My first encounter with what we’re going to call “the space” happened at age 13, sitting in the front seat of my mother’s black Ford Expedition. She and I were parked outside the local bank, and we’d come to a full halt in the middle of our errand to finish listening to the woman’s voice on the radio. The segment was on This American Life, from a 2001 episode called “Stories of Loss,” and something about its author, Genevieve Jurgensen, pinned us to our seats in a kind of reverent and abject horror.

Its never easy to create music let alone good music.

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There’s something fundamentally different about the music that’s written for radio, even by great pop writers whose work seems effortlessly catchy—primarily, it’s not supposed to be very catchy. Its function is to create a space for the human voice, and for the silence of a voice that’s stopped speaking.