Songs In The Key Of We

Music, Memories, and the Emotional Bell Curve

“Where are the songs about love in the later years - the work, the rewards, the hardships?”

A friend posted this the other day, wondering why so many songs focused on the early stages of love or heartbreak. And how all of the “regular” stuff or maybe the harder stuff later in life seemed to just get forgotten. 

I love thinking about questions like this, in particular, why music resonates so much around certain themes and tends to fall flat (or worse, become forgettable) when it’s about anything else. 

What is the lasting and emotionally angsty effect of our formative years? Why do artists “speak to us” on a level we deeply understand when it’s so painful? 

The poetic awareness of ennui around our own place in the world, especially where music is concerned, is something I know I’ve thought a lot about and something I romantically think about in retrospect. 

Why is it that sometimes in our lives, music is so important that it speaks to us on a level that’s hard to recreate? 

Partly, I think it’s the hormones talking. The young person brain fires and misfires like nobody’s business, and when artists can harness that misfiring into a few chords and a bunch of lyrics, well, that’s where the magic happens, folks. 

But there’s also something to the idea that the “best” music, the most long-lasting, namely, the most timelessly accessible, comes from places where the emotional graph hits its peaks.

What emotional graph you ask? Well, the one I had ChatGPT draw for me to try and describe this musical phenomenon. 

I asked our artificially intelligent friends to draw a graph of what the inverse bell curve of the emotional distribution songs have, or at least the ones that hit the hardest. 

This graph makes sense, right? So much of life, thankfully, is spent in that trough, the low part of the U-shape where we do all the regular shit. That’s the work, the rewards, the hardships, the small wins.

It’s where we work, talk, raise our kids, watch Netflix, struggle, laugh, take out the recycling, get a coffee, argue, have a drink, pay the water bill, BBQ on holidays, and fill the gas tank. 

If we traded each of these actions with the same emotional currency as, say, our first kiss, our first breakup, someone we love passing away, deep sadness, or a moment of true enlightenment about our own lives, then we’d go bust and emotionally broke way, way early. 

Now, should those formative moments carry as much emotional weight as they do? Maybe not. But for artists and bands like (on my list) Bon Iver, Counting Crows, Paul Simon, Ray LaMontagne, Gregory Alan Isakov, or Jim Croce, I’m sure glad they did because the creative output during their struggle produced some of the great art of our time. 

When I listen to Justin Vernon sing “Skinny Love,” I’m not necessarily happy he spent so much time at peak sadness, buried deep in a remote cabin suffering from what might have been nearly debilitating depression. But I’m thankful he was able to access, capture, distill, and synthesize his pain in an open C tuning to give us a few minutes of true beauty. 

The other part of the regular stuff mentioned at the beginning is that there are infinite songs about those things. You just don’t really hear them. Or, you hear them once and then totally forget them. 

It’s just like how I can remember kissing {name redacted} behind East End Elementary School with decently stark clarity decades and decades (and decades) later and can’t remember, well, a ton of stuff that happened before it and nearly everything that happened after. 

We save those small but important pieces of ourselves in tiny corners, sectioned off from the rest of our existence because it makes us decidedly human to do so. Consciousness on this level, which music helps us access, is one of the true distinctions. I’m not sure we would want it the other way. 

Breen and I plus our two best friends (James & Taylor) have a shared Spotify playlist together. It’s titled “Top 5s” and each of us put five songs on. The basic premise was songs you would take to a desert island with you, forever. 

I spent more time thinking about this list than was anything close to reasonable. It took me hours and hours, days, really. I still think about it in odd hours. It wasn’t just some fun exercise to pick five and call it a day. This was an encapsulation of my whole life. My ethos. My pathos. I had to get it correct.

This was a 20-minute song biography of me, and to get it “wrong” was to possibly commit a self-inflicted emotional crime. Again, I took it seriously. 

That list is: 

“Skinny Love” -> Bon Iver

“Answering Bell” -> Ryan Adams

“Love is Everywhere” -> Wilco

“No One’s Gonna Love You” -> Band of Horses

“Line of Sight” -> Odesza 

In thinking about this post, I went back and listened to them while alone on a drive over the weekend. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the five songs, and I definitely didn’t think about this at the time, follow a somewhat logical pattern for life. 

Heartbreak -> Vulnerability -> Seeking Beauty -> Falling and Staying in Love -> Resilience

This is the way I want to think about art, specifically music. As a container for the truly emotional pieces of our lives. We can’t just willy-nilly throw the regular stuff in there, even the quasi-regular stuff that means a lot at the moment.

Yes, those moments in our life are important. Hell, they are almost all of what life is about. Our time here is mostly regular, in the best way possible.

But bringing all music into those moments would mean trying to constantly climb out of that regular and safe pit in the emotional bell curve. If that happened, we run the risk of all music being the same. 

And then, how could we lose ourselves in it?