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

features that gives songs their power over us: because the meaning is not perfectly defined, each of us as listeners becomes a participant in the ongoing process of understanding the song. The song is personal because we’ve been asked or forced to fill in some of the meaning for ourselves.
    Many of us feel a peculiarly intimate relationship with popular songwriters because it is their very voices that we hear in our heads. (And it is for this reason that poetry fans so highly value recordings of a favorite poet reading his or her own works.) Most of us listen to songs we like hundreds of times. The voice, nuances, and singer’s phrasing become embedded in our memories in a way we don’t get with poetry that we read to ourselves. We feel we know something about the lives, the thoughts and feelings of our favorite songwriters because we know several or dozens of their songs. And because of the mutually reinforcing constraints of rhythm, melody, and accent structure—combined with a shot of dopamine or other neurochemicals that are known to accompany music listening—our relationship with song becomes vivid and long-lasting, activating more regions of the brain than anything else we know of. The connection to some songs is so long-lasting that patients with Alzheimer’s disease remember songs and song lyrics long after they’ve forgotten everything else.
    The Beatles ushered in an era of singers writing their own songs. Although Chuck Berry wrote his, and Elvis cowrote a few of his own, it wasn’t until the Beatles and their enormous commercial success—followed by the success and writing of Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys, among others—that fans began to expect musicians to write their own material. The Beatles even cultivated this sort of personal connection to their audience. In their early songs, Paul McCartney says, he and John intentionally—somewhat calculatingly—tried to inject personal pronouns into as many of the early lyrics and song titles as they could. They took seriously the task of forging a relationship with their fans in a very personal way. “She Loves You, ” “ I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “P.S. I Love You, ” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me, ” “From Me to You. ”
    Still, it is important to note that some people ignore the lyrics more or less, and are drawn primarily to rhythm and melody. Although many people are attracted by the storylines of opera, equal numbers report that they don’t even try to follow the plot, enjoying simply the colorful scenery and the beautiful vocal sounds they hear. Even in pop, jazz, hip-hop, and rock, legions of people believe that the lyrics function primarily as an afterthought, something to hang the melody on. “What do lyrics have to do with music?” many demand. “They’re just there so that the singer doesn’t have to go ‘la la la’ with the melody all the time.” And as far as many people are concerned, “la la la” would be just fine.
    But for those who love lyrics, for whom “la la la” won’t do, there are many rewards in studying the ways in which the best of them are crafted. While researching this book, Sting and I discussed the relationship between poetry and lyrics. Both of us being Joni Mitchell fans, we discussed her song “Amelia” as an example of a lyric we admire:
    I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails
Across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
It was the strings of my guitar
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm.
     
    Note the repetition of the long i sound in I and driving in the first line; the repetition of the d sound in driving and desert in that same line; the repetition of the s sound in spotted and six in the second line. Of course there is also the alliteration in hexagram of the heavens. The song features a prominent guitar, connecting the music to the lyric. I love that she mentions her six-string guitar in the sixth