We were halfway through the second course at Le Comptoir—a ten-seat counter in LA’s Hotel Normandie where the chef hands plates to you directly across the wood bar-top—when we both noticed it: the way the room’s music seemed to breathe with the service. Sinatra at a conversational volume as people settled in, then the glide of R&B once the first glasses loosened, a slow inching toward something you could dance to if there were any space to stand. We said as much to each other and the sous chef, Allen, looked up with a conspirator’s smile. He appreciated that we’d noticed, he said, because the playlist was built to amp up as the night went on, as intentional as the way the beurre rouge complemented the cranberry chutney.
A chef fussing over a playlist is not a hobbyist’s indulgence. Charles Spence calls it “sonic seasoning,” the deliberate pairing of sound with flavor, and his lab has spent years showing that what we hear changes what we taste, from the crispness of a chip to the way sweetness blooms when the music tilts brighter. Heston Blumenthal made this literal with Sound of the Sea, serving shellfish alongside the hush of waves in a set of tiny headphones, demonstrating that context can heighten sensation the way salt wakes up a tomato. In a room as intimate as Le Comptoir, music is pacing and temperature, the rise and fall that tells the service when to glide and when to lean in. Curating it is hospitality in stereo.
About ten days later, back at my desk trying to put a dent in the pre-wedding to-do list, the welcome-party playlist muscled its way to the top: a seemingly straightforward task that felt larger than the others. Le Comptoir kept echoing in my head, that slow tip from table talk to toe taps, the way the room seemed to grow with the music as the evening warmed. This party is family and old friends, the kind of night that should travel from handshakes to hugs without anyone noticing the gears. The little rectangle of metal and glass that controls the sound suddenly felt like a promise to help it along. I could picture the space, the french doors open to the gardens, the first drinks arriving, the first stories loosening, and I wanted the sequence to earn that shift.
If you want a single authority on why this even matters, you could do worse than David Byrne, who has more than earned the right to talk about how sound meets space. He helped reinvent the American music scene with Talking Heads, took home an Academy Award for the score to The Last Emperor, watched his band enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and turned a concert into a Broadway event with American Utopia, which the Tonys honored with a Special Award. In How Music Works he makes a deceptively simple claim, that music is made to fit its room, and likes to pose a question that sounds almost too neat until you sit with it for a minute: does the venue make the music? He traces how human chanting swelled to meet stone and vaults, how punk sharpened itself to cut through CBGB’s concrete box, how arena anthems learned to bounce off steel and air. Context, he keeps saying, shapes the thing itself, including unglamorous forces like budget and logistics. A playlist for a dinner counter is part of the pacing, the way conversation finds its rhythm.
There are two of me editing the track list, each with an opinion and a memory, and they do not always agree. The Purist likes a clever segue, the kind that earns a grin from anyone who has ever squinted at liner notes. The Host likes a room that loosens its shoulders without having to think, a low pressure tide that pulls people toward one another. Early in the night the Purist reaches for a deep cut with a perfect intro, brushed cymbals and a bass that walks without hurry, but the Host catches the rise in conversation and chooses space instead, something that leaves air between the glasses and the opening chit-chat. Later, when the bar grows loud and the floorboards pick up the rhythm of shoes, the Purist wants to stack two tracks that were written in the same key, as if they were distant cousins. The Host imagines the laughter by the bar and chooses the album cut with a longer intro, giving the table in the corner time to land its story. The voices are not enemies so much as a duet, call and response, and when they start to bicker I hear David Byrne in the background asking his question again about the room teaching the music how to behave. Which is another way of saying that the audience is not the crate, the audience is the room itself, breathing and deciding.
Here is the embarrassing fact first: I want you to like the songs on my playlist. Not just tolerate them, not just sway politely, but like them in a way that makes your face change. Though it’s of course true that none of these songs are mine, they are borrowed light arranged in a line and I am simply angling the mirrors. The insight might be that curation is still a kind of authorship, a small act of arranging attention, and that makes it tender in the same way cooking from a recipe is still cooking. We risk versions of this all over our lives, at work and at home, whenever we draft a letter to a friend or set a table that says stay; whenever we pick a story to tell about who we are. If I am honest, the hope is simple, that the thing I made out of other people’s brilliance will land warm and be taken in good faith, and that the room will meet it halfway.
You hope for that one lift that belongs to the room and not to you, and if you are paying attention you will feel it before you name it. The clatter dims without effort, the talkers slow down mid anecdote, a harmony surfaces from nowhere and surprises the person who sang it. The chorus arrives and you can hear the grin move across faces, same as it ever was. I have loved this part since I was a teenager fumbling with burned CDs and speaker wire, throwing parties that were mostly an excuse to make the mix. I spent more time on the order of the tracks than on the snacks and felt no guilt about it. That pleasure has not changed.