I Wanted Music. I Got Connection.
Reel-to-Reel tape player, circa 1980.
During my senior year of college, my roommates and I decided to create “the greatest dance tape ever” – the kind of thing you can only embark on if you have time on your hands and a complete lack of humility.
The four of us had very different musical tastes, and we decided we didn’t need to agree that a song was great —only one of us had to believe that. This led to some strange transitions on the tape – my pick from The Spinners came before Clem’s from Devo; Jim’s Yes song led right into Don’s Supertramp.
But it worked. Clem edited it all onto a “reel-to-reel tape” (for an explainer of this technology, look up “history of sound innovation” and go to the entry just after “hollerin’”). Then, when it was ready, once a month, we pushed back the furniture in our “social” room, bought beer, invited everyone we knew to come over, set up speakers and pushed “play.” For the next three hours there was uninterrupted moshing and bar dancing joy.
And then, like college, it was over, abruptly and cruelly. We graduated and went to work. Elvis (Costello, anyway) left the building. The dance tape disappeared under VERY mysterious circumstances (still waiting to see the bootlegs advertised on the dark web).
A few months ago, I was creating Spotify play lists and realized I wanted something more than “my” stuff on my phone. So I sent friends a request to send me their two favorite performances of songs (5 minutes or shorter) in each of five categories: “Happy” (songs that made them feel good; with no need to share why); Sad (same); Passion (songs that made them feel something); Pump (songs that made them excited about going to work or to work out); and Holiday (what they intentionally listened to during the holiday season).
I thought it was a pretty simple request – and that it would result in my getting a bunch of new good songs in my life.
Turns out asking someone about their music is a deeply personal question. I got existential or political questions – what does “happy” really mean and is pop “passion” irreconcilably heteronormative? As people responded, I got outraged responses – how could I possibly limit anyone to just two songs per category? Who was I to force them to submit only sub-5-minute performances (this mostly from fans of dead classical composers Dead classics)? I got apologies from people who were somehow embarrassed about their selections or at least wanted me to understand the justification for their choices. I got pleas for extensions on the deadline I had never set – “I can’t POSSIBLY do this until the end of the month.”
Mostly, though, I got really good music, 300+ songs (and counting), most of them songs I had never heard or hadn’t thought of putting on my play list. How could I have missed the bossa nova sass of Marti Jones’ “Keep It to Yourself,” the fun of Chuck Brown channeling James Brown on “Bustin Loose,” (how did Chuck not make our original dance tape?), or the get-psyched energy of The Hours’ “Ali in the Jungle” or Cat Empire’s “Fishies”? I’d heard one Albert Pla song, but there’s so much more. How had I completely missed Rosalia for the entire past year? I’d sung “Abide with Me” and “Going Home” in music groups in the past, but they had dropped off my radar. What else have I missed or lost over the years?
Some Things I Learned
Shared favorites are rare: Out of 305 songs I’ve gotten so far, there are very few duplicates: The Commodores “Brick House” (also on our original dance tape) and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” appeared on three people’s lists (I went down a deep rabbit hole with Louis Armstrong and emerged with a new appreciation of his musicianship – vocals and trumpet); Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” The Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House,” Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day”and Bonnie Raitt’s version of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” each appeared on two people’s lists. I sent my request to a lot of people about my same age, and that should have resulted in more convergence (see “Age Matters” below), but even among people of a certain age, “favorites” are in a special class.
Context Matters a Lot: Songs can be very specifically associated with places in our lives. I got a long email from a friend describing the club in Toronto and the woman he danced with when he first heard Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations.” Because of that moment, it’s still one of his favorite songs ever. I have very clear images of dancing in my den to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” – it got me through an angsty (and hormone-laden) eighth grade year. The Sanford Townsend Band’s (yes that was a band) “Smoke from a Distant Fire” wouldn’t make any rock critic’s Top 1000 list, but I played it on repeat as I wrote letters to a girlfriend who’d gone back home at the end of a summer and it still makes my eyes a mist (with the smoke of a dist…).
Age Matters Even More: As part of my effort to find new songs I hadn’t heard, I asked folks to list some songs that were both “new” and “old.” That didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. One respondent’s songs were almost all selected from a five-year period; one focused overwhelmingly on the work of The Grateful Dead. I shouldn’t have been surprised: a New York Times analysis of Spotify data by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz finds that the songs that are most influential on our adult musical preferences are most likely to be songs from age 13 for women and age 14 for men (see chart below; this probably explains why I still love the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and still hate “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” – both from my 14th year). Overall, Stephens-Davidowitz noted, our teen years appear to be roughly twice as influential on musical taste as our 20’s (think back on the songs you got happiest about this Valentine’s Day – Seth says if you are 65, you picked “Let’s Get It On”; if you are 50 you more than likely chose Van Halen’s “When It’s Love” and if you are 35 you are more likely to pick Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” Right or wrong?). There are outliers, people whose taste doesn’t get stuck in adolescence, of course: David Brooks claimed in a recent article that his musical taste is permanently evolving, with his favorites being whatever teenagers are listening to at the moment. He’s at the right bottom of the curve of the mountain depicted in the graph below.
Music means enough to people to ignore ‘rules.’
I was very clear with friends that I only wanted two songs in each category and the songs could not be longer than 5 minutes. As if they cared. A piddling few paid attention to the parameters, and even they complained. Some refused to categorize their songs at all; others overloaded or dissed particular categories (“I don’t do sad songs,” one person noted). One friend sent me a suggested play list that was 8 hours and 4 minutes long; others submitted full albums or symphonies. Corollary to the axiom that “nobody puts baby in the corner”? Nobody puts music, especially favorite music, in a box.
Favorite ‘Song’ is Not the Same as Favorite ‘Performance’: During this process, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing the variety of covers done of a lot of the songs. I grew up with Ray Charles’ version of “Hit the Road Jack,” but I think these days I prefer the version by Mo’ Horizons. I fell in love with Frank Sinatra’s solo version of “Got You Under My Skin,” but these days I’m convinced his duet with Bono is even more fun. The drum-bass-piano-vocal combo on Johnny Adams’ live version of “Stand By Me” edges out Ben E. King’s original. The “Baby It’s Cold Outside” by Leon Redbone and Zoey Deschanel is infectious, but the rewrite John Legend and Kelly Clarkson do is equally clever and not nearly as creepy. Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” is iconic; the harmonies on the version by Cadence make it gorgeous.
Sharing a Playlist with Someone Is a Great Way to Reconnect: I sent my “favorite song” request out to a pretty wide group, some of whom I hadn’t connected with in a long time. As I’ve heard hear back from them, I’ve tried to listen to all their songs in a single sitting and, besides listening to the songs, trying to get a sense of “why did this person pick these songs?” In some cases the person who emerges as I listen to those songs is the same one I thought I knew; in other cases I wonder how I could possibly know so little about them. The emails and conversations we are having are rich and deep: we seem to be skipping some of the superficiality or posturing that happens when you haven’t talked for a while. I think that is in part because we have shared something deep and personal, saying “here’s something I am willing to share with you; something that matters to me.” And once we have shared our “secret” music with each other, everything else comes easier.
As the summer gets underway, why not add some new music to your mix, and renew your conversations with friends, old and new? Good music brings us together, and strengthens our spirit.
—Leslie
*What does your playlist say about who you are? Are your teenage favorites still locked in, and if so, is it because you stopped listening or because they are THAT good? Or is your list evolving? Do you have a killer “best song ever?” What is it that the song does to you?
References:
NYT on song preferences: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-songs.html
David Brooks on musical taste: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/24/opinion/middle-age-music-taste.html
“Nobody puts baby in a corner”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypKSbnYOrwE
Mo Horizons “Hit the Road Jack”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc7AIJOp-iA
Sinatra and Bono “Got You Under My Skin”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL3ZVzWdaS4
Johnny Adams “Stand By Me”: https://open.spotify.com/track/3v7AD2tX8dbfpqD9NUONAq?si=kiZjIsN2ROOgvl2S0DsGiA&nd=1
John Legend and Kelly Clarkson “Baby It’s Cold Outside”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I776VyXJab4