Most of the sounds I’ve heard through Turnbull’s speakers so far have been instrumental recordings, but I’ve decided to prioritize the kind of music I want to exist inside of—songs I wanted to be fully and wholly enveloped by. And I start with the big one: “As,” the seven-minute pinnacle of Stevie Wonder’s magnum opus, Songs In the Key of Life.
Notes from a Fender Rhodes and a few hi-hats twinkle in, before Wonder’s honeyed voice flutters into the room. It sounds real, somehow higher than I’ve ever heard it. I’m already slackjawed. For the nearly minute-long instrumental break in the song, we’re in there, Devin Booker, his associate and I, bobbing our heads, all of us looking at the floor, lost in sound.
That break ends, exactly at 3:43, when you can hear Wonder let out a sotto voce laugh off-mic, before coming back in like a wrecking ball, a moment broadly regarded as one of the most insane in his entire discography. It hits the room like a sonic boom, and I look up and Booker’s looked up and Booker’s dude’s looked up and we’re all laughing, this intimate experience of sound, and sound being entirely beyond belief. When you hear Stevie Wonder like this, “enjoyable” doesn’t even feel like it belongs in the proper range of adjectives. It’s certainly nowhere near what I felt, which is, above all, humbled.
From my stack, Turnbull picks up The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “Nice,” he says. “Which one?” Any song, I tell him. Truly, anything off that. He picks “God Only Knows.” Carl Wilson’s croon comes in, and no, it doesn’t sound like we’re in that studio in 1966, but different, as though we’re ascending toward an audience with something cosmic in scale, the endpoint of all Brian Wilson’s ideas about song, music, Phil Spector’s “Wall Of Sound,” spirituality—sometimes, frankly, it’s a lot to handle.
The same thing happens with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—we listen to “Dreams” and “The Chain,” and yes, of course they sound amazing, but I’m realizing that I’m hearing too much, hearing things that I’m not ready for. The song’s imperfections. Like putting on prescription eyeglasses and seeing too clearly, to the point of slight disorientation (or at least, seeing dirt on a window you didn’t just moments ago), I’m hearing everything—exactly what Roy said would happen. It’s disorienting, and incredible.
Finally, I’ve got one song left before we head to our next destination — but also, a song I feel so strongly about, I’m almost embarrassed if not downright uncomfortable to hear it in public: Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing,” off 1968’s Astral Weeks. It’s not really a song about much. There’s Van Morrison, mumbling or yelping about chariots and mist and never feeling so old again. And then there’s the music, a slow gallop of a guitar line, a very pronounced ting of a triangle, a sweet violin flourish, a drum line that sounds like a perfectly skipped rock, a big spoon of a bass line.
