An ecstatic and eccentric blend of criticism, music, autobiography and philosophy that is knowingly caught between genres ... As looping and leisurely as a satisfying jog in the park ... A peripatetic text that moves nimbly from one musician to another ... One of its primary virtues is that it introduces a reader largely ignorant of music (guilty as charged) to quite a lot of it ... Both a formal and a substantive meditation on the ways the personal and the impersonal intersect in the act of aesthetic evaluation, that is, the act of criticism.
Ruminative and vigorous ... Each [chapter] has the quality of a song, Ratliff contemplating with erudition and quiet ecstasy the work of a staggering range of contemporary and classical musicians ... At once highly pleasurable and scrupulously intelligent, a book to read closely.
Run the Song is a calm reboot of the day job, a critique of critique ... This is a kind of criticism that doesn’t exist in magazines and newspapers—one woven into and expressive of the fabric of daily life. There are not stars or thumbs-up or digits attached to these observations, and the main framing here is not the release schedule, but whether or not Ratliff thought the sounds were close enough to silence, an actually interesting metric.
