Listening to Music--Old songs, new songs

“Make new friends, but keep the old;

One is silver and the other gold.”

I had put on an old playlist yesterday as I unloaded the dishwasher, and was really enjoying the songs. Many of them had been my favorites long ago, such as “Fame”, “The Sound of Silence”, and “Johnny B. Goode.” That started me thinking about balancing time spent listening to familiar music versus time spent listening to music I haven’t heard before.

This is really a dilemma that applies more broadly, such as to movies and books, but maybe it is more vivid in the case of music because so much of listening to music is re-listening. We don’t even bother to call it “re-listening”, though we often say we are “re-reading” a favorite book, or (less often) that we are “re-watching” a movie we’ve seen.

When we start life, it’s all new. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “The Itsy-bitsy Spider”, “The Wheels on the Bus”—it’s all wonderful new stuff to learn and sing over and over (and over and over and over…). For quite a while, we get flooded with new music to enjoy, even as we love to repeat our (still few in number) favorites.

Somewhere along the line, the situation changes. We already know a lot of songs, have long lists of things we like to hear, and spend less and less time listening to new ones. Obviously some people, especially people who are very into music, still spend a lot of time listening to new stuff, but people like me hear remarkably little of it. (The situation is exacerbated in my case by the fact that I rarely turn on the radio.)

One source of new songs is other people, but here technology has interrupted the proper passing on of musical knowledge. So many people listen to music on headphones—I’m referring of course to teen-age daughters—that although parental ears are spared a constant barrage of Someone Else’s Music and especially What Are They Listening To Now?, it also means fewer opportunities to make new discoveries.

I think my mom quite liked some of those Billy Joel songs.

The song on the playlist that brought this particular fact to mind (remember, I said I was listening to an old playlist) was “Mean”, sung by Taylor Swift. It was on my playlist because at the time my daughter was listening to Taylor Swift, she didn’t have a cellphone (smart or otherwise) and all the music ended up on my hard drive. For some reason, I really liked “Mean.” I doubt I would have heard it if not for her.

But as fun as “Mean” is, I owe a much greater musical debt to my daughter.

Hamilton.

She was walking around the house for weeks—or was it months?—earbuds plugged in, humming happily, before I said, “Maybe you could play it for me while I’m sewing.”

The first listen-through was confusing and I hardly understood any of the words, but the second half sounded promising. Some music needs more than one hearing to be appreciated, and the second listen-through was the charm, in this case. I’ve been playing it in the car for months now, I think.

So how should I balance re-listening versus trying new music? At this point, I’ve heard enough music in my life (including all the stuff that was playing when I was in high school and college, whether I remember it vividly or not), that I could probably get thro

ugh the entire rest of my life just listening to things I already enjoy. Why make an effort to hear anything new?

I say again, Hamilton. (Really, I cannot recommend it enough.) I could easily have missed Hamilton entirely, because most of my accidentally-discovered new music comes from movies (“Try Everything” in Zootopia) or TV (“Tiny Winey” in Death in Paradise) and occasionally my husband (when he discovers someone new, which isn’t all that often—Paul Thorn, e.g.)

And without Hamilton, my life would be that much poorer.

So what’s the take-home point of all this? Nothing surprising. Just that it’s worth trying something new, sometimes, even when you’re happy with the tried-and-true. In the case of music, the song about friends I quoted doesn’t really even apply. The mere fact that you’ve been enjoying a song for decades doesn’t confer gold status on it, and not all new songs are mere silver by comparison.