That one Madonna song

The magic of music

Sunday morning, I’m sitting on our kitchen couch, drinking my tea and reading my morning book.¹ My husband is sitting next to me, researching why my stand mixer is leaking oil every time I use it and what we might do about it.² I have a song in my head, the way you do without even really being aware of it.

Or maybe that doesn’t happen to you? I very often have a song in my head with no idea how it got there, which then necessitates trying to recreate the exact set of events that led to the song burrowing its way into my head in the first place.  

Often it’s a single phrase or idea that triggers the song. For example, at some point in elementary school choir class (I know it was elementary school because I distinctly remember being taught by Mrs. Osbourne, who was also our church choir director), we learned a song called, “Baby Day.” This is a song I have never heard again anywhere outside the context of that choir class and, of course, inside my head, over and over again for the last forty years.³ Friends, it is not a great song. But it contains the following verse:

Why sleep when the day has been called out by the sun

From the night 'cause the light's gonna shine on everyone

Why sleep when the sleep only closes up our eyes

Why sleep when we can watch the sun a-rise

I cannot tell you how many of my perfectly lovely mornings over the years have been haunted by this song. “Why not get out of bed and watch the sun rise?” I ask myself and then the song bursts into my head, like an over-eager puppy, wetting itself a little with excitement and panting, “Did someone say sunrise?”

So many sunrises ruined by one song

Thankfully, Sunday morning it was not “Baby Day” that was in my head. It was Madonna’s song, “Take a Bow.” Nothing about the sun rising in that song. Not one of my favorite songs. Not a song I’d heard recently, so something of a mystery how it got into my head. The day before, I’d been listening to Iron and Wine while I was writing. Not even Madonna-adjacent. 

The song was in my head—I wasn’t humming it out loud. Someone was humming it, though. My husband, sitting beside me, humming the song that was in my head.

“Do you know what song you’re humming?” I asked him.

I didn’t ask him, “Why are you humming that song,” because it’s often not a question he has an answer for. My husband, like me, often has no idea why he’s humming a particular song. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what the song is. Though he will deny it, he is a very musical person. The son of a professional musician, he picks up songs I’m humming even though he has no idea what they are. Then, over the course of the next hour or so, he transforms them. Changes the rhythm. Speeds them up. Slows them down. He riffs on the song, without even knowing he’s doing it. His dad was a jazz musician and a bass player, so I guess it’s not a surprise.⁴

“I do know exactly what song I’m humming,” my husband said. “It’s my favorite Madonna song. I heard it in my dream last night.”

So, from his dream to my head. Not surprising, really. That’s the way music flows through the world and also part of it’s wonder. Your conscious mind doesn’t have to pay attention to music for it to get inside your head. In fact, most of the time, your conscious mind is pretty clueless about what’s going on musically inside your brain. You can have a song stuck in your head and have no idea what the song is. You can make every effort with your conscious mind to get a song out of your head with zero luck.

Also, I don’t know, did this ever happen to other people? Back in the days when our cars had tape decks and CD players, whatever you were listening to would stop when you turned off the car and resume at the exact same place when you turned the car back on. And somehow, my brain knew where that point was, even it was days or hours later. My brain preserved the memory of where the song had cut off, so that when I opened the car to get back in, I would pick up singing the song at the exact point it had ended. It was like I’d hit pause on some soundtrack in my brain. How does that work?

I’ve done some reading on the science of music. I learned a few interesting things, but it didn’t answer any of the big questions. Like, why is music so…contagious? And on a subconscious level? I mean, music, I’ve heard people say, is basically math. It’s not how I experience music (I’m horrible at math, but pretty musical), but whatever. Math isn’t a subconscious thing. It’s as far as you can get from it.⁵ Math is rational. So why does music work subconsciously?

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

Does the process of learning music on a theoretical level—understanding the concepts of fifths and harmonics (I don’t know what those are)—have anything in common with the people who learn by ear? I mean, Joni Mitchel can’t read music and doesn’t write songs that are actually in a musical key. Can you say she doesn’t understand music as well as someone with a Ph.D. in musical theory?

And what is music? Can it only be made by humans, which would seem a very conceited definition. Mockingbirds seem pretty damn musical to me. Or whale song. The howling of a wolf. The wind in the trees. Is that music and, if not, why not?

Music can do all these amazing things. Create collective effervescence. Time travel you back to a certain moment in your life. You know that feeling? You hear a certain song and you’re twenty-one again, in the convertible car you got when you totaled the Honda, riding to the reservoir with your college roommate and a box of wine in the Mississippi heat? You know that feeling? Or the Joan Shelley album that never fails to put me back in that eerie spring of 2020. How does music do all those things?

Music, at the level of physics, is nothing more than vibrations in matter. The air. The string of the guitar. The fleshy weirdness of our vocal chords and then the taut surface of our ear drum. There’s no sound in the emptiness of space because it’s a vacuum, but Einstein believed that the universe is still vibrating, just in a way we’re not equipped to hear. If we could ‘hear’ gravitational waves, it might sound like the universe was singing, which is not far from the idea of musica universalis, or the music of the spheres. Astronomer Johaness Kepler believed the music of spheres could only be heard by our souls.

Isn’t that a beautiful idea? Music that only our souls can hear. Music that travels from one person’s dreams into another person’s head on a Sunday morning. Music as conduit. Music as language. Music as connective tissue. Music as, well, let’s just say it, magic.

1. My morning book is the book I read first thing in the morning, with my tea and breakfast, in lieu of staring at my phone for hours, which don’t get me wrong, I also look at my phone, and play Connections (why is it so much harder lately?). The book is always nonfiction or poetry and right now it’s This is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, which my friend Ellen sent me, and makes me laugh out loud and also think about play and joy and, well, you know obsession.

2. I suspect the answer to why my stand mixer is leaking oil is because I use my stand mixer almost exclusively to mix and knead dough and the leaking oil is a way of saying, “Enough with the dough, already. It’s exhausting. Give me some whipped cream, won’t you?”

3. I have many questions about the songs that get picked for choir classes and how that happens and please god, if the songs have gotten better since I was young enough to be in choir. Let me just say, my choir class was no Glee.

4. He also makes up songs. Lots of them. Sometimes little mindfulness reminders set to a melody. Sometimes a phrase he heard that would make a good lyric, like the other day when I said, “I got the worst sunburn of my life on a beach in Galveston.”

5. My husband, who knows more about science, I guess, even though he is not a scientist and I am (sort of), but a historian of science, argues that math is intuitive or unconscious. He argues that Oppenheimer would begin an equation on a board and then skip to the solution, leaving out all the math in between. When people asked him how he arrived at the solution he said he didn’t know, he just knew it was right. So maybe math is also unconscious? Intuitive? I don’t know, but it sure never felt that way to me.