San Diego's Listening Rooms build community through music
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Experiencing music together. Photo: Courtesy of Future is Color
Listening Room organizers believe in the uniting power of music.
The big picture: Like book clubs but for music, Listening Room participants take in an album together and then talk about it using guided prompts from a host.
Driving the news: A new book, "Listening Room Journal," is filled with those discussion prompts, so people can reflect on their own time.
Flashback: Listening Rooms started in 2023 in Barrio Logan to create intentional spaces to listen to and discover music, Aladrian Goods, the host of the rooms, told Axios.
- "How do we take music as the biggest universal connector and give people the space to reflect and have community dialog with music as the catalyst?" she said.
How it works: For each listening room, the host picks an album.
- The last one was "Yes Lawd!" by NxWorries.
- "So every record we try to contextualize it in the history of what was going on when that album was created, how it was actually created, and then think about the themes that show up in the music," Goods said.
- Then they tie those themes back to a bigger picture that spans multiple albums they've discussed—for this one, it was "dreams as a catalyst to liberation."
Case in point: These conversations led to deep connections, Goods said, to the point that lasting friendships were made.
- Three women from different parts of San Diego met at a Listening Room discussion on Erykah Badu's "Mama's Gun."
- They got close during the event, and now Goods sees them together everywhere, from Balboa Park to the "Giants" exhibit at MCASD.
Another powerful moment came during a discussion of identity.
- "And someone shared their name and pronouns for the very first time in the room and was met with a roaring applause," Goods said.
If you go: The next Listening Room is Friday at MCASD.