Ben Ratliff is the author of books including Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen In An Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). He was a pop and jazz critic at the New York Times for 20 years and teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.