Malcolm Gladwell

And I suspect that one of the reasons so many people listed My Little Hundred Million as one of their favorites is because of that little bit of tape from Hennessy.

I didn't make that moment.

I didn't anticipate it.

I didn't manipulate Hennessy into saying it.

I stumbled into it.

And the wonderful thing about audio is that it allows you to capture those found moments exactly as they're happening.

There's an even better example of this.

It's from another episode on the list from listeners, Elvis Analysis Parapraxis, season three.

If you haven't heard it, the premise is pretty simple.

One of Elvis's trademark songs was, Are You Lonesome Tonight?

And in the middle of the song, there's a bridge, a couple of spoken sentences, a little soliloquy.

And over and over again, whenever Elvis had to say the bridge, he'd screw it up, get the words wrong, break out into totally inappropriate laughter.

The Freudian term for what Elvis was doing is called parapraxis, a slip of the tongue that reveals something about the speaker.

So the episode was trying to answer, what does Elvis's issue with the bridge tell us about Elvis?

Now, I should say, I had all kinds of trouble doing this story.

There was a great essay written about Elvis's parapraxis by the psychologist Alan Elms.

So I flew to Sacramento to meet with Elms, but he wasn't well and couldn't really speak.

So I kind of gave up, put the story aside for months, until I had the random idea of just going to Nashville and having professional musicians sing Are You Lonesome Tonight and explain to me why the bridge is so complicated.

I went to see Bobby Braddock, one of the legendary Nashville songwriters, and he brought with him a good friend, a singer named Casey Bowles.

Casey sang Are You Lonesome Tonight, and then we got on the subject of another song, one of her own.