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A Deep Dive Into Your Music

October 12, 2020

I am constantly listening to music. Whether it’s at work, doing homework, in the car, or just lounging around, you can almost always find me having some sort of tune playing wherever I am. If you’re like most people, you probably like to listen to music while going throughout your day. It’s helpful for drowning out distractions when you need to focus, but it’s also one of my favorite “self-therapy” tools if you want to call it that. Sitting down and deliberately listening to music is one of the most soothing and engaging things one could do.

When listening to music, I pick apart the lyrics. It’s always the focus of the music I listen to, and lyrics are almost always the reason for why I do or don’t like a song. This is how I thought everyone listened to music – focusing on the lyrics and letting the melody just be in the background. But over time, as I have had many discussions on various songs and artists in different genres, I realized this isn’t the case for a lot of people. Sometimes I show my friends songs with some meaningful and powerful lyrics, but when they hear only a piano or acoustic guitar in the background they aren’t impressed. I thought they were crazy. How could you not love the lyrical masterpiece this song is!!

My old roommate is a perfect example of this contrast in his approach to listening to music. He’s played drums since he was able to hold two sticks in his hands. Whenever he listens to music, his mind is engaged with the melody. He doesn’t pay close attention to the words or attempt to decipher the meaning of them. He judges music off the “sound” of the song and what the melody is portraying. Meanwhile, I listen to the same song he does, and completely focus on the lyrics.

This doesn’t mean one of us is completely ignoring the other way of listening to music, but it does mean, that for personal preference, our ears and minds engage different parts of the song. If you look up what’s more important to a song, you’ll see 9 out of 10 times it’s the music or the melody of the song, but this doesn’t mean lyrics should be forgotten. In fact, lyrics should be a heavy contributor to the “grade of a song”. So, how can we focus on and dissect the lyrics while not ignoring the rest of the song?

Focusing on the lyrics brings new depth to the music you’re listening to. It can give you insight into an artist’s life, the way they think, and the things going on within their own life. Listening to and understanding lyrics isn’t always straightforward and can take some time to unpack all the meaning behind specific words. Some songs may have lyrics seemingly without much meaning other than what you hear, but the deeper you dig, you find that many lyrics have hidden meanings, overarching stories, and poetic tools being used to make their true meanings a little harder to understand.

For me, I like to read the lyrics to a song after I listen to it. I look for any ways the lyrics may be written to show a double meaning or if there’s a greater picture being painted throughout the song as a whole. I then take note of anything I may not understand like a term or name, and try to find the meaning of it. I listen to the song again and try to find anything in the melody that gives any hints to the emotion the artist is trying to convey through a certain lyric. This helps me get into the artists shoes and allows for a deeper understanding of what that artist is trying to convey.

If you don’t have the time to sit down and dissect the music you listen to, or don’t have as much time as you’d like, there are podcasts that can help you get to the core meaning of songs. My favorite is Song Exploder. According to their website, “Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.” They are also coming out with a Netflix series, so you could add it to the list of shows you want to binge next.

If you enjoy listening to hip-hop, Dissect is another great podcast for exploring lyrics. Cole Cuchna, a writer and producer for Clever-Clogs, breaks down each song on a specific album, and literally dissects every piece of it. There are more podcasts out there for music analysis, but these are my two favorite.

The next time you hear some new music, try and find some time to spend really breaking down the songs into their different components. It will give you deeper appreciation for the music and will help you better understand what you’re listening to!

Sources

https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2013/05/29/187168874/the-good-listener-whats-more-important-lyrics-or-music

https://www.nrgrecording.com/post/why-do-lyrics-matter

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18626-music-and-lyrics-how-the-brain-splits-songs/

https://songexploder.net/about


 

Written by: Andrew Reynolds 

Andrew Reynolds is a Senior Project Management Major, and enjoys writing for the blog because of the opportunity it gives him to grow as a writer and to challenge himself to see current topics and discussions from a view point he may not have otherwise thought about.