Maybe We Only Have to Hear You Once

Do you want us to listen to your songs over and over?

Are you sure?

This bit of radio wisdom–that heavy rotation is better–is something we often take for granted. And of course it’s really taken for granted by the high-rolling music industry. “It’s gotta be catchy, it’s gotta have a memorable, addictive hook you want to hear again and again. The more requests the radio stations get, the better. The more YouTube plays it gets, the better. The more sales it makes, the better.”

That’s one perfectly valid way to think about your music. But it’s not the only way, and it’s not the only way to measure success.

Some of the most powerful listening experiences of my life are experiences I might never repeat in my entire lifetime–because they’re so intense and so difficult to digest. I can’t cope with the jaggedness of Cecil Taylor’s Silent Tongues every day. I can’t navigate the emotional storms of Patty Waters’s 14-minute rendition of “Black is the Color” every day (or even every decade). There are days when I haven’t got the mental energy and fortitude to handle Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity or Electric Masada’s At the Mountains of Madness.

Some of the music I’ve given just one or two rotations to has had the greatest impact on me as an artist and as a person. In some cases, I didn’t even enjoy the music on a sensory level. All of the artists above can be grating, dissonant, stormy, unpleasant. So why, you may ask, would I listen to something that I don’t like? Is that neurotic or what?

In the case of such far-out artists, the answer is that now and then I find myself in a mood where I’d rather listen to something intense and provocative than relax with something comfortable. Plus I’m a sucker for anything inventive, even if I don’t entirely “get it”. But here’s the main reason I collect musical oddities: listening to music so incredibly original gives me courage. All those artists I listed above are trailblazers who had the strength to create things that are boldly different, so different that they alienate many listeners.

Nonetheless those artists endured criticism and remained so fully committed to creating art their own way that their work really left a mark–an influence that ripples far past the usual shelf life for a pop hit.

There are some pieces of music you’ll listen to over and over until you’ve heard one delicious confection of a three-minute pop song over a hundred times. There are other pieces of music you might listen to just once–but it will shake you awake and remind you that there are some experiences in life that are so powerful and refreshingly bizarre that we only want to have them once. Maybe twice.

And at the core of all this, a lesson: that it’s okay–really, truly okay–to go your own way and work on something that isn’t even within a stone’s throw of the established norm. Every convention and tool that we take for granted today was, at some point, a wild experiment made by somebody out of curiosity.

Consider whether there’s a work in you that is refreshingly strange. Something new and exciting that a certain number of listeners are going to wrinkle their noses at. The kind of music where the payoff won’t be 1.3 million YouTube views, but instead a powerful experience for anyone who falls under the spell of this strange fascinating song you wrought. Maybe it’ll have a small audience, tiny even, but one that will really, truly hear you–and regard your work as something irreplaceable, with a niche in the musical wild that is truly all its own.

photo by andrecchin