Sting: How I Started Writing Songs Again
SONGS
89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love
The Summer of Love was not just a season of great music and the zenith of the flower child, but the culmination of a movement that started back on a chillier Bay Area day, on January 14, 1967.
Today, we have a playlist of 89 songs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that historic summer.
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Why Catchy Songs Get Stuck In Our Brains
You can read the study yourself here. It begins with a summary of the previous research on “the concepts of musical ‘catchiness’ and song ‘hooks,’” as well as the advice successful musicians often give for writing “hooks” that will stick with listeners for life. It’s not as easy as it looks, though one of the hallmarks of a successful earworm is simplicity. As Joanna Klein writes at the New York Times, Jakubowski and her colleagues “found that earworm songs tended to be fast, with a common, simple melodic structure that generally went up and down and repeated, like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’”
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Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?
In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”).
Check the analysis of the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017 here.
12 Playlist Ideas That Can Breathe New Life Into Your Back-Catalogue
Playlists can group songs based on:
1. Genre or sub-genre
2. The “scene”
3. Your influences
4. Place of origin
5. Time
6. A through-line
7. Instrumentation
8. Theme
9. Lyrical focus
10. Set lists
11. Catalog
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