# I Listened To One Song On Repeat For A Month

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** 12tone
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycsSbB_j6EQ
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/43925

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

*sigh* I don't know why I keep doing this to myself. let's start with some background: I've been a musician for over 20 years now, and a music theorist for around 10, and in that time, one thing I've become increasingly convinced of is that art and music are fundamentally about intention. art is the practice of making interesting choices. and there's a lot of videos out there trying to teach you how to be more intentional with the music you create, but not that many about how to be intentional with the music you listen to. and that's a shame, because active listening is not only one of the best ways to become a better musician, but also to become a more engaged fan, hearing things more deeply and connecting with them in powerful new ways. one of my favorite ways to get better at is with listening games. you decide what kind of listening you want to do, make up a set of rules and restrictions that force you to do it, then follow those rules to see what happens. but just saying that is boring: I wanted to put my money where my mouth is, so I did. I listened to the same song over and over every day for a month, and things got weird. here's what I learned. (tick, tick, tick, tock) so, first of all, why this particular challenge? well, mostly because it's just not how I usually engage with music. I tend to listen to full albums. I have a slowly evolving rotation of favorites that I supplement with new finds when I'm feeling adventurous. basically, I bounce around a lot, and while I do occasionally get obsessed with an album, I rarely have the time to really thoroughly explore it. I just get bored too quickly. but I also believe that art is defined by experience: what a song means comes not from its intrinsic characteristics, but from the conversation you have with it while you listen. and if that's true, then I should be able to have many different experiences, and find many different meanings, depending on what sorts of conversations I choose to have. to leave space for those experiments, the rules themselves were pretty simple: listen to the song three times a day for 30 days. that's it. I tried to spread those listens out, usually once each in the morning, afternoon, and evening, but I wasn't too strict about that. as long as I got three, I was happy. but I also knew I had to be careful: the whole point was to practice active listening, and familiarity can be an engagement killer. as I got to know the song, it'd be easy to slip into comfort listening, where I put it on to relax and shut off my brain. but I wanted my brain focused, so I turned to probably the most important tool in any listening game: journaling. before each listen, I wrote a sentence or two about what I was listening for, and then after, a paragraph about what I heard. this served two purposes. first, I knew I was gonna be making this video, and having a record of my thoughts was helpful in writing this script. but more importantly, and this is the part that'll apply to you too, knowing you're gonna write things down changes how you listen. by defining a goal in advance, I pushed myself to keep coming up with creative new ways to approach the song, and by journaling the experience, I held myself accountable to actually approach it in those ways. if I knew I'd have to say something, then I'd have to have something to say. if you want to see that full journal, with all my thoughts across all 90 listens, I'll be posting it on Patreon for everyone at the $3 tier or above. link in the description if that's interesting to you. anyway, with the rules all set, the only thing left was to pick a song. I briefly considered some sort of sprawling prog epic, something with a lot of different sections so I could just focus on each one in turn, but that felt against the spirit of the challenge. I wanted to see how many experiences I could have with a fairly standard pop song. I also wanted it to be something I'd never heard before, so I could go through the whole process of learning it from scratch. and with that in mind, I had the perfect song. y'see, last year I did another listening game where I checked out the 3rd album by a hundred different artists. it was a really great experience, I learned a lot about my relationship with music, and I have a whole episode of my podcast, Ghost Notes, dedicated to that process if you want to know more. but it did have a drawback. not every artist has three albums, and if they didn't, I couldn't listen to them. and, as luck would have it, right after I started, the world of pop music was rocked by the meteoric rise of Chappell Roan. who had just released her first album. so, yeah. I completely missed that cultural moment. all my friends were talking about her, I was getting requests to make a video about her, and I wanted to check her out, but I was doing this other thing, and then I forgot, and long story short I'd actually never listened to a Chappell Roan song. this seemed like a perfect chance to fix that, so I quickly settled on 30 days of Hot To Go. here's how that went. day 1. I woke up, sat down at my computer, pulled up the song, and was immediately greeted by this count-in: (bang) which quickly became a very familiar sound. the goal for today was pretty simple: vibe check. what's the song like? what's it about, how does it sound, and most importantly, do I like it? and fortunately, I did. the synth bass: (bang) has this really catchy pattern that's simple but infectious, the lyrics are punchy and clever, and while I'd been expecting a really polished, pristine sound, it actually comes across kind of underproduced, which as a garage rock fan, really works for me. there was one problem, which I'll talk about in a minute, but for the most part I really enjoyed it, and I was looking forward to spending a whole month with

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

it. for a song I picked without ever hearing, I could've done a whole lot worse. so far, so good. day 2 was mostly about learning the overall shape of the song. first, I sketched out a quick form diagram, then I spent the other two listens memorizing the lyrics, but back to that problem I mentioned: I just wasn't really feeling the chorus. the rest of the song was great, but the big climax wasn't landing for me, and with another 84 listens to go, I needed to find a way to love it or else I knew I'd wind up hating it. so day 3 was dedicated to chorus studies. first, I wanted to identify the problem as specifically as I could, and what I came up with was that there just didn't really seem to be a lot going on in the arrangement. like, there's a lot of instruments, but most of the textures are the same, with legato phrasings and washed-out attacks. (bang) the bass part is still there, but it's getting drowned, so the only real punch comes from the snare. I couldn't do much to change that, but I could change how I perceived it. so far, I'd been sitting down with headphones, but that's not fair. this is dance music, so if I really wanted to get it, I needed to move. music theorists call this embodied cognition: on a hunch, I tried grooving in half-time to most of the sections, then going full speed for the choruses, physically training myself to feel the metric excitement of a double-time flip. and it worked really well: as long as I kept moving, even if I was just rocking back and forth in time, the chorus became a lot more fun. so, crisis averted. day 4 was mostly just reinforcing that, and then day 5 was drum day. when I was planning this experiment, one approach I knew I wanted to include was orchestral listening: that is, listening to the full track but mentally isolating a particular part. this is, I think, one of the most important skills for an engaged listener, and it's a great way to practice hearing music more deeply. in a song like this, everything is built on the drums, so I dedicated my three listens to making as many observations as possible about them, looking respectively at the timbre, the rhythms, and the fills. on timbre, I was particularly impressed with the snare: my notes describe it as sounding "fluffy", and listening back: (bang) yeah, I stand by that. I think it's actually gated reverb, but "fluffy" feels right. for rhythms, my notes mostly focused on the changes they make to the kick pattern and hi-hats. when I was listening for fills I noticed enough variation to doubt that they were fully sequenced as I'd previously assumed, and looking it up there is a drummer credited on this track. not a bad day of drum thoughts. day 6 was more orchestral listening, looking at things like the melody, the bass, and then trying to identify as many different layers as I could in the chorus. but while I probably could've burned through a lot more listens with these sorts of exercises, I didn't want to. I wanted to have not just different experiences but different kinds of experiences: spending 30 days listening to one instrument at a time isn't my idea of a good time. so on day 7, I switched gears and decided to do a creative exercise. if I'd been in the studio with them as, like, a songwriting coach, what would I have suggested changing? it's easy to say an idea doesn't work, but I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and see if I could do better. I focused my attention on the chorus, and again, the obvious issue is that I wanted something with a sharp attack, something punchy and rhythmic. ideally, the best way to do that is probably adjusting the guitar tone, but if I was gonna test my advice, I needed something I could do at home. that meant I was stuck with things I could add. after some experimentation, I settled on this percussive synth part: (bang) which, like… it's ok. I don't love it, but given the restrictions I was dealing with and the fact that I only spent like 5 minutes on it, I do still think it's an improvement. not ready for the final mix, but that's not the point. the point was a quick composition exercise, and by those standards I'm calling it a success. day 8 was an exciting one, 'cause I got to try one of my favorite ideas: I'd been trying to spread my 3 listens out across the day, but what if I didn't? what if I just did them all back to back? and it turned out… interesting. the second listen was great. the hype from the first one carried through, and I was familiar enough with the song by now that, having just had a refresher, my brain instinctively knew where to listen at each moment. I was switching my attention to the drums when there was a fill, the synths for some cool background lines, the vocals to catch my favorite lyrics… it was awesome. just pure, effortless musical enjoyment. but for the third listen, I think I flew too close to the sun. at that point I was so ready that I was actually thinking ahead, trying to plan out future moments and forgetting to enjoy the current one. and this wound up being a bit of a recurring theme: I'd try something, love it, and try it again, and that invariably failed. it always felt forced, like I was trying to make myself have fun instead of just doing something fun. my most successful approaches were all spur-of-the-moment ideas, and as the experiment progressed I leaned harder on one-time trials. but more on that in a bit. day 9 was back to orchestral listening, this time focusing in on vocal phrasing, and on day 10 I finally decided to check out the music video. I'd gotten really familiar with the song on its own

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

and I was curious to see it as part of a larger work of art. what sorts of visuals did they pair with it? what story did they use it to tell? and I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. if you're not familiar, the music video has Chappell Roan going back to her home town in Illinois and performing the song in various locations with various people. it's a great idea, but, and I want to be careful here, because I don't like saying bad things about other people's art… but I'm really picky about music videos, and this one didn't work for me. that's not a very helpful analysis, though, so the next step was figuring out why, and after a couple viewings, the explanation I settled on was that the small-town backdrop is typically used to celebrate the innocence of simple living or as a contrast against the performer's over-the-top theatrics. either one works, but they say very different and largely incompatible things about their subjects, and I think the Hot To Go video is trying to do both. there's some great moments of camp, like the bit where she's in a pink dress and heels yelling at what appears to be a monster truck rally, and some genuinely heartwarming scenes, like her teaching the dance choreography to her grandparents. but a lot of the shots fall somewhere in between, and overall I didn't feel like it had a very coherent perspective. I didn't get what it was trying to say. that said, I'm not the target audience, so maybe I'm just rationalizing away not liking art that isn't for me. if you like this music video, great, please tell me why so I can like it too. day 11, I had a headache, so I just spent it singing along. I'd already done that on day 2, but now I knew it a lot better, and I wanted to see how that familiarity would change the experience. unsurprisingly, I felt a lot more connected, which goes back to a thing my vocal teachers used to always tell me: if you want to capture the attitude of a song, then the rest of it needs to be effortless. I didn't have to work to remember the words or the melody, so I could just relax and have fun with it. I could even add my own inflections, changing little details here and there to fit my voice and my style. really fun day. by day 12, though, I was hitting that point in any good listening game where you look at how far you've come, then look at how much you have left, and realize you made a mistake. I was still enjoying the song, but I was running out of ideas for new ways to approach it. planning this, I assumed each day would have a theme, and I'd just listen 3 times on that theme. but in practice, that often felt redundant, so I just did each thing once and moved on. that meant I was burning through ideas way faster than I anticipated, and the well was running dry. the next couple days were mostly spent grasping at straws, picking any random thought and seeing where it led me. some highlights included trying an alternate chorus fix where I added some syncopation to spice up the melody: (bang) which I'm absolutely convinced makes it better, and a creative writing exercise where I wrote my own treatment for a music video that felt more in line with how I heard the song. I wound up combining the cheerleader vibes with some small-town diner imagery, going section by section through an evolving scene where the increasingly large cast of characters were all played by Roan in different outfits. would probably have been prohibitively expensive to make, but my imagination has no budget, so it was still fun to play around with. that whole treatment is in the journal on Patreon if you're curious. this period also included a deep dive on all the various synth parts that marks the beginning of my love affair with this counterline in the bridge: (bang) but more on that later. eventually I did stumble onto another full theme: analysis day. I am a music theorist, after all. if I was making a video about this song, what would I say? so on day 14, I picked out three things that felt noteworthy to me: the bassline, the song form, and of course the melody. I listened closely to each of them, then took a swing at a formal analysis. I'll spare you the details, although, again, Patreon if you want 'em, but as a taste, for the bass part, I quickly noticed how the line moving from I to IV: (bang) meant it was in the exact two places in the major scale that allowed for this sort of half-step motion. that choice strongly emphasizes a sort of overwhelming majorness, contrasting some of the more despondent lyrics and putting musical shape to the overt, unapologetic confidence at the heart of the song. she knows she's hot, that's the whole point. the analysis itself was fun to work on, but it also forced me to engage certain listening muscles that, so far, I'd mostly been intentionally relaxing, and helped me find new ways to appreciate the song's message. which brings me to day 15. the halfway point. I decided to use this as a simple check-in: I'd been doing all these weird, focused listens, but the thing about a song is that it's a song. it's not just a collection of components, so now that I'd spent all this time taking it apart, I wanted to see how it looked when I put it back together. did my initial assessments hold up? did I even still like it? and… yeah. I did. it's a great song. I was feeling kinda under the weather that day, but that count-in always managed to perk me back up, and no matter how tired I was going in, by the end I was always smiling. the more holistic view also made me appreciate some specific choices, like this transition out of the first chorus: (bang) where you can really hear the

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

whole arrangement snapping shut. I think these listens were really important: when I zoomed in, I was often looking at the aspects that worked least well for me. it was helpful, after a couple pretty intense weeks, to remind myself that the song, as a whole, is really good. from there, though, it was back to throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck. I tried headbanging, which didn't work, and I tried sitting perfectly still and meditating, which… kinda did? wasn't great, but it produced an interesting sort of metanarrative experience: I found myself reflecting on the practice of listening to the song more than I was actually listening to the song. I also tried turning the volume really low to see how that affected my focus: I thought I'd struggle to pay attention, but by then I knew it well enough to fill in the gaps. what did happen was it changed the mix: for complex science reasons, lowering the volume affects different frequencies differently, so making it quiet is like cutting the bass. that brought out a lot of the higher background synths, especially, again, that line in the bridge. (bang) it's so good. day 18 was spent ad-libbing harmony lines, none of which I was all that happy with, but on day 19, I realized yet another problem. my good friend Noah Polyphonic was probably gonna watch this video, and he'd be disappointed in me if I didn't at least try to engage with the cultural context. to that end, I decided to listen to the song while reading about it, first the wikipedia page, then, when that turned out to be shorter than I expected, some interviews. if you try this, I recommend turning the volume up pretty high so you can't just tune the music out, but once I did that, this was actually really cool. I got to read her talk about the pressure she put on herself to be a more serious, sophisticated artist, and the joy she found by letting go of those preconceptions in order to make the fun, sparkly pop she wanted to make, all while listening to her do exactly that. it gave the song a more profound, liberating edge that wasn't there until I heard her story, so as much as I hate to admit it… Noah has a point. sometimes. don't tell him I said that. for day 20, I decided to continue on that theme and put the song in my own personal context, using it to guide a series of visualizations. the whole thing has a sort of throwback vibe, so I paired it with nostalgic memories of high school, summer camp, and some more recent nostalgia for my early days attending VidCon. I figured theses would all feel kinda the same, but I could not have been more wrong: Hot To Go is exactly the sort of pop song that my high school friend group would pretend to like ironically as a cover for the fact that we all secretly liked it unironically, so it immediately dragged up memories of some old friends that I used to be really close with but haven't seen or thought about in a long time. hi Ben, if you're watching this. my memories of summer camp, on the other hand, are tied less to people and more to places: it's the sort of idyllic, passive environment that doesn't really connect to such an active, upbeat song. I did eventually make it work by directing my attention toward the games and activities we played, but it was a nice demonstration that the things this song made me feel were more specific and deep than just generic nostalgia. and no, it's not lost on me that I chose three visualizations that all involved ignoring what the song was about, so to balance that, day 21 was spent reflecting on relationships, past and present. but discussing that here would mean talking about specific people, some of whom are no longer in my life, so to respect their privacy I'll leave it at that. day 22 was, honestly, a banger. probably the best idea of the whole project, and one I'd highly recommend you try for yourself. I hadn't planned this, but on a whim, I decided to do a little playlist experiment: listen to a different song, then Hot To Go, and see what that transition revealed. for my three listens, I wanted a song that was stylistically similar, one that was radically different but had the same densely packed production style, and then one that was a little more sparse. I settled on Britney Spears's Circus, Slipknot's The Dying Song, and Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon. the Circus one was… underwhelming. they're so close that it invites direct comparison, and it's really not fair to Chappell Roan to put her up against one of the greatest pop songs of my lifetime. seriously, how do you compete with this? (bang) The Dying Song was more interesting: I realized afterwards that if I was gonna pull from that album, Yen might've been a better choice for its thematic resonance, but still, the transition was absurd enough that I actually burst out laughing, and that put me in a great mood that carried through the song. listening to Slipknot also primed me to think about drums: I found myself air drumming vigorously throughout Hot To Go, although admittedly what I was pretending to play sounded less like the song's actual groove and more like Slipknot. (bang) still fun. and Ladies of the Canyon was hands-down my favorite of the three. it's such a gentle, beautiful song: (bang) and it put me in a really comfortable headspace that brought out all the warmth of Hot To Go. and that's kinda the thing with playlists: they're all about contrast. the

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

more different each track is from the ones around it, the more they're able to tell a complex story that transcends the individual pieces. Ladies of the Canyon and Hot To Go reveal things about each other, precisely because they have so little, but not nothing, in common. from there it was back to flailing around for new ways to listen. I spent a whole day playing it at half speed, which revealed some interesting nuances of timing, then I tried playing it at double speed, which revealed that sounded awful. day 25 started as me designing a metal cover, but it quickly became clear that the song didn't really want that sort of treatment, so I switched to theorizing a punk cover instead. I wrote a riff, sketched out some performance notes, and yeah, I think that could work if someone wants to try it. day 26 had me re-examining the section transitions: a lot of them use a fairly similar vocabulary, with clearly delineated 8-bar sections that each end with a drum fill, so I mapped out what I might do to change things up and make the flow a little more dynamic. but that was revealing another problem: as I approached the end, I was getting pretty sick of the song. my write-ups were increasingly negative, which isn't surprising, but I didn't want to end this with a bad taste in my mouth, so day 27 was all about positivity. for my first listen, I made a list of five things I really like about the song. I went with the catchy groove of the bassline, the gorgeous tone of the snare, the way she subtly changes her vocal delivery to sound desperate in the verses and confident in the chorus, the way the first prechorus says ("I made it so you'd dance with me") and then the second completely flips the meaning by changing one word: ("I made it so you'd sleep with me") and then, of course, the synth line in the bridge. (bang) it's still so good. why isn't the whole song just this? anyway, with these in hand, I set out to craft my perfect listen, bouncing my attention between lines in order to catch all the best bits. it was a great reminder of why I liked the song in the first place, and exactly the shot of energy I needed to carry through to the end. the last few days were mostly more one-off experiments. I did another creative writing exercise, trying to craft a scene around it for an imaginary jukebox musical. I did another embodied cognition test, listening to the song while forcing myself to smile really wide, which sounds silly but was actually really effective. and I mixed up my listening environment, going out into my backyard in the middle of the night, in the dark and cold of a Los Angeles winter, to listen to Chappell Roan. that one was actually amazing. sitting in the dirt, feeling the brisk night air on my skin… it felt like I was hearing the song again for the very first time. and then it was day 30. the final day. I chose to dedicate these listens to reflection, thinking back on the whole process. what did I learn? do I still like this song? would I do it again? and y'know what? I think I would. maybe not immediately, and maybe not the exact same way, but this was a really enlightening experience, not just about this song, but about myself. and about music. it almost feels like a shame to go back to listening normally without some sort of restriction. and that's the sign of a great listening game: I'm glad it's over, but I wish it wasn't. I'm done with Hot To Go for now, and I'm probably not gonna touch it again for a while. but maybe, in 6 months or so, I'll pull it up again, and I'm excited to see how that makes me feel. this is probably one of my most ambitious videos: beyond just the time I spent listening to the song, there was also a lot of prep work, a lot of reflection, and so much journaling. all of that had to take place while I was already doing my full-time job of making other videos, and the only reason I was able to do that was thanks to my amazing patrons on Patreon. as many of you know, I don't like doing sponsorships. I'm not a sales person, I have no interest in trying to get you to buy someone else's products, and that pressure, combined with the publishing deadlines that come with a sponsorship, makes it hard to focus on making great videos. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do something like this with a sponsor breathing down my neck. I don't even think a sponsor would like this video: it's not really the sort of thing that tends to perform well on my channel, but I'm ok with that because I'm super proud of it, and I hope, if you've made it this far, you understand why. and that's where Patreon comes in. the support and stability coming from my patrons on Patreon is what makes it so I can dedicate a whole month to a video that might get like 15 views, because I think it's still worth making. I want to make more listening game videos in the future, so if you like what I do, and especially if you like this sort of thing, please consider joining those patrons to help me keep making them. patrons also get a fully ad-free version of each video, including an extended outro where I talk more candidly about the topic. and this time, they're also getting the full journal I wrote up with my thoughts and feelings about all 90 listens, so if you want to see me think even harder about Hot To Go, Patreon is the best place to do it. that said, I know these are hard times for a lot of people, and if you can't afford to support me, please don't: Patreon is completely voluntary and 12tone will always be free. I don't want anyone feeling like they owe me money for the stuff I make, but if you happen to have some extra money and you want to throw it my way, that helps me keep making free stuff for everyone else. there is, again, a link in the description if you want to check that out. and as always, thanks for watching. thanks to our featured patrons, Susan Jones

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 25:00) [25:00]

Jill Sundgaard, Howard Levine, Warren Huart, Damien Fuller-Sutherland, Neil Moore, Geoff, and Michael Mol! check out Patreon for a fuller outro, and as always, keep on rockin'!