It goes like this: The fourth, the fifth....

The thing that is special about music is its ability to affect you in a totally visceral way. I mean you can be afftected by a poem or piece of theater or a work of art, but in some way that is all about taking in the information and processing it. Your brain works out how you feel about the words being spoken or written or the image you are looking at. But with music--lyrics aside--sometimes the chords or the harmonies affect you physically, without brain analysis. Like when your chest hurts during a key change in a song or when a certain guitar chord gives you goose bumps. Oftentimes this is coupled with lyrics that you find particularly meaningful but--unlike in other artforms--the thing that is affecting you isn't necessarily tied to language or something that is easily analized by the brain.

I call this phenomenon--of being moved by something unexplained and beautiful in music-- "the minor fall, the major lift," after that line in Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" when he says:
"Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah."

Despite my atheism, I like the idea that there is this secret chord change that is so moving that it's God's chord. Plus I fucking love this song. I know that most people know the Jeff Buckley version and I do think that he sings it best (there is something about his voice that just sounds doomed and like a sonic representation of pain and beauty) but I could do without the minor 7th guitar noodling in the intro. Leonard's version--pluses include that it's the original and the haunting quality of his basso profundo--has a kind of cheesy overproduced Seventies Elvis gospel feel to it. I recently heard a KD Lang version that is just her and piano that is lovely. But the most affecting version for me is the John Cale version on the Basquiat soundtrack. His gravely voice sounds really lived in and is nicely dissonant with the spare guitar arrangement. Every time I hear this version, I cry. (I guess its a good thing then that my version of the soundtrack was stolen in the robbery of 2000!) It sounds like the song is literally dying to come out of him--each guitar chord is mourning and each croak of his voice is riddled with exquisite sadness. The song itself, lyrically, isn't particularly sad. I mean it is fraught with disillusionment and loss of faith but its references to sadness are veiled in poetry and expressed explicitly through the "the minor fall, the major lift" of the music.

Anyway, its namesake song is a perfect example of tmf,tml but I get that feeling all the time. Tearing up the first time I hear some song for no other reason than the chords are like being played inside my chest. Sometimes I even get it during songs that I didn't realize moved me...until one day, they do. Case in point: Change Your Mind by the Killers. Clearly, I know this album backwards and forwards and this song was never one of my favorites. But one day last week it came on my ipod (I swear, I rediscover more interesting music via the shuffle feature!) while I was working and I got shivers. There are very close vocal harmonies that sound itchy to me because the notes are so close. And they are laid over this very slithery synth line that is one of the most Duran Duran-esque moments on the album. And the part that really gets me now is after a swelling bridge and chorus, the music dampens and is mostly bass and drums and Brandon sings, in a very croon-y voice (which is unusual for him--he mostly barks in a faux-Brit monotone) "We're all the same and love is blind." And something about the way he sings it, coupled with the close vocal harmony in the overdub and the note that the word "blind" is sung on (it goes up, instead of down which was the pattern set by the other verses). It just puts a lump in my throat.