The Value of Lyrics, Part 1: Music for Words

I got a request from a friendly reader for my take on songs with non-English lyrics. Gladly! But since I'm me, and this is the blog that it is, I'm going to start by trying to figure out my general theories on lyrical value, then pivot back to explain how non-English lyrics fit in. (Allison, you know me well enough to know you weren't about to get a direct answer.)

As I've started doing research for the blog, I've discovered that while most academic musicologists, (like my pal Leonard Meyer) focus on classical music, there's actually a fair number writing about popular music. One of them, Richard Middleton, has proposed that there are three different uses of lyrics within the context of a whole song:

1. "Story," which emphasizes narrative and tends to be performed in a manner close to the speaking voice;

2. "Affect," which emphasizes the expressive nature of the words and "tends to merge with melody;"

3. "Gesture," which emphasizes "words as sound" and effectively uses the voice as "an instrument."

This framework makes a lot of sense. The sources I've read seem to agree with my biggest initial reservation, which is that "story" is not a common usage compared to the other two. There are certainly examples out there (country story-songs, rap that emphasizes the words rather than the rhythm of the delivery, that Shawn Mullins song from back in the '90s), enough to merit their place in a general model, but they're not common enough in my musical experience to need much more discussion. I'll just post that Shawn Mullins song and leave it at that.

Middleton's other two categories, though, capture a useful distinction. The way I'd put it is that most songs with lyrics can be great in one of two ways: either the music can support strong, memorable lyrics ("affect"), or the sound and tone of the lyrics can support strong, memorable music ("gesture"). In short, a great song can either offer music for great words, or words for great music.

Underlying that statement is an assumption that the music and the lyrics both need to meet some minimal level of quality for a song to be successful. A great musical arrangement still isn't going to work that well as a song if it's accompanied with, say, lyrics as distractingly lazy as Train's. Nor will great lyrics work without an adequate- and appropriate- musical backing; sensitive love-song lyrics are going to lose some of their impact backed with death-metal music, and any example of good lyrics are going to lose some of their weight and enjoyment if I still don't want to listen to the musical backing.

Put another way, great songs have both great music and good lyrics- the distinction is that in many songs, one plays the lead role and one plays support. I have no way to quantify this, but I feel safe in saying that, more often than not, music is in the lead role; melodies run through my head more often than do lyrics that resonate on their own terms. (This probably also has something to do with the fact that talented musicians are invariably going to make music, while talented writers may well go into poetry or short stories or whatever instead of becoming lyricists.)

That said, there are songs where the lyrics carry the primary weight of quality for me. Within the confines of a standard-length pop song, that's typically not a matter of a complete thought- it's usually a matter of using just a few words to communicate something vivid. The lyrics of The Mountain Goats' "Broom People" are a total of 101 words, but line by line, it uses its economy to capture a gut-punch portrait of an abusive household, both visual (the "white carpet thick with pet hair") and experiential (a sighed reference to "well-meaning teachers"), and with clearly personal details like the abuser's old car in the garage. (John Darnielle has been upfront about saying that the whole album addresses his life with an abusive stepfather.) It's a bit like a great establishing shot in a movie, communicating worlds in brief images.

Iron and Wine's "Dead Man's Will" achieves much the same, in its slightly different, eponymous form. It's a very structured approach of finding four expressions of "buried" love, all well-drawn in a few words, and all the more powerful for being driven home as the narrator repeated chorus beg for his "love to reach you all."

Both of these are, even on paper, great writing. But part of what makes them stick as great LYRICS is because the musical accompaniment provides such effective support. It's not just that the music meets our basic expectations for the tone of the song- relatively slow tempos, sweeping high notes- though that obviously helps. Both lyrics stand out so powerfully because there are a range of subtle musical cues that support, reinforce, even expand upon their tones and connotations.

In both cases above, much of that subtle success is in the way the music introduces a note of hopefulness and grace into devastating subject matter. Dead Man's Will is, on first listen, appropriately funereal, with the slow tempo of a funeral march and a choral arrangement that evokes a hymn. Upon further listening, though, that choral arrangement contains even deeper resonance. The musical arrangement drops out on the final chorus at 2:20, an effective decision to make stark the lonely cry of the narrator. But it's followed by a wordless chorus that swells the harmonies we've already heard before, and it's easy to start imagining that the father, mother, brother, lover, are now the ones singing. In purely musical terms, it's a nice way to open up the strong melody for a final spin. But it's also a way to suggest that his love has reached them all.

Broom People seems like a bit of an odder case at first, with dramatic piano chords and a thrumming cello line that seem too energetic, too anthemic for a story of a child writing down "good reasons to freeze to death." Until Darnielle pivots at the end of the verse to talk about the arms of another (a girlfriend, most likely) that turn him into a "babbling brook." On paper, the structural choice to dwell on what's at home is effective for dramatizing the draw of his escape, yet the pivot lands with even more force by resolving the tension between music and lyric.

It remains true that for me the impact of both songs is lyrical, the near-physical impact of invoking an abused child's "friends who don't have a clue" or hearing the posthumous regret of a man too "scared and stupid" to find love. But they're great as songs because the music is pumping the lyrics full of life. It can work the other way, too, and I'll take up that topic in the next post.

The Beatles, Sloan, and the Evolution of Expectation

I started this blog with a quote from Leonard Meyer, calling out for the "some account of the meaning, content, and communication of music" better than the "special jargon" currently available. I've since tried to develop my own account stated in my own terms, based on my own experience. Now seems like a good time to circle back to Meyer, who offers his own interesting answers, and ones that I think fit within the concepts I've developed for myself.

Meyer's stated goal is to identify the sources of musical emotion and meaning, which isn't necessarily the same thing as my attempt to define perceived quality. I think we're on the same wavelength, though. I've described multiple ways in which I define quality based on the sort of points of craft and subtlety that also create emotional responses- minor chords on Justin Vernon's guitar, or the cracks in Freedy Johnston's voice. If we're not talking about the same thing, we're talking about close correlates.

Meyer's basic approach is to extrapolate a theory of musical emotion from a more general psychological theory of emotion, conflict theory. Meyer notes that divergent theoretical lines within the field still jointly accepted the basic premise of the theory, that emotions occur when a stimulus cannot be otherwise resolved physically or mentally. (At least he claimed this was a consensus at the time he wrote in the '60s; if there are any psychologists reading, please call me out if this is horribly outdated). He cites the basic example of smokers getting angry or depressed when they unable to meet satisfy their desire for the next cigarette; an opposite example could be feeling joyful when, say, the taste of food introduces a positive sensation that's not offset by a negative sensation.

In the musical context, Meyer suggests, the baseline- the equivalent to the point before the new stimulus is introduced- is musical "style": the instrumentation, rhythm, harmony and other basic musical characteristics we have learned and accepted as "normal." Those styles create "customary and expected progression[s]" of sounds that, upon being learned, lose some of their impact for the listener. At that point, it becomes the "deviations" from those styles that carry emotional impact by, in effect, serving as a new stimulus. Moreover, a given deviation can become part of a broader affective work because can "the listener will do his best to relate it to the style, to understand its meaning," and put it within the broader context of a whole musical work.

"In short," concludes Meyer, "embodied musical meaning...is a product of expectation," specifically the interplay of the expected and the unexpected. Which seems to fit with both of my criteria for identifying new music I like. My search for something "unique" within a still-familiar style has obvious parallels. And to the extent I've been able to define "good songwriting" or "craftsmanship" to date, it's also been in terms of adding something I perceive as "new" to the familiar- whether it's choices of instrumentation and arrangement that refresh so-called retro musical styles, or finding a way to do arrange something differently within a familiar pop song structure.

I'm therefore comfortable adopting the basic premises of Meyer's theory as a way to flesh out the vocabulary and the conceptual structure of what I'm already trying to do. And I think a good example that fits Meyer's particular emphases is my relationship with the Beatles and their musical followers.

Below is "Can't Buy Me Love," which to my ears, and I'm sure many others, sounds like a pretty clear and pure example of a familiar style. This is true in immediately identifiable ways: guitar-bass-drums instrumentation, verse-chorus-verse structure, guitar solo in the middle. But even though we may not process it as consciously, for me, and I suspect for many of you, the melodic and harmonic contours of the song sound familiar as well. The memorable musical components- the chord change under the chorus (first at about :06) the way the vocals change to a flatter, bluesier version of the melodic line in the second line the verse (i.e. at about 1:00), the structure of the three-part harmonies, and many more- are all, in Meyer's terms, "customary and expected progressions" for the pop-rock music we've been hearing for most of our lives.

The Beatles are legendary in large part because they had such a significant role in establishing those tropes as customary and expected- "Can't Buy Me Love" captures a style that didn't even exist 10 years before this song, but is still a big part of our shared musical experience 50 years later. And even though I was born long after they broke up, I maintain a lot of affection for them because they still played the same role in establishing foundations of my personal musical world; I listened to them a lot as a teenager, when my own musical expectations were still in the process of being formed.

Since the Beatles serve as such a core pillar of my musical taste, I'm still obviously interested in seeking out bands in the same vein. But those bands bear a different burden than the Beatles did in forming my taste. If the bulk of what they do is follow those same customary and expected progressions, the appeal is limited; it's probably just going to sound to me like something the Beatles did better (which may in part actually just mean that the Beatles, for me, did it first). It's the band that's able to consistently and effectively subvert some of those expectations that can continue to succeed.

In the world of specifically "Beatle-esque" music, I'm not the only one who thinks Sloan stands out as a band who's represented some of the best of the form for 20 years running. All the songs below are going to sound immediately familiar to you (and the album covers even look familiar, what with their penchant for the four-slightly-awkward-guys-looking-back-at-you picture.) But with Meyer's theory in mind, it becomes clear for me that Sloan's been able to build their deserved reputation in part on their ability to balance the pleasures of the familiar form with some subtle and clever subversions of the expectations that creates.

"Can't You Figure It Out," for example, shares some of the exact tropes of "Can't Buy Me Love;" listen to how the vocals repeat the melody line at :30 in bluesier fashion at :33, just like in the Beatles' verse. But the chorus sounds both memorable and fresh because they subvert the chord change the Beatles have also led you to expect. Stop the video at :41, right before the chorus hits, and see if you can envision how you think the musical aspect of the chorus is going to sound. If you've listened to enough of this sort of thing as much as I have, you may well be able to envision a harmonic chord that "resolves" the preceding chord progression in the way the Beatles have led you to expect. It's not what Sloan does, though- they move to a sharper, more dissonant chord that makes an impact in part because it manages to sound "correct" without being the answer we're (perhaps subconsciously) being led to expect.

"Coax Me" follows another familiar trope- perhaps less-used by the Beatles than fellow '60s-pop travelers like, say, the Byrds- of basing the song in large part on a winding, picked single-note guitar melody. Songs like that tend to be described as "jangly," in part because they tend to use light arrangements and pretty-sounding harmonies, as in "Mr. Tambourine Man":

In this case, Sloan subverts the expectations for such "jangly" songs by putting the melody in a particularly sad-sounding minor key. The rest of the arrangement is still very much in the Byrds' vein, but the harmonic choice achieves an air of melancholy that adds something "new" to the familiar form.

Sloan is also just as likely to subvert expectations through their song structures as their harmonic choices. Most Beatles songs, certainly from their "early" period up to 1966, follow a pretty tight verse-chorus-verse structure, with little variation. That repetitious structure can be incredibly effective for burrowing songs into the pleasure centers of your brain, especially when the melodies themselves are so strong, but it creates its own set of expectations- when the second verse ends, you know the second chorus is coming. "Another Way I Could Do It" has the sort of melody I'd probably still enjoy having repeated- but instead, Sloan cycles through numerous variations that find new, enjoyable angles on the underlying melody. After establishing the melody in the first minute, they repeat only the second half of the melodic phrase at 1:00; introduce a new guitar melody at 1:12; transition into an ascending bridge at 1:28; and repeat only the first half of the original verse phrase at 2:00 in order to transition to a new variation on the ascending bridge at 2:15; then they have a slow outro starting at 2:47 that inverts the arrangement that comes before by vocally harmonizing what used to be the guitar melody. That's five good spins on a strong melodic idea without a single full repetition, and that winding structure can still pleasurably subvert my structural expectations even after multiple listens.

Even much simpler structural variations can have impact. "Losing California" modulates the key upward on the final chorus, which I've already complained about as an overused trope. But while the standard pop songs does this by simply doing a chorus and then repeating it with the modulation, Sloan structures it in a different and clever way. After two verses and choruses, they plant the seed for the modulation through a short bridge at 1:17, which modulates upwards at 1:30 for just a second before dropping back to the original key. Then they follow through on the modulation at 2:20 by interposing the bridge between the final verse and the chorus- then following through on the modulation. It doesn't make the trope any less common- but I still find it quite enjoyable in this particular context because the song successfully subverts my expectations for when and how it's going to happen.

Now, I didn't even consciously notice most of these choices over a decade of listening to the band. I've just considered them good songwriters, good craftsmen, examples of Beatles-esque music still done well. But Meyer's vocabulary, integrated into my own more self-conscious criteria I've laid out in previous posts, provides a pretty persuasive way for me to better articulate what those general phrases mean.

Poking at Albums with "Pokey Midsections"

I am a major cheapskate who buys a lot of music, and still buys it in album form. (I attribute the album-buying primarily to the presence of good used CD stores near home, but inertia and creeping curmudgeonliness probably have something to do with it, too.) The listening habit I've developed to square that circle is to listen to every album I buy at least 10 to 12 times, usually concentrated over the course of a week or so before I move on to the next album.

The habit is partly a means to ensure I feel that I'm getting my money's worth out of my purchases, but I think it's stuck because it's also paid off musically. A number of my favorite albums- Talk Talk's "Laughing Stock" and "Spirit of Eden," The Flaming Lips' "Embryonic," Panda Bear's "Person Pitch," the Mountain Goats' earliest albums- I found either unremarkable or off-putting on the first listen; it was the concentrated, repeated listening that revealed their qualities.

I by no means consider this the "right" way to listen to music, just the way that's worked for me. But I'm sure it has had a significant effect on the fact those favorite albums are what they are. For one thing, it probably ties in to how I define terms like "craftsmanship" and "good songwriting". I'm probably going to be more impressed by musical decisions that don't fully pay off until the seventh listen than someone whose listening habits are less intensive or systematic, and emphasize them more heavily in my personal definition of those general terms. (There's probably a lot of writing to be done on that topic; I'll save it for future posts.)

I've also found that I tend to disagree with the common album-review complaint that an album has a "slow midsection" or starts strong before declining in quality, and I suspect I can define that difference very specifically in terms of listening habits. I can't speak authoritatively for any given reviewer, but I think it's fair to say that they're listening to music with some different parameters than mine. Most clearly, they're facing deadline pressures to finish reviews by release dates, while I take as much time as I please- and this may place fairly strict limits on the time they listen to the album, depending on how soon in advance they can get review copies. While I'm devoting my leisure time to these albums in as deliberate a fashion as I like, I assume most reviewers are trying to juggle one review among various other work tasks. And while I can ramble on as long as I like on this here blog, many reviewers are probably facing some degree of restraint on their word counts, creating the imperative to highlight their most concise criticisms (or praise).

The result I frequently see is that I agree with reviewer criticisms of weak sections of albums on roughly my third or fourth listen- and disagree after several more of my listens. Pitchfork hung much of its criticism of Elbow's most recent album, "Build a Rocket Boys!," on the criticism of a "pokey midsection" that "abates melodically." As far as I can infer, this has to be the two tracks between "Neat Little Rows," which the review itself highlights as "stomping," and "High Ideals," which has arguably the most complex arrangement on the album. Those two tracks didn't register with me much, either, for a while. But listened to on its own terms, it sounds to me like "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" has just as much melody as anything else on the album- it just took a while to come through in the album context because it's so much quieter than its surroundings. I'll still grant that "The Night Will Always Win" may be one of the weaker songs of the album, but it can't bear the weight of a "pokey midsection" all by itself.

Pitchfork similarly criticizes the songwriting on the Title Tracks' "In Blank" for "petering out a little" after a strong first four songs. (Not intending to pick on Pitchfork here- I see this in reviews from plenty of sources, these are just the examples that are coming to mind.) Which, again, is consistent with my experience on early listens; the first four songs were so immediate and consistent to dominate my experience. But that eventually smoothed out a few listens later- the chorus of "All Tricks" has just as much melodic snap as anything on the album, it just took a few more listens to sink in.

I'll admit I don't have authoritative knowledge of the process by which the reviewers listened to these albums. But this is a pattern I see often enough to make this a reasonable hypothesis: reviewers can tend to have less immersive listening experiences to an album than I will, and that are more likely to diverge in opinions on album pacing as a result. To be clear, I don't find anything wrong with this. Reviewers may be less immersed for reasons outside their control, and there may be plenty of other listeners who listen to music differently than I do anyhow.

I should note that I also believe my system may bring its own biases to the table. I may have a tendency to underrate albums that are oriented towards immediacy and don't gain as much value-added on the tenth listen. This may drive me away from, say, even the best of simple punk-pop, as much as I might enjoy the first-listen experience. I also may have a tendency to dismiss albums that don't vary much in tempo, tone, or melody for the entire duration, even if I might enjoy any given song on the album if it came up in an iPod shuffle. At some point in the future I'll have to revisit some music that could fit either description and put these guesses to the test.

Phoenix, Bon Iver, and Birdy's Law

Birdy is a 16-year old singer and pianist from Britain who won a national talent contest, released a covers album that was a hit in Europe, and has racked up millions upon millions of YouTube views. Needless to say, that's a remarkable accomplishment at that age, and it's clearly backed up with genuine musical chops.

She also appears to have pretty impressive taste in covers. Her biggest hit to date is a cover of Bon Iver's "Skinny Love," and she's also covered Phoenix's "1901," which I'd consider two of the very best pop songs of the past five years.

So it bugs me a little that, as impressive as she is, I can't help but hear these as distinctly inferior covers of great songs. Musically, they're just fine- both are very well-sung (particularly "Skinny Love"), competently played, and effectively set a mood- but to me, the stripped-down arrangements seem to have taken most of the life out of the originals.

At first listen, I found this hard to reconcile with my opinion that both originals are great for melodic reasons. Before I heard Birdy's versions, my highest praise for the originals would have been that their melodies are strong enough to manage the difficult feat of sounding instantly memorable on the first listen and still sounding fresh and engaging on the twentieth. But if that's true, why wouldn't I hear Birdy's simpler presentations as simply reinforcing that strength?

The answer, I think, is that I implicitly define melody as something more than just the notes strung together. What I hear as strong melody is typically those melodies fleshed out with additional qualities of rhythm, harmony, performance, and arrangement, and it's those qualities that lend the original versions much of their power.

Of the two covers, "Skinny Love" clearly sounds more similar to the original; all the basic melodic pieces are there. But Bon Iver's album version simply does more with those pieces than Birdy's. Rather than quarter notes on the piano, Justin Vernon's accompanying himself with a syncopated guitar rhythm that, to these ears adds more momentum and power. Birdy's accompaniment also uses very stable harmonic structures, while Vernon's guitar flavors the melody by occasionally breaking down into dissonance or unexpected minor chords (the 2:20 mark, for example). And Vernon's vocals are adding more as well; the way he hits the word "told" on each line of the chorus lends a power Birdy's smoother vocal performance lacks.

By contrast, the "1901" cover doesn't even sound all that much like the original song, because a lot of what Phoenix does to lend melodic power- on this song and others- comes in their substantial ability to arrange multiple, interlocking melodies, rhythms, and tones. The strongest, example, for me, comes at the 0:40 mark (and each verse thereafter). The vocals, overlaid on the high, fast guitar melody, overlaid on the stable five-note synthetic bass riff that anchors the entire song, accompanied by a drum pattern that hits entirely different beats than any of the three melodies, creates what I find to be a tremendously effective, four-part dynamic. Any one of those four lines would probably sound fine on their own, and two or three of them together would sound very good, but it's the ability to integrate all four so organically that allows Phoenix to create a whole so much greater than the sum of its parts.

In short, Birdy loses power, to my ears, because she's using such a limited range of her musical options compared to the originals. To repeat, her stripped-down versions still create an effective mood on its own, and there are clearly plenty of listeners who find that perfectly effective. But to me, this makes clear that an essential aspect of my personal taste is the use of a large musical toolbox. There's any number of different ways of doing so, from Justin Vernon doing a lot with a simple arrangement to Phoenix's maximalist approach, but perhaps one way I define "craft" is the effective use of numerous different musical nuances.

Let's call it "Birdy's Law." I'll admit, it's partly just that I'd enjoy someone arguing that Birdy's law is not governed by reason, but I think it works anyway. I'll put the law to the test again in future posts.

Avoiding the Saturation Principle: My Logic(?) in Judging New Music

I'm pretty comfortable citing the Saturation Principle to explain many of the cases where I'm not interested in a certain piece of music. I'll work in future posts to further apply the principle and some nuances in the concept, but I'm sure it's there. It underlies the conscious mental process I go through when I listen a piece of music for the first time- I'm looking for something that doesn't sound familiar that has some characteristic that makes it feel like a new musical experience. If something doesn't pass the test, it's the flip side of that- it doesn't seem to expand upon the (large amount of) music I've heard before.

I have a harder time explaining for myself what helps a song or album to pass the test. I do know that I tend to have one of the following two thoughts:

1. This sounds unique. I touched on this in the original post- after 10-15 years of familiarity with a certain type of music, a twist can go a long way. I know a lot of people find the vocals on Hold Steady songs off-putting, and I can see why, especially in earlier songs like the below. But for someone who had heard plenty of music that already fit the description of raise-the-goblet-of-rock arena anthems, overlaying it with Craig Finn's half-crazed ranting made some of the more familiar characteristics sound fresh again.

This isn't to say that any twist will do. In this particular case, the unhinged quality Finn achieves by largely avoiding rhythmic and melodic integration into the song might well be too much to take if it wasn't balanced by the fact his lyrics are consistently thoughtful, vivid, even literate. (I particularly like the the image of trashy John the Baptist-type with crosses made of pipes and planks leaned up against the nitrous tanks he's taking hits from.) More broadly,  what I'm interested in listening to has always remained within the standard sorts of rock/pop/folk/blues musical forms.

In short, I know that "unique" for me is a matter of balancing the new with the familiar. What I find harder to explain why the balance works for me in a case like the Hold Steady, and doesn't for, say, Antony, who has a similarly unique voice and works within another musical form I frequently like.

2. This is [insert name of genre] done really well. Plenty of bands I like would sound perfectly normal and familiar to more casual listeners than I. I'm guessing most of you would be quick to peg the Ron Sexsmith song below as soft rock, adult contemporary, or whatever other genre term you use to the describe the types of radio stations that air Delilah and John Tesh. I just consider it a superior example of the genre.

When I try to explain why, though, I tend to lean back on terms like craftsmanship or say it's simply good songwriting- exactly the sort of language that I'm trying to expand upon here. Something "unique" tends to at least be identifiable, even if I want to better explain why some such qualities work better for me than others. But there's something more holistic to explaining an idea like craftsmanship, so it's more difficult to define what exactly that is.

For purposes of this blog, then, both parts of this logic are only starting points for discussion, ones that raise as many questions as answers. In writing about music I like here, the focus will be on how I define terms like "unique," "well-done," and "well-written" in each particular case.

The Saturation Principle

I've got plenty of friends who enjoy them, but I just can't muster any interest in the Lumineers. Just my latest example of the hipster's lament: dismissing some popular band, even one that works within a broad genre (acoustic singer-songwriters) I listen to a lot.



It's fair for you to question whether I'm dismissing them for their popularity. Hell, I probably have dug a hole with those of you who have known me for a while by being pretty douche-y about those kind of arguments in college. (My wife is nodding right now.)

A lot of those college-age musical arguments were mostly just less-than-graceful efforts at self-definition. (My fellow socially awkward, indie-listening friends are nodding right now.) But older, fairer, more secure me still thinks the same way, and I think it boils down to two differences I still have with the sort of "average" listener that may like a popular band I dismiss.

1. I've listened to a LOT of music. I own around 850 albums, and that number grows almost weekly. For about the last 12 years, I've been listening to music an average of 6-8 hours a day, and that usually includes at least 15-20 minutes spent reading music-related sites and articles. 

2. I listen to music for its own sake. Less obvious, perhaps, but just as important. I don't primarily treat my albums as background music. More often than not, when I'm listening, I'm trying to actively engage with my music- listening to albums numerous times to catch their nuances, thinking about how it compares to that band's body of work or to other bands in the genre, listening to spot songs or moments that I think are great, maybe even starting a blog so I can pontificate about what I'm listening to.

In combination, those two facts make me vulnerable to what I'll call the saturation principle: the more music I listen to and actively engage with, the more likely I'll find it difficult to engage with a new piece of music, because to me it will sound similar to music I've heard before.

The effect of this principle is more or less a generalized version of the experience of listening to an overplayed song. You probably feel exhausted when you hear "Rolling in the Deep" or "Somebody that I Used to Know" or some other song you've heard literally hundreds of times in the past few months- the song becomes dull as you feel like you can predict the next notes, as the exciting or emotional moments lose their sense of surprise, as you can remember the lyrics in your sleep. Well, a similar thing happens for me with the Lumineers on much earlier listens, because even if I haven't heard the song, I feel like I've heard the instrumentation, the chord changes, the general melodic outline in a number of other songs I've already listened to. (In this case, Jay Farrar's work in Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt is one clear reference point.)

Which doesn't mean there's anything wrong with liking the Lumineers, at all- other people haven't listened to the same other music in the same way, and I might very well have liked their songs better 10 years ago, when I hadn't listened to the similar music that's now saturated my musical experience. It just means that at this point in my life, I'm looking for things that sound different, or that at least do a familiar thing in a unique way- and under my definition of "familiar," the Lumineers don't work for me.

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that the saturation principle is relevant for a lot of my fellow, so-called hipsters. (At least the ones who get the title due to actual interest in music as opposed to just being irony-obsessed and annoying to New York Times writers.) The flip side of feeling "saturated" about a band like the Lumineers is finding an eccentric, hipster-loved band like Animal Collective or Sunset Rubdown or the Flaming Lips more appealing, in large part because they do sound different. What twenty year-old hipster me didn't appreciate is that it doesn't necessarily mean that music is incontrovertibly "better," or that others were missing out by not liking it- it just means that their musical experience was different (and probably less intensive) than mine.