzanine.But I’m here to tell you: I don’t listen to nearly as much music as I should.Why is that?A couple reasons come to mind, one obvious, one ...