This Will Change the Way You Think About Music

Record producer-turned-neuroscientist Susan Rogers breaks down what music is for, how heavy metal and classical are closer than we think, and what makes a perfect night in the studio.

When I used to play open mics as an amateur guitarist and singer in New York City, I often questioned what I was doing: Why would anyone want to hear my sub-par version of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” when they can listen to her professional version at any time? The young, talented, ambitious people who showed up with their original songs hungry to be discovered made sense to me, but my own motivations seemed less clear. That all changed in the last year or so, when I moved to Upstate New York and discovered a more casual and social music culture where people go to Bluegrass jams or play singalongs around campfires. After years of the city’s more intensely competitive arts scene, as well as decades as a professional pop culture critic, I suddenly saw music completely differently. It’s not simply something to be perfected and then critiqued. It’s an expression, an offering, a bonding mechanism.

That was my first recent major shift in how I saw music. The second major shift came when I read Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas’s enlightening book This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. In it, Rogers offers a new framework for understanding your (or anyone’s) taste in music from a neuroscientific perspective. Rogers, a former studio engineer and producer for the likes of Prince and the Barenaked Ladies, left the music business to study the science of music. Here, she lays out seven axes on which to evaluate musical preferences—authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre—arguing that what you like is simply a matter of how it hits your individual brain.

In other words, music isn’t good or bad, and therefore, taste isn’t good or bad. This thesis reminds me of Carl Wilson’s brilliant book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, in which he delves deep into Celine Dion’s album of the same name to ostensibly try to understand why so many people like an artist he derided as a critic. He ends up concluding that musical affection depends on much more than technical achievement. But in This Is What It Sounds Like, Rogers and Ogas go a step further, showing that a taste for Celine Dion or Nirvana or Britney Spears is no different from a taste for merengue or cilantro or a Frappuccino. It’s simply a matter of how each of us in individually wired.

I talked to Rogers about what this means for music criticism, why music is a more personal experience than TV or movies, and why pop music is the perfect blend of the expected and the innovative.

JKA: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what music is for. What do you think music is for?

SR: Funny you should ask, because I was thinking of that question yesterday. My dearest, dearest friend sent me a new song he's written, and it's very nice. Having made commercial records for a long time, I can't help it. I am conditioned to think about any work of musical art’s commercial potential: Who will this be for? And he's not exactly looking for feedback, but if I am to give him feedback, I'm going to say something along the lines of, well, you could make this more accessible so that other people get something from the lyrical message. You could dig into this or dig into that. And then, of course, I stopped myself and realized, well, he has no intention of doing that. He's 60 now, so his days of commercial record making are long behind him.

In fact, he doesn't necessarily even intend to sit in front of an audience and play this. So he's making art for himself. He's making the art that he wants to hear. Then there are those folks that I'm used to working with who are making art in order to make a living. And when we were in the studio with those artists, we were thinking about the audience and how we'll get that dollar, whether it's literally or figuratively, how we're going to make a living off this. But then there are those folks that you are talking about who do make music, and they do want to get out on the stage, and they do want to have an audience in front of them, but their ambitions are to provide a service in a setting.

So to answer your question more directly, the folks who are playing in clubs are performing a function of delivering music. This is similar to food in that you can go to a fine restaurant and pay a lot of money, and the chef had better blow your mind. But kids love a little bag of potato chips or cheese and crackers or whatever you got. And many, many people are satisfied and happy being sung to and being played to. It may not be the Taylor Swift version of that song, but these guys are feeling like, it's a version just for me, just for me in this room right now. No one else has this version. So it is performing a useful function.

JKA: In your book, you've broken down our individual reactions on these different axes. And what I liked about it is it really brings home the fact that music isn't about taste in the sense of wrong and right or high and low. So my question is: Where do you think that leaves something like music criticism?

SR: They're doing a very important job, as the film critics are. The film critics would be performing a dereliction of duty if they regarded a very popular, maybe a cartoon or a Marvel movie or a popcorn movie as the next Citizen Kane. It simply isn't. So they've got a set of standards, which are considering the art form as a whole and the art form as a representation of culture. And they're doing mental math to address the question of whether or not this work of art is saying something original and saying something useful. It has to be about the magic words: other people. So there is a role for critics in the arts and in a lot of different areas to assess works independently of their public appeal or their commercial potential, but to just regard them in the context of other similar art forms and to say whether or not this is taking us in the right direction, at least according to their best guess.

JKA: Can you imagine a world where we could, with the system that you laid out, change the way we argue about music? I'm thinking of when people have conversations about the Beatles versus the Stones or Taylor Swift versus Beyoncé. Could we instead find ourselves just saying, well, I just really value lyrics more or rhythm more, that sort of thing?

SR: I'd like to see that happen because of all the art forms, music is so incredibly personal because of the way that we consume it. As they say in the sciences, music doesn't happen until the consumer phase. In other words, if you played a record in a room and there were no living ears in there to hear it, it’s not music, it's just air molecules going back and forth. It's the brain that converts these pressure waves into music. Or if it's not your taste in music, noise or something really annoying.

It is private. No one else is in there with us. And because music is an emotion delivery device for those of us who love music, we have these musical little buddies that have been with us through our high and low emotions, through our desires, our fantasies. It's been with us where no one else can go in this private place of lighting up these circuits. So when we critique one another's taste in music, we are saying to the other person, I reject an aspect of yourself that you actually really like. I know virtually nothing about the other art forms, but I know with music how it feels to have someone just tear apart a band you love and your reaction is kind of along the lines of, you don't really know me.

JKA: You make the point that some of the biggest changes in music are tied to technology. Which turning points do you consider the most important?

SR: The major, major revolution was the personal computer. So when I started in the late ‘70s in the recording studio, these spaces were the kinds of places where the average person never went. In order to have a day in the studio, you had to have record company money because even an average studio is going to cost $500 or $600 a day, and many of them were up to $3,000 a day to be in that room. You had to have the record company budget, and you needed specialized knowledge and skills to operate the equipment and make something happen in that studio. These were these rare places where people didn't go. People have recording studios on their phones now. All people have always made music, but the recording of music shifted from being a specialized skill to being totally accessible.

Music changed with no more clear example than Lil’ Nas X with “Old Town Road.” Not just the song itself, but the moment in which it arrived and how it arrived, the do-it-yourself skills put that out there in the marketplace, got the attention of the right people. It was a clear and evident sign of the revolution that had happened.

This did happen in the seventies to a lesser extent, but it happened with hip hop. That's what hip hop was doing in New York in the 1970s. They were taking preexisting samples, so to speak, by spinning vinyl and mixing it up on cassettes and stuff so that they were creating something new out of old parts, and they launched an imminent revolution. They rang a bell that's still ringing. And that was 50 years ago. Although that was still the days of record labels. So people who wanted to be known had to get signed to a record deal, be given a bigger budget to do the thing that they were doing. But I guess in hindsight, we can look back and we can say, yeah, we should have seen this coming because clever kids are going to take whatever tools they've got, including other people's music, and make new music with it.

JKA: One of your dimensions that blew my mind was predictability versus novelty, and the fact that pop music is right in the middle. As a producer, is this how you always thought about it?

SR: As a producer, the only pop hit record I had was with Barenaked Ladies. But for the most part, I've always been, as a listener and as a record maker, to the right of that bell curve. Pop music has always been for me a little bit under my threshold for the amount of novelty that I crave in a work of art. But the folks who are on the opposite side of that curve, like my brothers, they like their classic rock. And even pop music is just too, ah, what do we need this crap for? And the crap they're referring to is not that it's not good music, it's new sounds, new lyrical ideas, new formats, new rhythms.

JKA: You mentioned your brothers, and I was thinking about this novelty scale and wondering about how so many of us get older and we say, what's this crap on the radio now? Do you think there's just a limit to our appetite for novelty over a lifetime? Do we reach our threshold in young adulthood and go, all right, I can't go any farther than this?

SR: My personal hypothesis is that where your sweet spot is on the bell curve of novelty and familiarity begins to settle down and make itself a home in your youth. By youth, I mean childhood, and then going through the junior high school years and adolescence. And I believe you stay there. I think you stay there as you grow older. And here's one example of some research that would support that. There's a fellow named Adrian North who has done several studies that are looking for correlations between personality traits and music preferences.

He found two populations of human beings with an almost identical personality profile, and similar, but related, tasted music. This was young males who love heavy metal and older 50s, late-middle-aged males who love classical music. These populations line up and on all the tests of personality with almost perfect overlap. The difference between them is their age and their culture. So what they're listening for a heavy dose of complexity. A lot of innovation. They want music that rewards active, not passive, listening.

They will sit down in front of those speakers and play air guitar or air drums to a long piece with a lot of changes. Adrian North's work predicts when those guys get older, in their 50s and 60s, they're going to be going to classical concerts and listening to some of the more complex classical composers. They're getting the exact same reward, just through more culturally appropriate music.

The studies show that the only folks who continue to seek out new music tend to be the folks who work in it, especially musicians and record makers. But it's unusual to abandon the music of your youth and be deliberately seeking out new treats from new music. Just personally, the students turned me on to a lot of very good music, which I like. But I don't want it because I already know other pieces of music that are that good, from which I have memories and associations.

JKA: You worked with a lot of people as a producer. Do you have a favorite memory from the studio?

SR: Often they involve either laughing really, really hard or being so incredibly musically satisfied, feeling like this thing that you did is just crazy great.

One of the best days I ever had in the studio, the artist was Jeff Black. He was on Arista Austin, and we were working at Willie Nelson's studio, in ‘97, or maybe ‘98. And Jeff had just come off the road from being the opening act for Wilco. So the Wilco guys were going to be Jeff's backup band. Jeff is singer, songwriter, acoustic guitar. So it was the original Wilco minus Jeff Tweedy. It was those three guys and a great producer who I hired as piano player, a guy named Greg Wells from Canada. He works with Katy Perry and 21 Pilots, all these big artists. Anyway, back then, he was just an upcoming studio pianist. So Greg was with us and Wilco, myself and Jeff Black. And the song we were doing was a song called “Birmingham Road,” which became the title track on that album.

“Birmingham Road” is the saga of when Jeff was a young man in high school in Liberty, Missouri. Jeff, a little bit on the heavy side, wore glasses, quiet, nerd type, really intelligent and sensitive, but not the popular boy at all. And like most of the boys, he had a tremendous crush on the popular girl. She was just so out of his league. He couldn't even talk to her, much less ask her on date. But kids graduate from high school and they get their jobs and they’re young people in this little town of Liberty, Missouri. And her life wasn't turning out that well. She had a couple of kids and maybe a divorce or something like that. So Jeff ran into her one day and his career is on the ascendancy. He got signed to a record deal. So he's got the courage and he asks her on a date.

She says, yeah, sure. And they go out to Birmingham Road and they're in the car, the backseat of the car, and they're starting to make out. And Jeff realizes, this isn't at all what I dreamt of, because she was sad and life had beaten her down. She wasn't interested in him. It was just something to do. It wasn't at all like what he had fantasized about. Ah, it's so beautiful. The lyrics are not narrative. He's not telling a story. You'd have to know the story to know what's going on. But essentially using the poetry of the songwriter, he's letting us know.

Anyway, so we did this song in the studio and we were so rushed because Wilco had to get back out on the road and the band, they were there working up the arrangement, and I just said, no, no, no. This is not right. It's not right. I wanted her to be in the room. I wanted a feminine energy. Let's bring her into this picture. So I had my rhythm, a drum machine from the sixties, and I plugged it into an amp and I put it on what I think is one of the sexiest beats, which is bossa nova. I put on that groovy bossa nova with the hips, the side to side hips. This isn't that male rock energy, which is basically up and down. This is hips, this is side motion, this is swaying. So I put that out in the room, let it bleed into all the mics, found the right tempo and said, play to that.

She's the ghost in the room. They nailed it. It was so good. We recorded it to tape and we ran through it a few times. And I remember that night, sitting around the control room afterward. Before you go home, you unwind. There were cold beers and some of the guys smoked a joint and you just talk music. It's what you do. And then every once in a while, [Wilco member] Jay Bennett would say, play it again. And we'd listen to this six-minute-long song that is nirvana.

You don't know how it's going to do commercially out there in the world. You don't know who's going to hear it, who's going to like it. You don't know if it's going to work without people knowing the story. But you had that moment.