Read The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature for Free Online

fast.
    It’s funny how memory works—instead of a segue to another Bacharach and David composition (“Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” or “I Say a Little Prayer”) or another B. J. Thomas record (“Hooked on a Feeling,” “I Just Can’t Help Believing”) or another song with the same I-I maj 7-I7-IV chord progression (“Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Something”), my frontal cortex was bent on searching my hippocampus for a song with “rain” in the title, and instantaneously, unconsciously, my brain delivered “You and Me and Rain on the Roof ” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. I love this song. The melody descends the scale from the fifth degree, sol, down an octave to the sol below, suggesting the Greek lydian mode, and I knew from experience that there was little danger this would get stuck in my head, but it would at least push out the Bacharach melody. Why was I trying to get rid of that? Oh yes, because the Beatles’ “Rain” was reverberating around in there. Oh no! Soon I had that back. Quick! Think of John Sebastian. Ahhhh. “You and me and rain on the roof . . .” Sol - fa - mi - re - do - sol - la - sol.
    It rained all day. Puddles started to gather and the little sewer drain on every corner started to back up. Water began to gather in street intersections. The city engineers had not had to design for water runoff because it usually doesn’t rain much in this part of the world. It continued to rain for a week. My overactive hippocampus kept offering me more rain songs, floating up from my unconscious: “No Rain” by Blind Melon, “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor (and the haunting cover version by Blood, Sweat & Tears), “I Can’t Stand the Rain” by Tina Turner, “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” by Hendrix, and of course “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin, the opening chord a downward arpeggio, itself falling like rain. I congratulated myself on successfully avoiding getting stuck with an earworm from “Here Comes the Rain Again” by Eurythmics or “Walk Between the Raindrops” by Donald Fagen. I fired up the stereo with “Rainy Days and Mondays” (the Carpenters), “Rainin’ ” (Rosanne Cash), “Let It Rain” (Eric Clapton with his group Derek and the Dominos), and two rain songs by one of my favorite groups: “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (Creedence Clearwater Revival). Two more of my favorite groups finally weighed in from down below in my hippocampus, playing in my head as if a CD player were wired directly to my neurons: “Prayers for Rain” by the Cure, and “Bangkok Rain” by the Cult. So many rain songs! And it kept raining outside.
    When I talked to one of my favorite songwriters, Rodney Crowell, about Six Songs , he argued that the first songs composed by humans probably dealt with the elements, with weather, sun, moon, rain, and so on, because these would have been so central to early man.
    Lee and I met the following week and the sun had been out for a couple of days by then. (“Here Comes the Sun,” I thought as I walked across campus to meet him, and this gave way to auditory images of “Sun King” and “I’ll Follow the Sun” [Beatles], “Let the Sunshine In” [The 5th Dimension], “Sunny” [Bobby Hebb], “You Are My Sunshine” [as performed by Ray Charles], “Wake Up Sunshine” [Chicago], “Who Loves the Sun” [The Velvet Underground], “California Sun” [the Ramones and the Dictators], “House of the Rising Sun” [Eric Burdon back when he was with the Animals, one of the first rock songs I ever wanted to play nonstop for a week].) Lee brought Robert Frost’s “The Wind and the Rain” and Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” from Leaves of Grass . I brought Cole Porter and Joni Mitchell.
    Many of my favorite lyrics have internal rhymes. By “internal rhymes,” I’m referring to rhymes and near rhymes that occur anywhere other than the end of a line, like these from Cole