Why Do We Remember Certain Songs, And Not Others?

Friedemann: Songwriters often talk about memorability as if it's a magical, supernatural thing. hear lines like, it's just catchy, or it has that magic, or you either have it or you don't. But millions of people remember the same songs for the same reasons. memory isn't random. Psychologists have studied it for decades. We know how people remember names, stories, faces, and conversations. So why would it be any different for all those things than it would be for music? That's how I teach memorability in our courses and that's how you're gonna learn it right now. Welcome to See the Song with a podcast where we steal the techniques of the greatest songs of all time because stealing is the greatest form of flattery. I'm Friedem and Fent Eisen, song creator, author, and head of holistic songwriting, where we unlock the source code of songwriting and production. Today we're going to talk about memorability. And we're going to start with a little scenario I want you to picture. You are at a party and you are being introduced to a person you have never met before. Do you remember their name? Yes or no? If you're like most people, the answer is probably going to be on the negative side. And by understanding how we can solve this problem, how you can remember somebody's name better, you can also learn how to write songs that connect better with an audience that they will carry with them and remember for a long time. So let's get started with number one. Attention, you can't remember what you didn't notice. Obviously, if you're being introduced to somebody and you're not really listening as they're telling you their name, you're going to forget it. Memory starts with attention, which means most songs fail before memorability even becomes relevant. if your listener didn't actually pay attention, if they weren't engaged from start to finish in your song, how are they ever gonna remember any of your great hooks? Memory isn't a storage problem, it's an attention problem. And there are two things you need to remember about this. One, You need to hook your listener somehow. You need to earn their attention. And you do this by with a great opening, right? You want to get an early wow. You want great production, great performances. You want to have maybe an interesting opening line for those who are more logically inclined, and maybe an unexpected sound to start your song off with. But that's only half the battle. This is, for example, something that AI is pretty good at. But what it's not so good at is keeping the listener's attention, right? This is where things get interesting, where we introduce constant novelty, where we have tiny rewards every few seconds, where we create something that has an aura of curiosity, of emotional tension. This is really where the addiction formula comes in, right? We talk about it every single week when we discuss a song. I show you the energy curve of the song. And that is basically your story. That is your song. That's how you keep people engaged and keep them listening from start to finish. The addiction formula really is the backbone of great music. Without it, your song is just going to fail. There's no question. How many times have you been in this situation where you've shown your music to a friend or family member and they listened for a little bit and then they start talking halfway through? Super uncomfortable. I hate it when that happens. And I kind of swore to myself, I never want that to happen again. I want people to actually be intrigued enough to want to keep listening from start to finish. And ever since I discovered the addiction formula and have used it consistently in my songs, it hasn't happened again. Which is again, I'm just gonna you promote my book, The Addiction Formula. If you haven't read that, please do check it out. It's on Amazon, it's on my website. It's a game changer for people and it certainly was for me. Number two, patterns. Memory loves repetition. The brain remembers patterns, not isolated moments. So the trick isn't to remember just one thing, it's repeating. When you are meeting somebody for the first time, a surefire thing you can do to remember their name better is to just repeat their name back to them. They say, Hi, I'm Sam. You go, hi Sam, I'm Friedemann, right? Just repeating that name immediately is going to burn it into your brain a little better. And you can use their name a couple of times through conversation, Sam, comma, you know, blah, blah, blah, comma, Sam, to Really burn that into your brain. The brain is a pattern recognition machine. It is excellent at taking everything apart that we give it and turning it back into the information that it needs. So if we repeat on multiple levels, we ourselves consciously don't notice it, but subconsciously we certainly remember all the bits that we are being given. How does this play out in a song? Well, obviously we have musical patterns. We have sections repeating. For example, the chorus repeats usually three times throughout a song. We have hooks that keep repeating that could be playing in the background over and over again. Sometimes entire melodies repeat. Sometimes it is just the rhythm of those melodies, and sometimes it's just parts of the melody. For example, when you're listening to Now you're in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you. Then the second and third line in that streets will make you feel brand new and big lights will inspire you, they're kind of similar, and your brain does track that. apart from the music, there's also language patterns. So the words, your lyrics, right? Where we can repeat a line in its totality, or we can repeat parts of the line. So we might repeat a word. Swim, swim, ba da, swim, swim. Repeating that word every once in a while makes it stick better. But we might also do it with a longer phrase. For example, it's been a while since I could hold my head up high, and it's been a while since I first saw you. Right? One of my favorite songs from the early 2000s repeats those few words. It's been a while since blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is the verse of the song. We can also do this on a more macro scale where we have structural patterns. So the sentence structure stays the same, but the meaning changes. For example, only need the sun when it's burning low, only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Only know you love her when you let her go. And then on the miniature scale, we also have repetition of certain sounds, what we call rhymes, that's the repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, it's the repetition of consonants. the more repetition you build into your track, the easier it's going to be to remember your track. And this is something I'm sure you've heard of a million times before. Everybody keeps talking about repetition when it comes to memorability. What everybody keeps saying is just two pieces of advice is repeat stuff and make it as simple as you possibly can. It's the KISS rule. Keep it simple, stupid. However, I don't think that this is entirely true. which brings us to point number three, contrast. We remember what stands out. Last week in our podcast, we talked about McGee's Alice, a song that, by all intents and purposes, is quite complex. There's not a lot of repetition in it. The melodies are quite complex. The rhythms are quite complex. And yet, I found myself singing that song for a good month. Like every day I was just coming back to it because my brain was busy with that song. We remember what stands out. We love it when a song challenges us a little bit. Now everybody is challenged by different things. I'm a lifelong musician, so I'm gonna be challenged by something a lot more complex than somebody who doesn't really have an interest in music very much or just listens to music, you know, while they work or in the background, right? For them, melodies are gonna stick that are much simpler than for me, but it still stands that we want to have something that is sufficiently complex. This is one of the core things that I think people often overlook is for things to stick, it shouldn't just be as simple as possible and then we repeat it. That's gonna make things feel dull, boring, lifeless, and really annoying. There needs to be something that is just a little bit weird that stands out amongst all the other songs that we listen to every day. People don't remember normal, they remember contrast. The brain remembers difference. Psychologists call this the von Restov effect. Basically, it means people don't remember normal, they remember contrast. So, for example, say you have a lineup of you know six pieces of fruit, right? And you exchange one of them with I don't know, a tire wheel, right? Is another common object. Immediately that it stands out in your mind just because it is different. It doesn't fit into the lineup. So it's about contrast. It's about doing something that is slightly unexpected that will get people to remember things more easily. I feel like I'm in a special position to talk about this because of my name, Friedemann Findeisen. You would think that's a name that's hard to remember. But I've had many people come up to me years after they first met me and remember that name. if you follow the KISS rule, you would think that a name like Sam, Dave, Steve, Martin would be a better choice for a person and it would be easier to remember. But how many people do you know that go by one of those names? And it's much harder to remember who's who if you're meeting them in a lineup of people. If you have a name that stands out, i.e., if you have something in your song that stands out, it actually has a much better chance of being remembered by your listener. This is what I call sufficient complexity. You want something that kind of does a little bit of damage in your listener's brain, right? You don't want it to go in one ear and out the other. you want there to be a little bit of friction. Songs can stand out through unusual melodies, unusual chord changes. We talk about those all the time in our podcast, right? Strange lyrics, weird production choices, silence can also be very powerful, a missing downbeat, right? A missing transition. We've talked about all of these things before, and I try to highlight them every time they come around in a song. We've talked about apita on this podcast, and in that we have the word ptah, ptah, which is not how you pronounce apartment or apt. I'm not even sure how you would pronounce that in English, but the whole song is pretty much in English. Except for that one word, right? And so that stands out. That definitely catches your attention. Another one of my favorite examples of all time is Korn's Twist. If you've never heard that before, do yourself a favor, do listen to that now. It is one of the most incredible things I've ever heard. And it's so remarkable that song. Jonathan Davis does something very similar to it on a song called Freak on a Leash, which is a much bigger hit. But twist to me is so remarkable because it uses a vocal technique I haven't heard anywhere else before or since. So artists can stand out through their voice, through their image, through their writing style, right? A couple of artists that come to mind for me, their voice spilled Billy Eilish, Lord, right? their writing style is Eminem, their image, Rammstein, 21 Pilots, right? These people stand out because they are different than everybody else around. And finally, number four, participation. People remember experiences. We remember conversations better than lectures. if you meet somebody at a party and you have an engaging conversation with them, chances are you'll remember them much better than if you didn't. likewise songs become more memorable when listeners get to participate. We want to move our songs from a level of just consumption or you know playing in the background to an actual experience. and this typically happens on two different levels. We have the physical level and we have the emotional level. On the physical level, this is things like groove, right? Does the song inspire me to move? Do I want to dance along to it? Can I sing along to the song? Are there phrases in it that I can sing, you know, whoa o's or something that I can sing along to? I think Farrell's happy is a great example of a song that is impossible not to dance to. And for another song that triggers an intense physical reaction, you might want to check out James Blake's Limit to Your Love, which has that really incredible sub in the second half of the song. I mean, I dare anyone not to be moved by that. You hear that in concert, your whole body is shaking. That is a moment you're gonna remember forever. And then we have the emotional side of things. Obviously, lyrics, the words you use and the phrases and the content of your lyrics, melody, harmony. Performance I think Lola Young's Messi is a great example of a song that pulls you in on an emotional level. Nostalgia is also really powerful in music. Connecting a sound that your listeners heard before to your song actually connects your song to millions of experiences and to millions of emotions that they have felt before in their life. This is why so many songs use sounds of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, because it triggers us, right? It reminds us of who we were back then and it reminds us of the intensity of our feelings when we were teenagers. So you trigger nostalgia by familiar sounds through references, and this could be lyrical or musical, retro production, right? couple of good examples for this, I think, are Chappelle Rowan's Pink Pony Club, which starts out with this very variety-like piano. Like that's a subtle nod to that. it might be Alex Warren's Ordinary, where we have that church choir, which might remind you of a time when you were still in church. Getting super conscious of what you are doing to trigger people's emotions and physical reactions is one of the greatest things you can do to make your songs more memorable. So in summary, a memorable song grabs attention, creates patterns, stands out, and invites participation. if you'd like to dive into these concepts more deeply, we have a program called the Inceptionist Bundle, which I'm gonna link in the description, which talks about how to make your lyrics as memorable as possible. And actually, something that I learned while making that program, which I wasn't aware of before that, was how much lyrics have an influence on the melody. it is a lyrics program, but it also has tons of influences on how I write my melodies now. And I think this was the thing. That really in my mind kind of flipped the switch where it was like, now I get it. You know, I've I've been making music since I was fifteen, right? I've been writing my I wrote my first song when I was twelve. But making that course is what finally taught me this is how repetition works. This is how we can actually write songs that burn themselves into our listeners' brains. don't remember songs because they're good. They remember them because their brains were given reasons to remember them.