One of the band’s funnier recent text threads began when Zach got a song stuck in his head and couldn’t remember what it was. He recorded himself singing the melody and sent it to us—truly, this is trust—and we tried our best to identify the thing. Two weeks later, after the thread had delved into Mungo Jerry, Gershwin, the theme from Driving Miss Daisy, Taj Mahal, and so much Randy Newman that Spotify is still tossing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” into my algorithm, he figured it out himself. That’s a long time to be haunted by a song.
Once when I was freelancing at a large marketing agency, a couple of designers spent an afternoon wandering about, disconsolate, singing a motif they couldn’t identify: “Da-duh! DUH! DUH! Do you know what that song is?” Somehow no one did.* (This is perhaps not surprising, as it’s the same office where I once heard an intern confidently define ska as “rock, but with like a blues feel.”)
The ways we remember music—or almost remember it—both fascinate and scare me. Sometimes when you’re writing a song it comes so fast that it feels more like recall than creation. Sometimes it does turn out to be recall, accidental or not, and then you lose a court case. Which makes the songs that come fast more than a little terrifying. You feel as though you’re dealing with music as an elemental force—unless you’re just regurgitating something you heard once in a Walgreens—and for a while you genuinely don’t know which is true. That frantic not-knowing is part of what “Cryptomnesia” is getting at (though that song began as a dream, and to be honest I still don’t know what every last part of it means).
A song I’m almost done with is still in that state, which means I’ve been carrying it around for a week or two while my brain pings between things it might be and pops random melodies into the ol’ mental algorithm. I’ve practiced it for the sake of putting together a demo, and now I can’t tell whether the chord progression feels inevitable because I’m used to it, or because it’s a song that already exists out in the wild. I am probably not going to know until I play it for the band. This too is trust, huh?
*They didn’t ask me—no one ever asks the freelancer—but it was the theme from Carmen.
Once when I was freelancing at a large marketing agency, a couple of designers spent an afternoon wandering about, disconsolate, singing a motif they couldn’t identify: “Da-duh! DUH! DUH! Do you know what that song is?” Somehow no one did.* (This is perhaps not surprising, as it’s the same office where I once heard an intern confidently define ska as “rock, but with like a blues feel.”)
The ways we remember music—or almost remember it—both fascinate and scare me. Sometimes when you’re writing a song it comes so fast that it feels more like recall than creation. Sometimes it does turn out to be recall, accidental or not, and then you lose a court case. Which makes the songs that come fast more than a little terrifying. You feel as though you’re dealing with music as an elemental force—unless you’re just regurgitating something you heard once in a Walgreens—and for a while you genuinely don’t know which is true. That frantic not-knowing is part of what “Cryptomnesia” is getting at (though that song began as a dream, and to be honest I still don’t know what every last part of it means).
A song I’m almost done with is still in that state, which means I’ve been carrying it around for a week or two while my brain pings between things it might be and pops random melodies into the ol’ mental algorithm. I’ve practiced it for the sake of putting together a demo, and now I can’t tell whether the chord progression feels inevitable because I’m used to it, or because it’s a song that already exists out in the wild. I am probably not going to know until I play it for the band. This too is trust, huh?
*They didn’t ask me—no one ever asks the freelancer—but it was the theme from Carmen.
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