MUSIC FOR BIG EARS | Butterboy

 

VA - music for big ears (a butterboy compilation) (6 x CDs)

now here’s an interesting idea (more of a thesis really!)

as Butterboy explains:

 

LISTENING BEYOND THE SURFACE

VA - music for big ears (a butterboy compilation) (6 x CDs)

Music for Big Ears isn’t about volume, it’s about depth. It’s a phrase that honors the kind of listening that goes beyond hooks and choruses, into the emotional marrow of a song. This 6 CD set invites that kind of attention: cinematic, poetic, and quietly radical. These aren’t songs that shout, they unfold, whisper, and linger.

Across this sprawling collection, we hear artists who treat sound as storytelling. Gene Clark’s The Same One opens with spectral grace, while Judee Sill’s The Archetypal Man and The Kiss blend theological metaphor with baroque pop precision. Tim Buckley’s Love from Room 109 stretches time itself, a 10-minute meditation on longing and memory. Fred Neil, Laura Nyro, and David Ackles offer songs that feel like letters never sent intimate, unresolved, deeply human.

The term Big Ears also speaks to emotional openness. It’s about sitting with ambiguity, hearing the ache in Wendy & Bonnie’s Endless Pathway, the surreal shimmer of Julia Holter’s In the Green Wild, or the quiet devastation in Mark Hollis’s A Life (1895-1915). These tracks reward patience. They ask you to lean in.

There’s cinematic texture throughout. David Axelrod’s Mental Traveler, Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, and Harold Budd/Brian Eno’s The Pearl evoke landscapes more than scenes, you don’t just hear them, you inhabit them. Even folk-rooted cuts like Karen Dalton’s Something on Your Mind or Townes Van Zandt’s Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria carry visual weight, as if the lyrics were painted in brushstrokes.

And then there’s abstraction. Lucrecia Dalt, Arve Henriksen, Matana Roberts, and Meredith Monk push the boundaries of form, inviting us to hear music as philosophy, as ritual, as breath. These are songs for listeners who crave nuance, who find beauty in imperfection and meaning in silence.

Music for Big Ears reflects emotional intelligence, sonic curiosity, and cultural preservation. It’s a listening practice, a way of honoring the overlooked, the fragile, the profound.

I’m not sure who first used that phrase in response to one of my posts, but it stirred something. It reminded me of a particular way we listen, not just with our ears, but with attention, emotion, and curiosity. So, thank you, whoever you were, for sparking that memory. Here are 121 tracks that ask you to use your big ears. (Butterboy)

Check link for track listing but you are going to want to check this out! Honest!

Suffice to say it includes many favourites from Brian Eno, Wayne Coyne, Nick Drake, Joan Baez and Andy Fairweather-Low to Richard & Linda Thompson, Jim Croce, Joanna Newsom to Anne Briggs, John Cale , Kevin Ayers, Scott Walker to Terry Reid and Vashti Bunyon to Bridget St. John to Townes Van Zandt