Music and You

SUSAN ROGERS: I grew up in Southern California and like a lot of little kids, just was crazy about music. And I really believe that little children, most of them anyway, down deep inside, they kind of know who they are. And I did.

I felt an instinctual attraction to music, but no aptitude for it whatsoever and no desire to even have any aptitude. I didn’t want to play or write or sing. I wanted to in some way serve music, help it come into the world.

So in order to get into that kind of career, when I was 21 years old it was 1978, and you didn’t see women recording engineers or record producers. You see very few now, much less then. But there was one door I could walk through that would work for me, and that was to become an audio technician and repair the audio equipment. I did that self-taught in electronics and worked my way in and up the chain. Then my lucky break came in 1983. My favorite artist in the world, who happened to be Prince, put out the word that he was looking for an audio technician.

He liked working with women. I had all his records. I had seen him live many times. I was an audio technician, and I was willing to leave Hollywood and move to Minneapolis and be a full-time tech. He transitioned me from the tech chair into the engineering chair, and after that I was off to the races. JOHN BOLAND: Amazing. So over the course of nine chapters, you approach music, listening, experience from every angle.

At the very beginning of the first chapter, “Authenticity,” is a recording by a group called The Shags.

The most charitable word I could use to describe this recording would be amateurish. ROGERS: Okay. [Laughs.] BOLAND: So let’s go ahead and play “I’m so Happy When You’re Near.” [Plays song.]

So tell us how you selected that song and what does it tell us about authenticity? ROGERS: In this book I’m talking about the listener profile, and I’m describing things that I learned in grad school about how the brain processes music.

I’m describing the listener profile along seven dimensions. Four of them

Susan Rogers Explains What the Music You Love Says About You MUSIC MIRROR

From the October 5, 2022, program “Susan Rogers: What the Music You Love Says About You.” Part of The Commonwealth Club’s Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. SUSAN ROGERS, Director, Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory; Record Producer; Author, This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You In Conversation with JOHN BOLAND, President Emeritus, KQED; Vice Chair, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

Left to right: Imani Rupert-Gordon, Sylvia Ghazarian and Buffy Wicks (on-screen), and Gilda Gonzales.

are musical, three of them are aesthetic, saying how we all have a sweet spot on all seven of these dimensions. The one dimension, though, that isn’t well described by science is authenticity, and that’s just something we knew in the recording studio. It has to do with where you as a listener perceive the performance gestures to be coming from. Is that singer singing her little heart out, is that bass player getting down into the belly button to play that grungy bass part? Or is that player—John Coltrane, let’s say—technically so proficient that he can blow you away, playing from genius from the neck up? So when we listen to performers in the studio, we’re assessing is this real or is this authentic?

Now, The Shags are what we call an industry band in the sense that people in the music business know about them. There were three sisters who grew up in rural New Hampshire in the 1960s—Betty, Helen and Dot—and their father believed they were going to be great, successful musicians.

So what dad did was pull them out of school, forbid them from dating or seeing boys, made them stay in their room and gave them instruments and said, “You’re going to play and you’re going to be great on your instruments.” These poor girls are just teenage girls and they’re cut off from the whole world. They didn’t know how to play. But they wrote these songs like “I’m So Happy When You’re Near” that has a genius to it. “I’m so happy when you’re near / I’m so sad when you’re away / Now that you’re here to stay / I’m happy every day.” There’s a purity about it, a kind of Emily Dickinson sort of purity.

So when we listen to them, we don’t hear technique. But what we hear is pure, unadulterated intentionality. It’s teenagers on drums and guitar and bass saying, “I want to tell you something.” It’s the musical equivalent of a child’s finger painting. The child’s finger painting is not going to hang in the museum, but the child is saying, “This is mom, this is dad. There’s my dog. There’s the house. I want to show you something.” And in their lack of technique, you can perceive what they’re trying to do. In the recording studio, you sometimes get musicians who are very well-trained. And they play perfectly, with no heart and no soul at all. They’re just being technically perfect, unconnected to their hearts and their belly buttons and their groins. The Shags are all heart. So that’s why I wanted to share it in the book—to share their story, but also to point out that great music isn’t always technical perfection. Sometimes great music is great intentionality, pure intentionality. In a sense. BOLAND: It’s interesting that you point out some pretty famous artists appreciate The Shags. ROGERS: Yes. Because they recognize that’s hard to do. It’s hard to be that pure and that raw and that exposed. As Miles Davis used to say to his musicians, “Play like a non-musician,” meaning play like a three-year-old would play if a three-yearold could make music, how a 97-year-old would play if a 97-year-old had the dexterity that he once had. Play like a human. The Shags remind us of this. BOLAND: So authenticity, realism and novelty are what you refer to as the aesthetic dimensions of a listener profile. And for the rest of the program, we’re going to focus on three of the actual musical dimensions of listening, starting with melody.

“Frank [Sinatra] could deliver this subtext of virility because his phrases could last for so long. Then he’d get to the end of the phrase and you’d hear air come out. He’d still have more gas in the tank.”

Frank Sinatra, as you point out in the book, is considered a master of melody, but he was not always a master of melody. We’re going to listen to two Sinatra recordings that will illustrate how he learned to leverage melody to develop what is now his very familiar style.

Let’s first hear Frank singing “All or Nothing at All” in 1940 with the Harry James Band, and then we’ll hear how he sounded 25 years later, singing “It Was a Very Good Year” live at the Sands in 1966.

So let’s play both Sinatra recordings. [Plays songs.]

Tell us what we’re hearing and what do we learn about melody from Sinatra’s development? ROGERS: When Sinatra was a young man, 24 years old, he went to a concert at Carnegie Hall. He saw Jascha Heifetz—violinist—perform. Sinatra was sitting near the front, and he saw how Jascha Heifetz would make these long phrases with his bow. Just keep the energy into that bow and not stop those phrases. Sinatra had an epiphany. He said, “If I could just learn to do that with my voice. . . .” So he went to the vocal coach John Quinlan, and Quinlan said, “Stop smoking. Take up running. Increase your lung power.” Well, he kept up the smoking, but he did swim and he did run. And he learned to time his melodic phrases.

Now, in the studio, you hear a singer take a deep inhale. I used to love that with Prince. When there’s a deep inhale at the top of a phrase, it means here it comes, hang on to your hat, because an expert singer is going to take all that lung power and time it out just perfectly. Frank was better than anyone at that, so Frank could deliver this subtext of virility because his phrases could last for so long. Then he’d get to the end of the phrase and you’d hear air come out. He’d still have more gas in the tank, and that’s a subtext of even more virility. So Frank was showing his dominance over other male singers and also playing with melody in such a way that the band had to follow him.

That segment you just heard was actually conducted by a very young Quincy Jones—he’s like 26 years old—conducting the Count Basie Orchestra. Frank loved working with Quincy Jones. All the musicians who worked with him said “Frank could hold on to a phrase to a length that was beyond belief.” But Frank valued lyrics so deeply; he wanted to make sure you understood and paid attention to every single word he sang. So he learned to control his breath and consequently his melodic phrases to make you feel what he wanted you to feel. Hard to do. He was the master. Regardless of what you think of his politics or other aspects about him, we’re just discussing the man’s musicality here. And there was no one finer in his day. BOLAND: Another superstar with melody was Nat King Cole. Let’s hear Nat King Cole singing “Nature Boy” from 1947. [Plays song.]

So what makes Nat King Cole a master of melody? ROGERS: We were learning about melody when we were in the womb in the final trimester. It’s a liquid environment, and we can hear mom’s voice; a little bit later on, we can hear dad’s voice, too, if dad’s voice gets close enough. So we’re learning how humans use the pitch changes of their voices to express emotion. After you’re born, caregivers use their voices to express, “All right, baby, you’ve got to calm down, though. Aw, come on, baby. It is time to put on your pajamas” or whatever they do. I don’t know; I don’t have children. Anyway, this is the tone of voice we use to warn you or reprimand you. So from a very early stage, we’re learning what these pitch changes mean emotionally when we grow up. If we become composers, we compose in a way that reflects our native language.

So a great singer who’s also a great pianist like Nat King Cole knows how to use his voice to imbue those lyrics with feeling like a great stage actor. Countless actors have done Shakespeare. They all have the exact same script. But not everyone is Sir Laurence Olivier. Not everyone knows how to time those phrases and deliver the weight of those words like a true maestro.

We don’t always know technically what we’re responding to, but we know it intuitively down deep inside when we hear a great performance by a great artist. We’re moved in part because they know the signals that cause us to respond. BOLAND: Is there a particular part of the brain that’s responding to melody? ROGERS: Exactly. So our auditory system, our whole brain is very efficient. It divides up tasks. So in case you get an injury, there’s a homologous section on the other side thinking, maybe [it can] help you out if you get an injury on one side of your brain. Our auditory system is no different. We’ve got the two ears and the auditory nerve bundle comes up through the auditory brain stem, and it terminates right above our left ear. For nearly all of us, this left side of the brain is specialized to be a really fast processor of words. Languages, for the most part, are processed over here. This side is the slow side that doesn’t focus so much on the short little differences between a constant and a vowel, for instance, but focuses on how sound is changing over the long term, which makes it perfect for music.

It’s listening for those pitch changes, for the intonation in your voice. We’re not the only mammal to have developed that. Studies with domestic family dogs in full MRI scanners, which is wonderful because the dog lies still in the scanner for three 6-minute runs with the line scanner with the little headphones. And it’s the same thing. Dogs are responding to dog voices over here on the left, and dog valence, meaning dog emotions, over here on the right. This is how our brain is, how our brain can independently attend to the lyrics in a song with a melody on one side and get a treat—a dopamine hit—from the other one.

If you have friends who say, Oh, I never listen to the words on a record, I used to

think, “Oh, that’s not true.” Now I know it’s true that you can totally be absorbed in the rhythm or in the melody, in the harmony, in the style of the record, in the timbre, the sounds of the record, and really not be engaging that side of the brain at all. You’ve got all the treat you need from the other aspects of it. BOLAND: Now we’re going to hear another version of “Nature Boy” by jazz legend John Coltrane, who was a master of harmony. [Plays music.]

You know, I could listen to John Coltrane for the rest of the night, but I’ll do that when I get home. Tell us about the role of harmony, working with melody to add nuance or emotional power. ROGERS: Back in the ’50s and ’60s, most

listeners were familiar with “Nature Boy,” because it had been a hit for a lot of artists. So most music listeners knew the melody. What Coltrane is trying to do here is play some variations on that melody to wordlessly tell you a little bit more, to imply something else about this boy who wandered very far, this strange, enchanted boy. Now, Nat King Cole presents the song as a sweet, tender, poignant, beautiful story. Coltrane is using his horn to say, yea, but there’s some darkness going on there, too, right?

And it’s the harmony notes that do that. The harmony notes are shadows almost. It’s almost how they function. They shade the main message in a certain way, just how I’m trying to think of a good analog with speech.

But we can choose our words very carefully to imply certain subtexts in our speech. That is very subtle. And harmony works a little bit like that. The great jazz musicians have to be geniuses, because jazz improvisation has been called “composition in real time.” They’re writing as they go along. They have to understand the head, the lead line, the main melody. They have to know how far they can drift away from that with their note choices to still remain in key, still be communicating something and then working their way back to that main melody.

You’ve got to be pretty, pretty talented to

do that at that level. BOLAND: Let’s begin our discussion of lyrics with another song. Let’s hear a little bit of “Stand” by Sly and the Family Stone. ROGERS: You’re picking these songs that are killing me. [Boland plays song.] BOLAND: So what gave the lyrics of “Stand” so much power? And I know you particularly felt that. How do the lyrics generally impact our listening experience? Where do lyrics fit in—particularly on this song, but just in general? ROGERS: Yeah. There’s a fellow named Peter Murphy. He’s a scholar and he’s written quite a lot about lyrics. He says if you’re out on the street and you hear somebody say, “Hey, you,” you look around and you can determine right away, Oh, you doesn’t mean me.

But when we’re listening to lyrics, music is really effective at getting us to go into our own heads, shut out the outside world and imagine and daydream, go into our psyches.

You hear that word you in a lyric. For all you know, it could be you. And it feels often like they’re talking to you. They’re talking about you. Sometimes you feel like you’re the singer. Sometimes you feel you’re the one being sung to.

When I was 13 years old, when that song came out, the song is about the tension in America. You know, the Vietnam War, and race relations were in such terrible turmoil. I was 13, so I was in turmoil just from being a teenager. And when that came on the radio, those lines—“All the things you want are real / you have you to complete and there is no deal.” This killed me. It just got me. Yes, the things I want are real now.

Other people can listen to that and it’s not special to them. But when the right lyric hits you at the right time, it becomes your words. That record becomes your record. The phrase I like to use is the music of me. When you hear a song that sounds exactly like something you would make if you made music, that’s you. That’s your musicality. And this record is a reflection of my own musicality. BOLAND: Sort of related to that, many of the world’s most popular songs have lyrics that capture the social anxiety and isolation of youth. So when you hear it, it means very different things. But let’s hear a snippet of “In My Room” by the Beach Boys. ROGERS: [Laughing.] Should have my Kleenex up here. [Boland plays song.] BOLAND: Tell us about the way the impact and meaning of lyrics change as the listener changes, or as the listener grows older. ROGERS: So when we are teenagers, the most important problem we need to solve is fitting in in our social world.

A quick sidebar for a fun neuroscience fact. You get adults and teenagers into the lab, and get them in the FMRI scanner and you ask them two questions. What do you think of yourself? And the second question is, What do you think other people think about you?

In the adult brain, those are two sep-

“Lorretta [Lynn’s] genius was to be relatable, to get you to feel like I know her. She could be my neighbor. I could have a cup of coffee with her. She’d like me.”

arate areas. Here’s what I think of myself, and here’s what I think other people think about me. In teenagers, it’s almost perfect overlap. To a teenage brain, what the other kids think about you is who you are.

So when we’re teenagers, we’ve got these social problems to solve. We don’t know how. We’re not old enough yet. But you can come home from school after a bad day, you can put that record on. If you were in the ’60s, someone like Brian Wilson would sing to you. There’s a world I can go [to] and it’s my world, and I’m private there. And all my worries and my fears come out in that room. I can do my crying and my sighing.

And for men—how often does that get talked about? Women are known to be a little bit more in touch with their emotions and more comfortable with expressing these kinds of sorrows. But with a pure and beautiful expression, he wrote in that song to say, “I feel vulnerable and I’m hurting.”

And you hear that singer’s voice and you go, “Yeah. Just like me. Just like me.” You bond to that singer.

Now, when you get older, you’ll appreciate it on a different level. In the book, I mentioned a song like Tammy Wynette’s “D-iv-o-r-c-e,” singing about divorce. If you’re a teenager, that means nothing to you for the most part. But if you get older, and that’s a real possibility, that song is going to hit you like a ton of bricks. Willie Nelson’s version of “You Are Always On My Mind.” When you’re older in life, you know what that means. You might not appreciate that at 35. In short, lyrics are the part of records that solve problems for us, and our problems are different as we age. BOLAND: It’s interesting the people who write music and lyrics. She just passed away; Loretta Lynn’s lyrics were very important. Talk a little bit about her work. ROGERS: So the height of elegance is simplicity, and it is damned hard to write a simple song like “In My Room” or “The Pill,” like Loretta Lynn did, or other songs she wrote. It’s hard to take a deep topic and write about it as a simple truth that’s capturing what the scholar Joseph Campbell called the universal truth. Simple words. But it’s true of all of us. Loretta’s genius was to be relatable, to get you to feel like I know her. She could be my neighbor. I could have a cup of coffee with her. She’d like me. Bruce

Springsteen, for a later generation, had a similar relatability. That’s hard to do.

An artist like Prince or Michael Jackson is lyrically not offering that to their listeners. They’re offering other things, but not that relatability. Loretta set the standard for how to do that, and there were many, many songwriters who owe her a debt of gratitude for showing us how it’s done. BOLAND: So particularly lyrics do that, I guess much more than melody would. ROGERS: Yeah. One scholar wrote, “Music allows us to don the clothing of the person who is singing to us.” So certain lyrics can let you temporarily become someone else.

I don’t have anything in common with the members of Public Enemy, except that I love Public Enemy. There are rap artists that I love because when I listen to them, when I listen to Chuck D, I feel just a trickle of power when I listen to my hardcore music

just a little bit. I will never be that, but I want to feel like that. When I listen to the great Lana Del Rey, who I just adore—she’s sexy and she’s attractive and she’s bold and she’s just all the woman that I’m not and will never be—I love feeling for a 3-minute song like I imagine she feels. This is why many artists are incredibly popular.

Artists like Prince—they’re not the kinds of cars that pass you every day; you won’t pass a Prince on the street. But when you listen to Prince’s music, you get to be someone who’s a fairly rare bird. And that feels good.