All Music Is Mental Media editorial, from culture and discovery to live music, screen stories and the science of sound.
Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age turned BC Place into nearly four hours of loud, communal, gloriously excessive rock and roll — and left one question ringing after the lights came up: who loves rock and roll?
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Knowing what a songwriter meant can deepen a song. It can also shrink one we've already made our own. So who gets to decide what a song means once it leaves the person who wrote it?
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Some performances make us stop hearing the performance at all. The voice, writing, band, production and imperfections align, and for a few minutes we simply believe them.
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You can know every second of a recording and still be surprised by the song in a room. Physical presence, unpredictability, shared attention, visual information and the people around us all change the experience.
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One voice can move us. A room full of voices does something different. Synchrony, shared attention, breathing, physical participation and the temporary feeling of becoming an "us" all help explain why.
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Why deliberately play heartbreak when you already feel awful? The answer may involve recognition, regulation, memory, reflection, beauty and the strange relief of hearing a feeling held somewhere outside yourself.
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Sometimes a few seconds of music can return a person, room, summer or version of ourselves. Research on music-evoked autobiographical memories helps explain why — but the song is only part of the story.
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A song can lift us, unsettle us, calm us or pull us deeper into a feeling we were already carrying. Science suggests many reasons, but some of the explanation still belongs to the listener.
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Music doesn't stop meaning something when the artist finishes making it. It keeps changing through memory, context, performance, other people and the lives we attach to it.
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Some songs stay songs. Others become people, places, relationships, grief, beginnings, endings and versions of ourselves we thought we had forgotten. The recording stays the same. What we carry inside it keeps changing.
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A song can exist for decades before a film or television scene gives it another life. Sometimes the music transforms the image. Sometimes the image permanently changes the music. And sometimes a score is so interwoven with the story that taking it away would mean taking part of the story with it.
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Some songs make the body hear celebration while the lyrics tell us something darker. That contradiction is not a mistake. Sometimes the space between what the music says and what the words say is where the song becomes most interesting.
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