Are you a lyric person or a music person?

When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answer goes way deeper than you might think — to the heart of what it means to hear anything at all. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guests: Charlie Harding, host of the Switched on Pop podcast; Dominique Vuvan, professor at Skidmore CollegeFor show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:09Speaker 02

  Hello, it's Noam. And today is a big day. We're launching a video version of our show on Netflix. And we'll be dropping new episodes over there every Monday. We're still going to have two episodes every week right here in the audio feed. On Mondays, you're going to get the same episode on Netflix, just right here for audio. And on Wednesdays, you'll get another new episode just for the audio feed. So if you want to watch this episode right now, you can check it out over at Netflix. And if you do, shoot us an email. Let us know what kind of mysteries you want us to explore on the video show. [email protected]. All right, here we go.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  A while back, my friend Charlie Harding came to me with a question.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Why do I pay attention to the music before I hear the words?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Charlie's a songwriter. He's the host of the excellent music podcast, Switched on Pop. And he was wondering why, when he listens to music, he can't really hear the lyrics.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Am I a robot? Like, I kind of feel like I've, like, lost some human trait that is essential to the purpose of music.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  So I took this question. I went and talked to a whole bunch of researchers. And I found out that this is a way bigger question than I thought. It tells us a lot more about the brain and how we process what we hear than I realized. So what's going on here? When we listen to Beyonce, The Beatles, or the Beastie Boys, do we actually hear the same thing? Or do we hear something entirely different?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Charlie, thank you for coming on Unexplainable.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  I'm so happy to be here.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  A while back, you came to me with this question. Why do you pay attention to music and not lyrics when you listen to a song?

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Where'd that come from? Where'd that question come from?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  It's like the fundamental question of my life. Music is my job. And yet, when I hear a song, I hear all the music first. And I'll listen to a song for the third, fourth, fifth time. And then I'm like, oh, there's some words. The music always comes to me before the words do.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  And I find remembering the words very challenging. And I know I'm not alone. I have many peers.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I'm the same way. Yeah, yeah. I'm a music-first, can't remember the lyrics kind of guy.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  What's wrong with us?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  This is a very good question.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Am I a robot? Like, I kind of feel like I've, like, lost some human trait that is essential to the purpose of music. But the moment that I really realized something is wrong was at my friend Stephen Abbey's wedding.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  And me and my co-host Nate were asked to play a song at this wedding. We were asked to play the song "California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco. It's a great sort of, like, campfire song.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  And so I'm, like, driving in the car with my collaborator Nate, who's a brilliant musician, and his wife Whitney. And we are trying to remember this song. We're singing it. We screw it up. We go back and look at the lyrics. We sing it. We keep screwing it up. And Whitney, in the front seat, is like, guys, what is wrong with you? And she just, like, knows all the lyrics the first time through.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  She's been listening to you guys mess it up over and over again.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  And of course, at the wedding, we totally screwed up the lyrics. But nobody noticed, right? Like, everyone was watching them. No one was paying attention to us or paying attention to the wedding happening. So it was fine. But obviously, on the side, Whitney's just like, oh, my god.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'm fascinated by this question. I have felt this myself, right? As a music person who goes back and listens to songs and can't remember the words. One of my favorite songs is by the band The Dodos. And I was listening to the song in the car the other day. And I was getting to the chorus, and I was singing. And then I was like, do I not know the words to my actual, like, one of my favorite songs? What is wrong with me? So, you know, I took your question, and I've been talking to music researchers, probably, like, two dozen, maybe 30 music researchers over the last two or so years. A lot of people, right? Because I've been working on other music stories. And every single time I get to the end of the interview, I'm like, hey, I have this other weird question.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  You know how some people listen to music more and some people listen to lyrics more? And they're like, yeah, I kind of do know about that. And then they stare off into space and they think a little bit. And then they're like, I don't really know anyone doing actual research on it. I talked to one researcher who wasn't even sure this is a real thing. Like, he was like, oh, it might just be a story we tell ourselves about how we listen to music. Like, I'm into melody, or I'm into lyrics. I'm into what the song says, or I'm into how the song sounds. But it might not be a real thing.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Why is that researcher gaslighting my personal experience?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Well, we'll get, we'll move on from that guy in a second because he did, he did make me wonder if this whole thing was just, you know, a myth. But then I came across this one researcher who told me that he had a friend who was working on a study that has not been published. It's currently in review at a journal. And it's basically this exact question. So her name is Dominique Vu Van. She's in a band called Nice Hockey.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I like that.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Which is great. She plays guitar and synth.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  But more importantly than being in a band, she's a psychology and neuroscience professor at Skidmore. And Dominique's been researching the connection between music and language for her whole career.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  When I think about the big questions about music, like, how does that work? How does it function for us? Why is it important? These are questions that are literally just asking a basic version of, like, what makes us human? How do humans do their thing?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  A few years ago, she was trying to trace where these things are processed in the brain. So like, which parts of the brain process language? Which parts process music? Are they the same? Are they different? But she wanted to play people some music and examine them using FMRI, which is functional MRI. So it doesn't tell you the structure of the brain, but it tells you how the brain is actually functioning. But it was just way too complicated because too much was overlapping. FMRI is actually kind of limited in how closely it can examine the brain. It has a resolution of 3x3 millimeters, which sounds really small, right? Like, if that's the smallest piece you can examine, that seems pretty good.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  I can see 3x3 millimeters. And like, the brain is...

• 7:57Speaker 02

  You want to guess how many neurons are in one 3x3 unit?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  100 billion?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Okay, you're a little...

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  About a million.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  About a million.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  It's still, it's a lot of neurons.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not very granular.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And that's like the smallest unit they can examine, right? So she's not sure if, you know, the same neurons are being used for music and lyrics, or if they're just kind of near each other in that 3x3 millimeter unit. It's just really hard to tease it apart. But she was at happy hour after work one night, where most good ideas come from. And she and another researcher, they were talking about going to a concert they'd been to and what they remembered. And Dominique was like...

• 8:40Speaker 04

  I personally am just a very non-lyrics person. Like, even for my favorite music, I don't even process the lyrics. Like, things that I've listened to dozens and dozens of times, like, what I'm really hearing is the beat of the song, like, aspects of the melodies, like, the bassline and what the person is, like, the melody that the person is singing, the quality of their voice, but not the words that they're saying.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And then her friend was like, what are you talking about? Like, the lyrics were incredible. I was totally hooked by the lyrics.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  It occurred to us during this conversation that one way to potentially pry apart the brain networks that are subserving language and music processing is by measuring the degree to which people differ on their sort of processing of the language materials versus the music materials in a song. And if you can see that the pattern of brain activation for those different people look different, then that tells you a little bit of something about the degree to which you're actually sharing resources in the brain for these two kinds of materials.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Basically, you have this pattern happening in the brain. We don't know if it's music or lyrics. But if you find out if a person is a music person or a lyrics person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song, they're focusing on the lyrics, so this pattern we're seeing in the brain, that's probably lyrics. If they're a music person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song, they're processing music, they're focusing on music, this pattern that we see is probably music. Does that make sense?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Okay. So in order to find out whether people are music people or lyrics people, she had to do a study, which is basically the study that you've been looking for, that I've been looking for for two years. She got over 1,000 people. She gave them some prompts. And she asked them to rate them on a scale of 1 to 7. So 1 meaning I focus mostly on music, 7, I'm focusing mostly on lyrics. And I thought maybe we could do a few together? Want to do a couple?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's one. After listening to a song, I often think about what the words meant.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  I feel like for most of my life, I've been a 2. It's not like lyrics are there, but just registering.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  I'm probably a 2 as well. I have songs that I remember the lyrics, but it's like songs that I have to force myself to go back and learn the lyrics.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Okay. And here's another prompt. I always listen to what is being said in the lyrics.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, can you do a zero?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  I can give myself a 1.5.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Okay, I give myself a 1 on that. When listening to music, I most often find myself drawn to the lyrics.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  I would say, once again, probably a 2, because sometimes, like, a perfect rhyming pair will happen, and it will really get me. That happens. But it's like, it's almost like it comes into vision momentarily and then fades away.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And it also depends on the artist, right?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Surely.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  I don't know, Steven Merritt, or Bob Dylan, or like, David Berman, like, some of these great lyricists.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Joni, like, anyone who's like, more in the sort of folk tradition.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Joni Mitchell.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Where it really is just sort of vocal and accompaniment.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Right? That, then I'm gonna be, that's what I gotta pay attention to.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  When you only got three chords in The Truth, the three chords aren't as interesting as, yeah, what's happening in the words.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so, I think my lyrical bane of my existence comes from another artist that I really, really love, one of my favorites, which is Bon Iver. And the way that he kind of just mumbles sounds and then converts them into words. And I think a lot of artists do that, but then they convert them into meaningful words. And Bon Iver doesn't really convert them into meaningful words. So I will do a dramatic reading for you.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  "Only love is all maroon. Gluey feathers on a flume. Sky is womb and she's the moon."

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  That is deeper than I can understand.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  I love this song so much. But if I was a lyrics person, would I hate it? I don't know. All right, so, in the end, after testing all these people, over 1,000 people, Dominique found that a lot of them were more strongly lyrics, so closer to 7. A lot of them were more strongly music, closer to 1. Some of them were right in the middle, around a 4. But on the whole, there was sort of like a hump in the distribution, and that centered around 5. So she found that most people are lyrics people. She said it's kind of like a Cosmo quiz, basically, like, how much of a X are you? But this is way more scientific. Like, they didn't just pick random prompts. They took a bunch of prompts, they saw what worked, what didn't, which ones measured everything they wanted to measure, which

• 13:31Speaker 02

  ones actually led to consistent answers and not kind of random answers all over the place. And those are the ones they chose to run by people. But that's just half the work. So here's how she described it.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  You want to make sure that someone who gets a 7 on the test, you know, if you give them a test on lyrics memory or something, they should do better than someone who scored a 1.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  They still need to test their results to see if it actually is giving real answers, like, if it has predictive value.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Because otherwise, you're measuring some thing that you made up, and maybe it behaves well statistically, but it's not actually validly corresponding to the thing in the world, the construct that you're actually trying to measure.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  So they wanted to have them listen to music and see if they got lyrics. But they didn't want to use music that people were familiar with, so they went to the Australian pop charts, which apparently have, like, all the same genres we do. They got rock, rap, pop, country. Dominique told me that the Australian country songs, for some reason, are still about Texas. So do that what you will.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  And she asked them questions, basically, like, who was the main character, who was sitting in the car next to this person? And they did find that the people that scored higher on the lyrics scale were able to answer these questions better. So the way they answered those prompts did accurately represent how well they paid attention to lyrics and songs.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  It's real.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  So this whole idea of some people are more music people, some people are more lyrics people, that one researcher who said it didn't exist, who was trying to gaslight you, no, it's real. It's a real thing.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  I feel so validated. One thing that immediately occurs to me is, like, we're both musicians. And I was wondering, like, does that have some inherent bias? Is there a musicianship bias?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  This is the question. This is exactly what I went into this, thinking, I am a musician, I've trained on many instruments, I know music theory, that must explain why I pay more attention to music. And this is the thing that, like, blew me away. Dominique told me that musical training doesn't really impact your score.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Interestingly, we found really, really little evidence that these things matter at all. So I was really, really surprised.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Really? Music training didn't impact the score here?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  So there's small moments where it seemed to maybe matter, but there's no strong evidence that over our whole sample, you get these strong lawful relationships between people's musical training and, like, their lyricsiness, which was really surprising to me.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  But Dominique says this actually kind of makes sense. We're just all exposed to so much music and sound all the time. Like, even you and I, we're playing music a couple hours a day at, like, tops. I mean, I'm not practicing guitar that much anymore, but even people that play guitar for several hours a day, it can't compete with, you know, 15 hours a day that you're just, like, hearing ambient sound and pitches and birds and music and honks and all this stuff in the world.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Right. Like, musicality is fundamental to our human experience.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  When we're talking, we are speaking with intonation. We're rising, we are falling.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  We hear, the timbre of our voice is identifying who we each are. All the various components of music, rhythm.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  I am speaking in time.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  And pausing.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  And she also just looked at all kinds of things. She looked at age, she looked at gender, and she just couldn't find an easy way to explain the difference. And in the end, I think we get to this point where it's just a big mystery, right? Like, what makes someone a music or a lyrics person? At this point, we don't know.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Team music.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Also, also team music. But she has a lot of questions about all this. This is, like, the initial research that's showing that this is a real phenomenon.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Like, do you have questions about this, now that you know that this is a real thing, and we also don't know what explains it?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  I do want to know whether or not it's trainable to move from a 1 to a 7. It's something that has been happening in my life. I've been writing a lot more songs. I profess about music and teach songwriting, and I'm required to listen at a level of granular detail to lyric in a way that I never had in my life before. And now lyrics are coming to me in this whole new way. It's so exciting, because I feel like, oh, my gosh, this whole new world of music is opening up to me. I wonder how other people could also move between these scales.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  That's actually one of her questions. Is it genetic? How much of it is nurture? How long does it take for you to get nurtured into this, right? Like, how long does it take for you to become a 1 or a 7? So I want to just play you what she said there.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  And so I think a lot of the time, when we think about these individual differences, we talk about them as though they're sort of, like, calcified forms, where it's just, like, this is who you are, right? But that's not exactly how it works either, because we're continuing to develop through adulthood with all of the experiences and the training and the practice that we seek.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  And the reason this is important, of, like, trying to tease out music and language, is that there's really a lot of impacts here. Like, I don't want to just say that scientific research only matters when there's, like, practical biomedical impacts, but there are practical biomedical impacts. And I will tell you all about them after a quick break.

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• 20:43Speaker 02

  All right, Charlie, I told you I was gonna tell you all about the potential impacts of this research. So here's what Dominic said.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  We have a lot of interesting treatments for neurological and brain disorders, like for stroke, for example. There's this thing called melodic intonation therapy, which helps patients rebuild their language networks by attaching language to song, right? So you sort of sing sentences on your way to being able to recover your ability to say the sentences again.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  You know, there's stuff with music and speech for dementia patients, how music can kind of get through to dementia patients a little bit. There's research on education, all kinds of things.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  I mean, music and memory is amazing.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  I was visiting my wife's grandparents, and her grandfather is in his 90s, was singing songs to me that he had learned in fourth grade that were all these mnemonic devices to remember classical melodies. And by putting words to the classical melody, he was able to sing them back. He's singing things that he learned in fourth grade.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I do this all the time. I mean, when I was in school and I had to memorize like the order of the books of the Bible or something, I actually put them into a rhythm. I mean, I was a drummer, but I put them into like a rhythm and I would just go through it in my head and I still remember it and it's gibberish, but the rhythm is still in my head. It helps, yeah. So at the end here, right, we've got basis for future research on what causes some people to be music or lyrics people. You know, we gotta do more research, genetics, nurture, how long it takes, can you switch? We've got some interesting ways. We could use this to actually help people, dementia patients, stroke patients, just this kind of basic understanding of, you know, the thing that makes us us, which is music and language in a lot of ways. Where does it come from and how does it work? Great

• 22:31Speaker 02

  questions. But there is this question in here that I can't stop thinking about. If you hear a song, any kind of sound, really, it can seem like we're all just listening to the same thing, right? If you hear a noise, you and I might assume we're hearing the same thing. But I've done a lot of reporting showing that our brain isn't just, you know, hearing a sound that exists out in the world, it's editing the sound, it's processing it in a unique way, and it's almost having a sort of performance in your brain. And what happens is that we end up processing sounds in actually pretty different ways.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  So this is the like, do you see the same color orange that I see?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Or it's, do you hear the same color orange I hear?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  So basically, this is what we're getting at when we talk about, okay, we're both listening to Billy Bragg and Wilco, and we're kind of hearing different things.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  We're not just focusing on different parts, we are hearing different things. And here's what I mean. I talked to this psychologist, Diana Deutsch, a few years ago. She does tons of great research on audio perception, and she has this great example of how we hear things differently, like the same things, we hear things differently. So this is an audio illusion she made that listeners might have heard on the show before, but this is called the tritone paradox, and I want to just play you this one.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Did you hear that going up or down?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Down.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  So you heard it going down?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  I heard that going up.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  You're wrong.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So here's the first one.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, down.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Up.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Up.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Down.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  I thought we were the same. I thought you were my friend.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. So her idea is that different people, based on where they grow up and based on the sounds that they're exposed to, actually hear the same exact thing in different ways. So we just listen to the like simplest thing, a tritone, and you heard it going down, and I heard it going up. You heard the next one going up, I heard it going down. Apparently, we are different. And then there's a whole bunch of other allusions that she uses to kind of illustrate that people can hear the same thing differently. I don't know, there's a certain level at which I'm a bit, I'm kind of in awe about that. I think that's so cool, that we can all hear different things and come together. And then I'm also kind of sad. It's almost like we're all at a concert with our AirPods in, you know? And I'm trying to like weigh these things, that, you know, we go to a

• 25:02Speaker 02

  concert and we perceive different things.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  I often go to concerts with my friend Harrison, who is the drummer in my band. We'll often be watching the same thing, and I will be drawn to the sound of the drums because he's standing next to me and I can see him noticing. And that's not an experience that I would be having if I were not standing next to Harrison at that concert. I would not be paying attention to the drums, but knowing that his experience and his perception of that is different has opened up a door in a world of perception to me that he didn't have before, which I think is really cool.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  She notices him noticing the drums.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  And that makes her more curious, right? Like that brings something out in her that wouldn't come out if she was just listening to music in the way that she's comfortable to listen to.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's maybe like a potential cynical conclusion we could have come away with, which is like, we're all just having our own experience, we're alone together. But in fact, music is inherently social.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  That they are having a special experience, that connection, knowing that, yeah, we are hearing different things, but when we get to share that thing that we both enjoy, it makes us very human.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I mean, we're not ants, right? We're not the Borg, right? We have to have differences between us in order to have meaningful social interaction. If you were exactly the same as me.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  He's so boring.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  If we both heard that tritone going down, it would be really boring, right? But if we have differences in perception, if, you know, Nate's wife listens to the lyrics and Nate listens to the music, that gives them something to talk about. That's like a perceptual gap that actually allows them both to step in.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  And kind of learn something about each other, or learn something about the music, or, like Dominic says, perceive the music in a different way.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  I love this. Beautiful. I mean, it really is about fundamentally being a person. And this happened to me very recently. I went to a concert with one of my good friends, Nolan, who loves the artist Jason Isbell.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  And I kind of know his work, but I wasn't as familiar. And Jason often plays with a band, it's like really engaging. But this show was a small, intimate theater show, just Jason and his acoustic guitar, which is mesmerizing and beautiful. And so at the time, I was like, this song kind of reminds me of that other song. And next to me, Nolan is having a profound experience. There's like a rhyming pair will happen, and he'll just go like, oh. I'm like, oh, I totally missed that one. I was totally zoned out, paying attention to the guitar.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  And what did that do? Like, did you talk to Nolan about it? Like, what did that, what did it feel like to go to a concert and just have an entirely different experience as someone?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  I feel like we don't actually have good social permission to talk about this music lyric divide. I feel like you were helping us create that. But at the time, I didn't want to deflate his experience at all. So I think, right after the show, I was like, that was really moving. And I was like, I think I remember talking about like, I can see that was really moving for you. I'm not as familiar with the music. What I meant to say was, I'm not as familiar with the words. I definitely came away being, it was not as impactful to me at all. And since then, I have revisited Jason Isbell's music, and it is.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  The song that stuck out to me was called "Open and Close."

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Can we just play a clip for a second?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  The doorman's asleep. I don't think I'll wake him. He's always so sweet. He's here really late every night of the week, letting the right people in. The real friend. This one stood out because it's about someone from Alabama, from the South, and he has made this record in New York City. And you can tell that this is kind of like the first time someone's been like, what is a doorman? Like, there's a whole social institution about doormen and how they provide services to the city. And he says it's just like the nice person, like letting in all the right friends. And you can really hear

• 29:03Speaker 03

  the sort of contrast between the.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  It's like a tension.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, the tension between this, like, organic rootsy quality of his music and the manufactured nature of city life. It's so pretty.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  And you probably wouldn't have thought about it this way if it hadn't been for the experience of going to that concert, sitting next to Nolan.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Oh, it had, it was all through the transference of his experience.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is what I love about what Dominic was saying, about going to that concert and seeing, you know, her friend, the drummer in her band, Harrison, just totally losing himself in the drums. And then Dominic is like, oh, there is this whole other world that I'm not paying attention to. Like, in this case, it's not music and lyrics, it's drums. But then it just makes you realize that like, every single part of a sound, someone is hyper-focused on it, right? Like, every little part of a sound has some story to tell, without getting too cliche.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  It's true, I believe it.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  But this difference of music and lyrics and what we focus on, I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg. And the further down you go, you realize, okay, some people pay attention to drums, some people pay attention to guitar, some people pay attention to harmony, some people pay attention to melody.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And then at like a really base level, at the bottom of the iceberg, like, we can each hear the simplest interval, like a tritone, and we can hear totally different things. And you build up from there and you're like, oh, actually, we have completely different takeaways from any song we hear.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Even as a trained musician, I really have to work hard to try to hear everything at once.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Right? It's the equivalent of like walking into a restaurant and trying to hear every conversation.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  We don't actually have the mental capacity to do that. And when music is happening, we can only tune our attention to so many things at any given time. I think that's also why I love to hear a song again and again and again. It's that every time I'm hearing it, I actually truly am paying attention to different things. I'm hearing it with new ears.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that feels like a good place to stop.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Boom, thank you for doing this.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for the question, Charlie. Thank you for sending me down this two-years-long rabbit hole.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  I'd like to think that you were only doing this for two years.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Yes, that, no, that's all I was doing. I mean, I keep calling in sick and they're like wondering where I am. And I'm just like, I'm talking to music researchers and no one's giving me the answer.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  I'm stunned. I really feel validated. And, but also, I feel like I fit more in the world now.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld, who is edited by Joanna Solotaroff. Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles. Our animator is Kareem Kureya. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Devon Howard and Joe Nebress. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. Meredith Hadenot runs the show. And Byrd Pinkerton looked around and saw a large white chamber with black curtains. Her beak beeper was going nuts. She saw a group of birds standing in the center, waiting to greet Flaptin. "This is Jeff Beak," he said. "That's Jimmy Cage, and these are the Yardbirds."

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Dave Baker, and thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you want to see the video version of this episode, you can find us on Netflix. And if you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]. Tell us what kind of mysteries you want us to look into on the video show. And if you want to support the show, join Vox, become a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Drolette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green betever, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com.

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