NEW MUSIC BOOKS

I read two very different books recently, one a humorous rock trivia guide, the other a study of the neuroscience of music listening. I highly recommend both!

First, let's talk about Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton's Little John: Music's Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed by Gavin Edwards. Gotta love that title. It refers to the urban legend that Elton's song "Tiny Dancer" is really about his penis. (Alas, it is not -- lyricist Bernie Taupin was inspired by the freewheeling women he encountered when he first moved to Cali in 1970.) Edwards is also the author of another very funny music book, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, about commonly misheard song lyrics. While some of the rock myths covered in the new book are a bit too familiar, like the whole “Paul is Dead” saga, there was plenty here to keep me entertained. I devoured the entire thing in about two hours. Some items of note…

* John Mayer literally sees music as colors. He and Hendrix and Franz Liszt all share a rare condition called synaesthesia, in which one’s sensory perceptions overlap. Yikes, does this mean that we’ve all been fooled and Mayer is actually a musical genius?

* Lots of crazy sex stuff: Brian Adams’ “Summer of ‘69” is indeed about the physical act not the year; Elvis’s chosen method of birth control was to pull out and finish with his hand; Steven Tyler admits to being inappropriately attracted to his daughter Liv.

* We’ve talked before on Musical Biscuits about Ringo’s musical abilities. Edwards maintains that Ringo was a great drummer, not showy but always in the groove, and he points to a few moments where the Beatle really stands out: “Drive My Car” (“where he’s particularly inventive on the breaks”), “Ticket to Ride” (“where he basically invents heavy-metal drumming”), “Rain” (“where he’s playing like a man possessed”), and the “Strawberry Fields Forever” outtakes on the Anthology 2 (where he is “basically inventing the trip-hop beat”). I would add to Gavin’s excellent list the drum solo in “The End” from Abbey Road.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession also happens to talk about a lot of Beatles songs. For example, author Daniel J. Levitin points out that the reason "Yesterday" is so beloved is that its main melodic phrase is seven measures long, whereas most musical units are four or eight measures -- and it is precisely this small deception, this setting up and manipulating of expectations, that so pleases the human ear.

The book is filled with these kinds of revelations, and they are all remarkably digestible because they involve songs everyone knows by heart. Levitin was a record producer (for the Dead, Chris Isaak, and others) before he was an academic, and his love and familiarity with the music is what makes the book work so well. I have a hard time with a lot of popular science titles, because they often assume the reader holds a certain degree of scientific knowledge -- and, I'll be honest, I have zero. But like in Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, which this most closely resembles, there is more than enough non-hardcore science here for a total ignoramus like me to latch on to that I stuck with the book to the end (occasionally skipping passages) and learned quite a bit in the process.

I was fascinated to discover, for instance, that one theory as to why we sometimes experience almost an elevated state of consciousness when we hear loud music in concert, as opposed to on record, is that the extreme volume (over 115dB) floods our auditory system and triggers neurons to fire at their maximum pace. "When many, many neurons are maximally firing, this could cause an emergent property, a brain state qualitatively different from when they are firing at normal rates."

Interesting stuff, eh? And how many books are blurbed by both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder?!