The Song Remembers When
The musical one percent.
There are an estimated 97 million songs built off of just 12 notes, but less than one percent of those songs resonate. The rest live in oblivion. Some of the oblivion songs are great (like this one). Many of the resonating songs are mediocre (like this one). Some of the resonating songs are truly dreadful (like this former number one). Cream doesn’t always rise.
This week’s TBL will focus on the one percent. Be sure to play the music, too.
If you like this TBL, an earlier edition about musical mondegreens, from more than three years ago now, may be worth your time, too.
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The Song Remembers When
I was standing at the counter I was waiting for the change When I heard that old familiar music start It was like a lighted match Had been tossed into my soul It was like a dam had broken in my heart After taking every detour Getting lost and losing track So that even if I wanted I could not find my way back After driving out the memory Of the way things might have been After I'd forgotten all about us The song remembers when
We’ve all had this sort of experience. We hear a song, even by happenstance or in the background, and are instantly transported to a different time, place, circumstance and, often most importantly, to a someone remembered.
The songs that inspire such remembrances are the ones that resonate most deeply. The secret sauce of these songs is that they encourage “narrative transportation” – we are story-driven creatures, after all.
However, rather than transporting us out of our lives, the lyrics activate thoughts of someone or something, present or past, that is or was part of our lives.
More than a feeling (more than a feeling) When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling) And I begin dreaming (more than a feeling) ‘Til I see Marianne walk away
I remember this summer of 1966 number one hit1 from the Hollies less for its general quality than that it was the song by which my then-babysitter taught me about AM radio and rock-n-roll.
It should come as no surprise to you that we prefer songs that use more second person pronouns – like “you” and “yours” – rather than the third person.
These songs draw us into the performer’s place and to think of someone, our own personal “you,” who we want to be with and love.
When Taylor Swift belts out, “We are never, ever, ever, getting back together,” we don’t know who she means (okay, maybe we do), but most listeners immediately get a vision of some other particular somebody from their own past.
Since the ancient Greeks, we have known that tones whose frequencies were related by a simple ratio like 2:1 (an octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth) produce the more pleasing, or consonant, harmonies. This effect doesn’t depend on musical training – infants and even monkeys can hear the difference.
It is inherent. This “[s]ymmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in... [It] helps us make sense of the world around us,” explained MIT’s Alan Lightman. More poetically, according to Leonardo Da Vinci, “our soul is composed of harmony.” And harmony is glorious.
Participating can be better still.
Singing makes us happy. Group singing is relaxing. It releases endorphins, helps our immune systems, and positively impacts mental health. It promotes friendship and community. That’s why it is used so powerfully in churches...
...and often springs up spontaneously.
The first concert I attended post-pandemic featured James Taylor. JT was great, as always, but I was especially stuck by the audience singing along. It was moving and powerful.
“When people get together and hear the same music ... it tends to make their brains synch up in rhythmic ways, including a shared emotional experience,” explained Ed Large, a music psychologist at the University of Connecticut.
Memories of favorite songs engage broader neural pathways than other types of memories, allowing people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia to feel the emotions connected with those memories, allowing them to sing along and engage in conversation – even improving cognitive outcomes.
Making and listening to music increases blood flow to brain regions that generate and control emotions. The limbic system “lights up” when we hear music. Just the first few notes of our favorite songs induce the release of dopamine.
Within mere fractions of seconds, we translate a wall of sound into sense via a two-part process. It begins when sound waves hit our eardrums and tiny hairs convert them into an electric signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex of the temporal lobe. Our brains – those three-pound lumps of neurons with a point of view – then turn that auditory perception into something meaningful.
James Baldwin wrote of “the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters.”
Sometimes, when risk, hope, talent, effort, longing, and love collide, the music enters and the resultant concoction is astonishing. And beautiful. Please have a listen to the wonderful Ashley McBryde’s Grand Ole Opry debut below. Prepare for it to be dusty.
Our decisions about values – ought decisions: whispers of meaning, redemption, and regret – are not truly rational and not entirely intellectual. They are inherently practical and pragmatic. Does a work of art resonate? Does a belief system work for us? Does a song sing? We are meaning-makers through and through, filling in the gaps of our understanding as we go along.
Music is found in all human cultures around the world. The oldest known bone flute is 60,000 years old, so music has been around at least that long.
While we have begun to understand the “what” and the “how” of music and its influence, the “why” remains elusive.
It’s a question that has puzzled scientists for decades: Why does music, an abstract pleasure, provoke such consistent emotions in humans? From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense that music makes us feel things. It’s not necessary for or even related to survival in any way I can tell.
However, people of faith should simply recognize that good music is beautiful.
And that is enough.
Music is a primary means for us to recognize the ends we all seek, at least in our better moments: meaning; purpose; Truth. It prods us further up and farther in.
“People are sleeping,” Sun Ra said, in liner notes for a reissue of his jazz album, Lanquidity. “The right music can wake them up.”
And maybe, just maybe, per Dostoyevsky, “Beauty will save the world.”
Totally Worth It
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Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson is a 285-pound left-hander who is taking the minor league baseball world by storm. He was the 308th pick of the 2023 MLB draft out of Central Arizona Junior College. He pitched six hitless innings in a game last week and five shutout innings Wednesday to drop his earned run average for the season down to a microscopic 0.35. Tug, as his friends call him, has only given up eight hits in his first five starts.
An Idaho (not Florida!) man was arrested Monday on alcohol charges after allegedly kicking a bison. The good news: the bison didn’t kick back. Still, in the game of drunk guy versus wildlife, the wildlife always wins.
There is a unit of measurement for wine (or whiskey) casks called a “butt.” It’s about 150 gallons. That means if you fill the barrel up, you – at least technically – have a buttload of wine.
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This is the best thing I saw or read recently, unless it was this. The rightest. The most insightful. The most inspiring. Rumours. Tragedy. Another tragedy. A different sort of tragedy. Silence.
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Benediction
Karl Barth was the most influential theologian of the 20th Century, and the most prolific. The Barmen Declaration, of which he was the primary author, answered the threat of Nazism as few could or did. His unfinished multi-volume Church Dogmatics, alone, was 17,000 pages.
In 1962, Professor Barth visited America and spoke at Rockefeller Chapel (really a Gothic cathedral) on the campus of the University of Chicago. After his lecture, during Q&A, a student asked Barth if he could summarize his whole life’s work in theology in a sentence. Barth gave a remarkable answer.
“Yes, I can. In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”
This song – probably the most famous song of the Church but for Amazing Grace – beautifully encapsulates the essence of the Gospel. It is joyfully sung here by a fantastic choir, singing together in love.
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.” To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 172 (May 3, 2024)
It was only a number one in Canada (it peaked at number five in the U.S.), but in my western New York neck of the woods, our rock-n-roll radio station of choice was CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. “Bus Stop” was a “CK” number one.