In Praise of the Most Perfect Podcast Theme Song Ever
As heard on the show ‘Heavyweight,’ a track by the Weakerthans expresses the beauty of life’s smallest and most consequential moments.
Confession: I still feel a little guilty listening to podcasts. Mainly because there’s always a faint voice in the back of my skull telling me I could—should—be listening to music instead. It depresses me that there is a generation of people who’ve spent more time parasocially hanging out with Joe Rogan or Alex Cooper in their headphones than establishing bonds with bands and lyrics and albums. While I personally don’t devote hours of my listening life to those particular personalities, I do frequently, mindlessly tap on The Daily to momentarily engage with a hellbent world, or The Lonely Island and Seth Myers Podcast to momentarily escape the realities of that same world. And, maybe as a byproduct of my aforementioned shame, I can’t help but pay attention to how shows like these use music to set a mood or make a point.
No podcast does this better than Heavyweight, hosted by veteran Canadian American broadcaster Jonathan Goldstein. The show began in 2016, was cancelled by Spotify two years ago (yet another reason to loathe the company), and made its triumphant return with new backers Pushkin Industries this September. I remember listening to its initial run while heading to my weekly bowling league, using it as a distraction from the Hillary vs. Trump clamor that election year—then taking refuge in subsequent seasons, when the show reminded me of the powers of compassion and empathy at a time when such things felt obsolete. There is no other podcast quite like it, and it is the only one I’ve ever heard that’s as emotionally rewarding as some of my favorite music.
In most episodes, a normal person comes to Goldstein with a problem they need help solving. Many of these issues are deeply personal, involving reunions with loved ones, best friends, or enemies from the distant past. Some of them lead to wonderfully random investigations, like when Goldstein’s friend Gregor wanted to confront Moby (yes, that Moby) after the diminutive producer allegedly used samples from Gregor’s copy of the Alan Lomax box set Sounds of the South to make his gazillion-selling album Play. (It’s one of the greatest podcast episodes ever made.) No matter the subject at hand, Goldstein manages to wring feelings from it in a way that’s funny, unexpected, and smart; Heavyweight’s hard-won reconciliations and sought-after solutions are almost never tidy, just like in real life. It’s ultimately a show about dealing with and moving past regret, and revisiting memories that are never exactly how you remember them.
Every episode starts and ends with parts of “Sun in an Empty Room,” a song by the Canadian indie-rock band the Weakerthans, from their 2007 album Reunion Tour. It’s a perfect song about looking back at the heartbreak of what was, and what could have been, with perfect lyrics that are perfectly sung by frontman John K. Samson. And it is made more perfect every time it plays on Heavyweight—especially at the end, when the song often uncannily distills an episode’s complex emotions via its beat, riff, and words.
“I’ll hear certain lines and be like, Wow, it’s almost like the song was written for this particular episode,” Goldstein, 56, tells me. “It’s all kind of coincidental but in a wonderful way. It really is like a grace note at the end of the episodes.”
“Sun in an Empty Room” gets its name from a 1963 painting by Edward Hopper that is lonely and bright, with beams that lead the eye toward an open window with a lush tree outside. During our video call, Goldstein holds up a print of the painting that his wife had framed. “I just love it,” he says. “It’s like this non-subject almost, and I love the aesthetic of that.”
Samson and the Weakerthans took the image and dreamed up a scene that sounds like a breakup—the moment you survey a shared space that was once filled with a couch, camaraderie, and hopes, that is now just four white walls. It’s not a depressing song, though. There’s a resilience to its steady drum beat and sing-along chorus. Samson sounds nostalgic but grateful, simply expressing the melancholy of an era gone by. The original song has a couple of verses that allude to the bigger horrors of war and poverty, but the edited version that plays as Heavyweight’s end credits theme focuses on its more intimate lines:
Now that the furniture’s returning to its goodwill home
Now that the last month’s rent is scheming with the damage deposit
Take this moment to decide
(Sun in an empty room)
If we meant it, if we tried
(Sun in an empty room)
Or felt around for far too much
(Sun in an empty room)
From things that accidentally touched
(Sun in an empty room)
Goldstein particularly admires that first line and how it speaks to the temporality of our existence on a grander scale. “We struggle for permanence and really want to feel like these armchairs that we spend a lot of money on are bolted into the floor,” he says. “But its real home is the thrift store, and it’s only on loan. It’s that paradox: The permanent home is the impermanence.” He adds that the line felt especially meaningful at the end of a recent episode about a friend’s late mother who found it so difficult to let go of all the accumulated wares that made her house worth living in.
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At this point, “Sun in an Empty Room” and Heavyweight are spiritually bonded works, and it seems safe to say the connection has played a part in the song becoming the Weakerthans’ most popular track on Spotify, with almost 10 millions streams. (A representative comment on the song’s YouTube page reads, “It’s kind of amazing how much this entire song has become shorthand to me, like Heavyweight in general, for the general message that ‘We’re all hurting. It’s okay.’”) But Goldstein admits that the initial decision to use the song wasn’t terribly thought through.
When Heavyweight started, Goldstein had known Samson for about a decade, after they first met at a book event around 2007. “We were constitutionally similar in that we found ourselves more or less hiding in the corner together,” Goldstein recalls. A couple of years later, Samson and his partner Christine Fellows—who also contribute original interstitial music to Heavyweight to this day—performed with Goldstein at a live taping of his old CBC show Wiretap in Samson’s native Winnipeg. Goldstein remembers going to a curling rink with the singer after the taping. “He very patiently explained all the arcane rules of curling to me, which I immediately forgot,” he says. “But it was very pleasant.” Their kinship makes sense: Both are cult Canadian heroes, humble geniuses whose art champions human connection without getting all corny about it.
So when Heavyweight began, Goldstein sought out a song that felt familiar, trusted. “When you’re starting something new, you want it to feel safe and cozy, you want to feel bolstered,” he says. “I liked John, and it was keeping it in the family. I cycled through a whole bunch of their songs, and then I thought, How about this one? It felt like a slightly whimsical decision, but over the years it has turned out to be resonant.”
Another one of those kismet moments between the song and the podcast happened when Heavyweight was canceled in 2023. At the end of that season’s final episode, Goldstein decided to play “Sun in an Empty Room” in its entirety rather than its usual truncated version. “It was incredibly synchronous to losing the show, right down to the last lines: ‘We don’t live here anymore,’” he says. “Some people thought it was this intentional, eight-year wind up to this punchline, and that I was saving these lyrics for the last episode, but it just worked out that way.”
Both Heavyweight and “Sun in an Empty Room” pinpoint the universal in the specific, allowing them to feel so close to so many. Everyone has wondered, What ever happened to that childhood friend I spent every waking hour with for years but haven’t seen in decades? Everyone has been hit with a tsunami of nostalgia while negotiating with a landlord about cleaning this pesky floor stain or patching up that hole. For Goldstein, the song’s lyric about light hitting “walls that we repainted white” make him think back to the first place he ever lived on his own. It was the mid ’90s, in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighborhood, and he decided to celebrate his newfound freedom by painting every part of the house a different primary color. “I went to the paint store, and they were like, ‘What kind of red do you want?’ And I was like, ‘I just want red red, like the red that I remember from kindergarten. And I want blue blue and green green,’” he says. “Thank God the landlord did not make me repaint those walls white.”
“Sun in an Empty Room” brings me back to my own first solo apartment, too. The earliest photo I have on my iPhone is of that 322-square-foot studio on the ground floor of the worst building on one of the nicest blocks in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. It was taken May 3, 2009, right when I moved in, with just a few boxes on the floor. Light streams in from the sidewalk outside. My friend is in the shot, looking impressed but also looking like he was thinking, How is Ryan gonna fit all of his shit inside this tiny apartment?!
Fast forward to December 2016—about a month after Heavyweight wrapped its first season, as it happens—when I was finally moving out of that spot after too many rent increases and boiler breakdowns. I have a photo of that empty room as well, nearly identical to the one taken seven years before, but stuffed with memories. It’s where my wife and I first lived together when she moved to New York from Vancouver, where I proposed to her, where we sat on a sky-blue Ikea couch and binged The Sopranos for nights on end, where some kid yelled into my open window, “Hey, it’s Tom from MySpace!” one night when he saw me in a white undershirt, hunched over my laptop.
That apartment is also where our cat lived out some of his greatest years, relaxing on the bookshelf and the windowsill, the tabby king of Clinton Avenue. In the 2000s, before I knew her, my wife named him Virtue, inspired by a song by one of her favorite bands: the Weakerthans. In his senior years, Virtue had liver issues and was taking chopped up mirtazapine pills, which is prescribed as an appetite stimulant for cats. During this time, my wife and I went to see John K. Samson play a solo show in Manhattan, where some of his banter touched on how he was taking mirtazapine, which is prescribed as an antidepressant for humans. It felt weirdly full-circle, and the two of us exchanged teary glances at the coincidence. Virtue passed away on our laps, in a sunny room filled with our love for him, in 2022.
When I listen to Heavyweight and hear “Sun in an Empty Room” now, I think of all these things. I think of my own past lives as I commune with the story being told in a given episode. I think of the green outside my window, foretelling the future. I think of the bare rooms I have made whole, and the rooms I know so well that, one day, will be empty again.
