Joseph LeDoux: Brains & Music

Every musician knows that music, memory, and emotion are connected. But how? Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Science and director of the Emotional Brain Institute at New York University, and author of the best-selling book, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life – along with other influential writings, has studied this field for decades. Considered one of the world's leading experts on the mind and brain, LeDoux is also a prolific musician and recording artist who has collaborated in the studio with the likes of Rosanne Cash and has performed with his group, The Amygdaloids, on bills with Rufus Wainwright, Lenny Kaye, and Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate. His music has been playfully described as “heavy mental.” But how does LeDoux’s acute knowledge of the brain’s operations affect his approach to his own musical compositions and lyric writing? I sat down with Professor LeDoux in his home studio/office to talk about the mysteries of the brain – and the magic of music.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Eunice, Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun country, and ground zero for Cajun music.

At what age did you become aware of the uniqueness of Cajun music?

The uniqueness, I didn’t know. That was just what was there. No matter where I went, we had some Cajun music playing. It was part of the culture, so much that I didn’t even notice it.

Were you listening to the radio?

Yeah, whatever was on. In a small town like that, you'd have a radio station that’s catering to a lot of different groups. After school, they’d play Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, or something of interest to teens. In the evening, it turned more towards soul and rhythm and blues. I loved pop music. I could pick up WLS in Chicago and other long-distance stations, including some in Mexico.

Did you have an interest in science as a child?

Absolutely not. Science wasn’t on my radar. I was taught by nuns in Catholic school, and they were putting me into the priest boot camp trajectory. Kind of an anti-science environment! [ laughter ] In high school, we got folk guitars, because that’s what was happening in the early ‘60s. We were playing Simon & Garfunkel and Peter, Paul and Mary. It was a good way to hang out with girls. Then, by February of ’64, The Beatles had arrived. Everybody threw those acoustic guitars away and ordered Sears, Roebuck & Co. [electric] guitars. I still have my Silvertone and my Fender Deluxe amp. And I was in bands, and I was a disc jockey in high school.

Music is in your soul and your body.

It is. It’s what I cared about most as a kid. Then it was time for me to go to college. The year that I graduated, a junior college opened up in Eunice. I got a degree in business administration, and I got interested in consumer protection. This was during the time of Ralph Nader, and I was into consumer psychology. Later, I started a master’s in marketing back at LSU [Louisiana State University] in Baton Rouge. I got more and more interested in psychology, and I was taking a lot of psychology courses.

You studied psychology through marketing?

Exactly. Near the end of my master’s work, I took a class on learning and motivation. It was all about the brain mechanisms of learning in rats. That’s what the professor researched. I didn’t even know you could study the brain. I asked if I could work in his lab and he said, "Sure." We published a paper or two together, and I applied to PhD programs in psychology and the brain. I had no credentials, but I applied to a dozen places. [State University of New York at] Stony Brook, out on Long Island, accepted me. I got in there and met my mentor, Michael Gazzaniga, who was studying split-brain patients, which I had not even heard of at that time.

What is split-brain?

There are some people who have epilepsy that is so bad that it can’t be controlled by medications. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when all of this was being done, the medications were not very good. Kids that had epilepsy from an early age could have seizures so bad that their parents had to hold them on mattresses. It was awful. A last-ditch effort, not something that they would ordinarily do, was a dissection of the connections between the two sides of the brain. It prevented the seizures from bouncing around from side to side and being more harmful than they would otherwise be. What was interesting in these people were the psychological implications. In most people, language is on the left side of the brain, so that side of the brain in a split-brain patient can talk and respond and knows who they are. There's a conscious human person there. On the right side is a different story. The left hand, connected to the right hemisphere, can reach into a bag or point to a picture and non-verbally indicate what it saw, but it can’t talk to you. It’s not clear who’s living over there, if anybody.

It’s more reflexive?

I wouldn’t call it reflexive. It’s more that the right hemisphere knows what things are and can respond to them non-verbally. I did my dissertation on a patient who was unique. Like most of us, this guy had the normal language skills in his left hemisphere, but we discovered that his right hemisphere could read, even though it couldn’t talk. That was the opportunity to ask interesting questions by putting words into his right hemisphere. If you’re staring at a dot on a screen in front of you, and a stimulus appears on the left side of that dot, that stimulus goes to your right hemisphere. Similarly, a stimulus to the right of the dot goes to your left hemisphere. In most people, the two processes merge. What the right side sees goes to the left, and what the left side sees goes to the right – that’s what those connections between the two sides are for. Normally, we don’t have a left and a right world; it’s just one world. It’s like an illusion that’s been put together by the brain. In the split-brain patient, who doesn’t have the ability for the info to cross from one side to the other, the info stays there. So, if we put a word like “apple” into the right hemisphere he could select what he saw by selecting an apple from pictures of several objects. This showed that the right hemisphere of this patient could read words and turn those into actions. On the basis of that, we put in the question, “Who are you?” on the left side of screen – to the right hemisphere. The left hand reached into a pile of Scrabble letters and arranged them to spell his name, "Paul." I still get chills thinking about it. That was the first time anyone communicated in a human way with the right hemisphere of a split-brain patient.

That’s unbelievable.

We went further. The question was, “What job do you want?” The right hemisphere spelled out "race car driver" with Scrabble letters. The left hemisphere had already told us he wanted to be a draftsman, an architect. The two sides had different ambitions. Same self-identity, Paul, but different ambitions for Paul. But the kicker was a study where each hemisphere saw a different stimulus. The two hands pointed to the appropriate matching picture. When asked, “Why did you pick those?” the left hemisphere, of course, didn’t know why the left hand choice was made. But it made up a story, without batting an eye, that made the two pictures go together.

What was the result of those experiments?

The big idea that we had was that a lot of behavior is controlled non-consciously. The conscious brain has to tell itself a story in order to make these unconsciously generated behaviors make sense. This is necessary, because the conscious mind has its own rules, actions, and understanding of the world that doesn’t necessarily match with all the unconscious knowledge in the brain. Such stories or narratives are what I have spent much of my career subsequently trying to come to terms with, scientifically.

What came next for you?

After graduate school, I turned to studies of rats to understand systems in the brain that might control behaviors that, in the human brain, might need this justification or rationalization. I decided to study emotional behaviors in rats by giving them a tone, paired with a mild shock, and then the rat would freeze every time it heard the tone. Because the circuits in the human brain that cause us to freeze are the same as those in the rat brain (because of evolution), we can use the rat brain and its control of behavior to understand the control of those systems in the human brain. We can’t understand human emotion or human consciousness from rat brains, but we can understand the non-conscious behaviors that go with it. I spent most of my early career mapping out those pathways. What I tried to do in rats was to follow the flow of that auditory-conditioned stimulus, that tone paired with the shock. The tone goes into the ear, then generates a sequence of activity from area to area, and ultimately neural signals come out of the brain, go to the spinal cord, and voila, the rat freezes. This was possible to do because the input (the ear) and the output (the muscles) define the beginning and end of the pathway. And, because the auditory system is well understood, and we know how the motor responses come out of the spinal cord to the muscles, the task was simply one of connecting the neural dots in the brain between the stimulus and the response. That’s what I did. In less than a decade, I – and couple of other researchers who were on the same track – were able to map that whole pathway. It didn’t hurt that there were brand new techniques that had come out for studying how brain areas connect with one another.

When you say tones, do the various types of tones make a difference? Does this in any way relate to music and the brain?

Well, it does, in the sense that it’s a tone. When I chose this particular behavior, I did it for two reasons: One, the stimulus could be very simple. That was important since the goal was not to understand auditory processing per se, but to understand what happens after the auditory system processes it. The second thing was that the response is so reliable. Freezing is an innate response and occurs the same in every rat, and even in every human. Through conditioning, we can couple that innate response to a new stimulus. That’s what Pavlovian conditioning is all about. People think it’s simple and it doesn’t apply to humans, but a lot of what we are is maintained by a history of Pavlovian conditioning. Certainly not everything, but the simple should not be ignored just because there is more complicated stuff going on. It’s also important to note that, while rats and people respond similarly, we don’t know what’s going on mentally in rats. But in the human brain, interpretations and narratives are going on all the time – as the basis of our conscious experiences. I laid the basic findings and ideas out in my book, The Emotional Brain .

That’s a famous book.

It’s still in print, since 1996. In that book, I describe all of what we’ve been talking about; all the automatic, reflexive kinds of stuff I was studying through conditioning in rats. But, at the very end, I had a chapter called “Once More With Feelings,” which is about how the actual experience comes about, and emphasizing the split-brain idea that Mike and I came up. When we see ourselves behaving in a particular way, we generate that narrative to explain it. Fear, or any emotion, is simply a narrative. It’s not an innate response. My work on the amygdala has often been interpreted to mean that the amygdala is the brain’s fear center. That’s wrong. What the amygdala does is detect and respond to danger. Your prefrontal cortex, the most advanced part of your brain, is spinning those narratives and telling those tales. That’s what the emotion is: The telling of a tale to yourself about what is happening to you. This is based on what’s called the schema, a body of knowledge.

That one has acquired?

That they’ve acquired about situations. These schema are unconscious or non-conscious templates out of which the narrative flows, given all the other things going on at that moment. The narrative itself is unconscious, but it’s what you become conscious of. Ultimately, that’s what all my books have been about. I never got back to your question about the stimulus tone. I wanted a simple stimulus. The pathway ended up going through this part of the brain called the amygdala that I had worked on for so long, but I didn’t know that’s where it was going to go. The amygdala had been implicated in fear much earlier, but it was just kind of like a piece of meat in the brain that did something. It wasn’t like we knew the inputs and the outputs and how it all worked. That’s what I was able to help contribute to – the inputs and outputs, as well as the cells and synapses and molecules that make it do what it does. I didn’t want anything that would slow the stimulus down in the auditory system and interfere with it getting to the right part of the brain, which turned out to be the amygdala, but I didn’t know that at first.

Was it a certain frequency?

It was 1000 hertz. I found out later, too late to reverse it, but rats don’t hear 1000 hertz that well! They are high-frequency animals and can hear ultrasounds a 60 kHz or so, which is out of the range of their predators. It’s like a secret code they can use to warn each other in danger. Later I used 10 kHz; sounds which are more in their range, but it didn’t matter. A 1 kHz turned out to be good enough for what we were doing. Anyway, pure tones are not typically part of everyday life. We hear all kinds of much more complex sounds. But all of those are composed of those simple tones. One thing I should mention about all this is that one of my early discoveries was that when a tone comes into your ear, it was long believed that in order to have any meaningful psychological impact that it had to go to your auditory cortex. You have a visual cortex, an auditory cortex, and so on. Those are the receptive areas for sensory information, and they do all the meaningful processing, or so it was thought. To get to the amygdala, or wherever else it was going, it had to go through the auditory cortex. What I found in the rats was after I removed the auditory cortex, they could still be conditioned. How was that happening? It wasn’t going through the auditory cortex since that was gone. With these new pathway-tracing techniques, I was able to show that the way station before the auditory cortex, the so-called auditory thalamus, not only projects to the auditory cortex but also projects to the amygdala. That’s how the amygdala came into the picture. What is that thalamic input to the amygdala doing? It’s carrying very simple kinds of quick and dirty signals. A pure tone was a perfect choice, because it could get to the amygdala in 12 milliseconds in the rat brain. That’s fast!

Yes, very fast.

It takes about 20 milliseconds to get to the amygdala via the auditory cortex. So what? It’s only a few milliseconds slower than from the thalamus to the amygdala. But the brain ticks in milliseconds and the mind ticks in seconds. So, a few milliseconds is a big deal in the brain. The pure tone gets to the amygdala, triggers the response, freezing the blood pressure or heart rate, whatever we’re measuring at the time, and, more slowly, goes to the auditory cortex. From there, it sends the amygdala a more elaborate representation. I called these the low road and the high road. The way to think about it is you’re walking through a field and, all of a sudden, you find yourself freezing to a stick on the ground because the stimulus went to your visual thalamus and directly to your amygdala. The amygdala detected the stick as a snake, and you froze. It also goes to your auditory cortex, from which it’s also getting to the amygdala. This high has more detailed information, telling the amygdala, "That’s a stick, not a snake." So, you keep on walking. But if it was a snake, you’ve frozen and not stepped on it, and your life was saved. It’s evolution doing the thinking for you. It’s better to treat a stick as a snake than to ignore it and treat the snake as a stick. But, of course, that’s not the only way we respond. So much of our emotions are these prefrontal cortex interpretations based on memory, based on the situation, based on the schema, and all that. One thing that might be of interest in the two roads idea is that sounds are processed in multiple ways, and some simple sound changes, like note duration or intensity, might impact the listener a little faster than more complex sounds.

During your research of everything we’ve discussed so far, was your guitar handy?

It was locked away in the closet. We get involved in a career, right? I didn’t have time for music. I was married and had children. Going to meetings and conferences and raising children takes time. By 2006, one of our kids had died from a heroin overdose. That flipped my perspective completely. I had to figure out what’s meaningful in life. For his memorial service, I wrote a song about him and played it. I found that to be helpful to the healing. I started playing guitar with a colleague at NYU, Tyler Volk. We ended up forming a band, The Amygdaloids. It was then that I figured out I could write songs that fit my vocal range and write music that fit my level of dexterity. I’m happy with what I’ve been able to do.

During this time, you were a professor at NYU?

Yeah, I became a professor at NYU in 1989. Before that, I’d been at Cornell Medical College [now Weill Cornell Medicine] for a dozen years, doing research. Then I started writing books that appealed to the public. There weren’t many scientists writing books for the lay public in the mid '90s, because it was kind of frowned upon to do those. But my mentor, Mike Gazzaniga, was doing it, and he encouraged me to do it. There were also a few other scientists doing it. By ‘96, I had written The Emotional Brain .

Your book, The Deep History of Ourselves [ : The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains ], is on my desk right now. It’s a lot.

Four billion years is too much to throw at anyone. [ laughter ]

But it’s fascinating to me.

I like to communicate with the public. I try to come up with ideas that are about who we are and what’s happening in our lives.

How did The Amygdaloids form?

The genre we invented is called "heavy mental." We had a show at Union Hall in Park Slope [Brooklyn, NY] for something called The Secret Science Club. I was invited to give a lecture for the Secret Science Club, and they said, "We’ll provide some entertainment after." I said, "I’ll bring the entertainment," because we had this little group, what would come to be The Amygdaloids. I played rhythm, Tyler Volk was the lead guitar player, an Israeli post-doc, Daniela Schiller, was the drummer. She said, "My research assistant is a bass player." We marched off to Union Hall on November 1, 2006, as The Amygdaloids. We had been playing covers like, “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Manic Depression,” and advertised our first actual gig as an evening of music about the mind and brain and mental disorders.

That’s great.

If you dig into it, you can find a lot of rock songs are about the mind. I wrote a couple of songs for the gig. The show had a small write up describing our music as "heavy mental." That’s where we got the term, and it became the title of our first album. Altogether, we’ve had five Amygdaloids albums. The second one was called Theory of My Mind , all about theory of mind and how you’re getting to know a person’s mind. Then there was All in Our Minds, More Songs in Our Minds , and Anxious . I also have albums under my name, as well as with Colin Dempsey, my partner in So We Are, which is basically the acoustic Amygdaloids.

When you write a song, it seems like you keep your words to a minimum; the number of words in a song.

I can’t claim being a genius for that. It’s just how I do it, and what feels right. The message of my songs comes out pretty quickly. I don’t need to hammer it in, over and over again.

You seem like you’re targeting the mind-body problem, specifically.

Absolutely! That’s what I do. I have all this knowledge about mind and brain and mental disorders. I may as well put it to use in a fun way! But I think the songs can also be informative, if you listen to them that way.

And it comes together with your childhood, your early interest in music.

Yeah. The sound is sort of '60s, but more as a ‘60s template, in terms of chord structure and vibe. People say that the music you listen to as a teenager is the music you'll have for the rest of your life. That’s definitely the case for me, and maybe everyone.

That makes sense.

It makes sense, but why is that? I think there’s an answer: When you’re a teenager, your hormones are raging. We have these sex hormones and stress hormones and so on, but those are nicknames. They’re doing a lot of other things. Both of those, like the cortisol – the stress hormone, and estrogen and testosterone – the sex hormones – are important in storing memories. When you are in an emotional situation, which teenagers always are, you have those hormones storing those memories. Those are being stored in a way that memories aren’t stored after the hormones calm down.

I’d never thought of that.

I’m putting that into the memoir I have going right now. I’m about halfway through.

That’s a very interesting line of thought.

The title of my memoir is Mists of Memory , from a song by Nino Tempo and April Stevens called “Deep Purple." That was one of my favorite songs as a kid, “In the mist of a memory you wander back to me."

I might be completely wrong, but I got a George Harrison feel from one of your songs.

That’s probably “Falling For You."

I think so. It triggered an emotional response on my first time of hearing that.

That was an Eric “Roscoe” Ambel [ Tape Op #13 ] riff. He was the producer and put it in. That was intentional.

Are our brains always trying to find references to have input make sense to us?

Yes.

Like songs that we’ve heard before?

Absolutely.

FURTHER READING

Books by Joseph LeDoux:

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996)

Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (2002)

The Self: From Soul to Brain (2003)

Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains (2019)

The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human (2023)

Mists of Memory: A Life So Far (upcoming)

Joseph LeDoux recommends:

Anil Seth Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)

Stephen Fleming Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness (2021)

Hakwan Lau In Consciousness We Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2022)

Uta and Chris Frith Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains (2022)

Batja Mesquita Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (2022)

Daniel Levitin This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006)

When you began getting back into music, did you think back to those ‘60s days with the folk revival and the transition from folk to rock?

Yeah, I think my songs are more folk rock than anything else. In 1962 and ’63, there were lots of kinds of pop songs, and folk was another variation. Folk songs were good pop songs. It was music we could play that wasn’t complicated.

How did you end up working with Rosanne Cash?

Rosanne and I met through our mutual editor, Rick Kot, at Viking Press. Rosanne had a brain tumor, and she had written a book, Composed: A Memoir . Rosanne was talking about the brain all the time, and Rick said, "You should talk to Joseph." We met, talked about the brain and music, and that was that. Around then, I was involved with some people who wanted to put together a benefit concert. We called it Rock-it Science Festival. I wanted Rosanne to be the headliner, and she agreed. At the last minute, her agent booked her in Germany, so she called me and said, "I’m really sorry. I can’t do it." The lightbulb went off in my head, and I asked, "Would you sing on my album?" A little guilt goes a long way sometimes! [ laughter ] She was my backup singer on a couple of songs. Lenny Kaye and I met at that Rock-it Science Festival; we had a house band that consisted of Lenny, Jeff Peretz, Steve Wynn, Peter Holsapple, and Stuart Chatwood.

I know all these people!

They backed up the main acts, like Rufus Wainwright, who ended up being the headliner. We also had Gary Lucas and Dee Snider. That’s how I got to meet these people. There were also a couple other science bands. There are actually a lot of science bands out there!

There are a lot of connections with music and science.

Lenny Kaye and I had this conversation [BRAINWAVE] at the Rubin Museum of Art on this topic. Lenny’s a creative guy. We had a lot of interesting things to talk about. We played a few songs we each picked. He found some mind songs, like “Mind Over Matter” by Nolan Strong & The Diablos. I played my own “Mind Over Matter” song. We played songs and talked about different topics related to music and the brain.

Are there some thoughts about how, in songwriting, we can affect people's emotions?

Well, first of all, I think a lot of the emotional effect comes from the music itself. All of the classical composers knew that – they could drive it right into you. They had that understanding. Music finds its way to some sweet spot in your brain where memory and music come together. It becomes this bond. Especially when the hormones we discussed are flowing. Even though we’re not kids anymore, we still have hormones and they help store our memories. Maybe not as deep and strong as when we were teenagers, but certainly they’re important. Somehow, they find the right hook that is going to trigger memories. That’s why the opening hook in a song can take you all the way. But not all hooks are in the intro.

Can hooks in songs unlock memories that were stored in a certain time of your life?

What I would say is that they create a schema of the moment. Schema don’t exist as these solid blocks of memory. They’re put together on the spot, depending on the situation. You have self-memories, music memories, emotional memories, all kinds of memories; these are used to put together schema that make a moment what it is, and if it is special it is something you remember. I don’t know exactly what the formula is to do all this, but one ingredient is a good song that catches you early – maybe a good instrumental part that catches you, and then lyrics that pull you in deeper, or vice versa.

How can you create new memories with music? How can we tap into the listener’s magical emotional spots?

There’s no problem in creating new memories. We do that every second of the day. It’s happening all the time. But it may be useful to know that we have different kinds of memory in the brain. Let’s put it into two categories. Explicit memory and implicit. That’s a very broad swipe. Explicit memory is memory that you can consciously retrieve. Usually, you have to be conscious of what you’re storing in order to consciously retrieve it later. There are two kinds of these conscious memories: One of them is called semantic memory; memories about facts and concepts and so forth that allow you to know what things are and what ideas are. And the other is episodic memory; memories about personal experiences that you’ve had in your life. You can learn about a restaurant in Rome by reading about it before you go. That’s a semantic memory. Or you can learn about it when you’re there. When you’re there, you learn about it by being there and taking in the ambience. The experience. It’s a different kind of memory.

That’s episodic?

That’s episodic. You are a central part of an episodic memory. It’s about your life. Semantic memory has nothing to do with you, it’s just facts about other things. I think it’s important to get to peoples’ episodic memories in order for them to consciously remember a song. But, since you as a songwriter don’t know the listener’s personal past, you have to use semantic memory hooks that are likely to have the listener remember some personal stuff. That’s really what a good songwriter like Jimmy Webb does. He knows how to use ordinary words in a way that unlocks listeners episodic memories about a related situation. But underneath all that are these implicit or procedural memories that happen unconsciously. In a sense, the entire brain is what we can call a deep learning system, a system in which every neuron is constantly taking in information and storing it. Not in any kind of meaningful sense, but more at the level of action potentials releasing neurotransmitters that causes the next neuron to fire in a certain way. When that happens repeatedly a connection is formed between those cells in a new way. That’s happening all the time. The brain is always adjusting and updating. When you walk into your apartment, you don’t have to tell yourself, "This is my apartment." It’s implicit. You’ve learned it. This tacit knowledge allows you to feel like you are at home. A hotel room doesn’t have that feel. It’s the same thing with being home in your brain. You don’t have to acknowledge, "This is my brain, these are my thoughts, and these are my movements." It’s all just implicit. We know that this is the case because there are some people who have problems in the brain where those things are no longer automatic. They don’t feel that their thoughts are theirs. They don’t feel that their actions are theirs. They don’t have that feeling of what it’s like to be themselves. Without that, you no longer exist as you. Even though it’s not conscious, you’ve lost the ground zero of who you are. Without that, your episodic memories don’t feel like they are yours. All three of those kinds of memories are important. Semantic, episodic, and procedural. In some sense, the hooks and so forth make the listener initially conscious semantically, causing them to think about the lyric or riff, but quickly those give way to what's underneath in the procedural, or implicit, way of storing that information. They then become automatic and make the song "feel right" when they hear it later. However, simultaneously, semantic memories triggered by the hook also unlock personal episodes. Because the procedural memories are there coloring the experience, the song feels "right," or "good," or "sad" and on and on. I’m not sure that I’m saying anything a songwriter doesn’t know in some deeply learned way. But maybe it’s useful to think about how it all works in terms of different kinds of memory.

I think it is. I’m interested in the way that words, melody, and notes lock in together. In your songwriting, knowing what you know and your research, have you ever come across something about the connection between the choice of notes, intervals of notes, and words to create an emotional response?

I would say that I do a lot of this through my implicit procedural knowledge as opposed to having an intellectual understanding of it, because I don’t think I know enough about music to plan that kind of thing. If you do something enough – getting those procedural memories going – you figure out what’s working and then it feels right. I think I’m more of a bottom-up songwriter rather than a top-down one. Though I guess I start both ways to some extent. Bottom-up, I start strumming the guitar and see what comes out. Hopefully, some lyrics start flowing non-consciously. I then start conceptualizing what the song will be and dressing it up. Then I switch back to bottom up and go back and forth. If I start with a top-down concept, once it’s established the bottom-up nonconscious takes over until that’s not working; then I switch back to a little top-down action to get the nonconscious mojo going again. I’ve probably written 50 songs with the word "mind" in the title or lyrics, sometimes with that as an idea and sometimes just strumming and applying an idea later. It hasn’t been that hard to restrict myself to writing about the mind. When I run out of ideas, I’ll go to the dictionary and pull up synonyms trying to find uses of the mind. But, after doing heavy mental songs for more than 20 years, I am opening it up. I’m writing songs with no explicit mention of mind and brain. At the end of the day though, many pop songs are about mind (love is a state of mind) and mental problems (heartache).

Did you want to add anything?

Thanks for asking such insightful questions that pushed me in directions I had not thought about much! Like the role of memory in songwriting.

joseph-ledoux.com

Richard Barone [Tape Op#54] is a recording artist, performer, producer, educator, and author.