Comfort in sound: on playing the same songs over and over again

Why musical repetition deilvers the feeling that "the world is right and everything is together"

Just over eight years ago, I started work on a big feature for the Guardian about autistic people who’d received their diagnoses as adults. This is a big subject in the media these days, but back then, there was a feeling of being at some new social and neurological frontier. The conversations I had were all as compelling as that suggests – but for me, there was one other fascination: how much they illuminated my understanding of my son James, who had just turned ten.

One of my interviewees was a brilliant artist called Jon Adams. About an hour into our conversation, he showed me an app called IMini, which allowed him to programme sequences of electronic notes into an on-screen keyboard, and use them if a bout of anxiety meant he needed to readjust. When he played me one, I said it reminded me of the experimental music that came out of Germany in the 1970s. That, he said, wasn’t a coincidence:

“I got really into Tangerine Dream in about 1976 – the repeating sequences were heaven for me,” Adams says. He also likes the electronic pioneers Kraftwerk which rings loud bells. My son is a Kraftwerk obsessive, and regularly zeroes in on particular segments of their songs and plays them over and over. Does that sound familiar?

“Yes,” Adams says, and his mind goes back to 1978. “I bought Mr Blue Sky by ELO. There was a track on the other side, and it had a very strange beginning. It was called Fire On High, and I’d play it over and over and over again.” Why? “It aligned me. It made me feel that the world was right and everything was together. It felt like it was part of me. It’s like all the stars lining up… Things like that give me the feeling I’m meant to be here.”

This is a beautifully eloquent and moving explanation of something James has done since he was around three years old. Back then, he used to take great delight in almost constant repeat-plays of small sections of music: the first twenty or so seconds of The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus, or the intro of Ian Hunter’s single One Bitten, Twice Shy. Over time, these compulsive listening cycles got longer, as he started hammering whole songs, the list of which is now almost endless. He also has a pronounced fondness for music with repetition at its core: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, the most mesmerising songs by The Velvet Underground, and the kind of pieces that are more about locked-in grooves than soaring melodies (e.g Aaron Neville’s Hercules, which he discovered about six years ago, and never let go).

Some of this is bound up with aspects of James’s autism. My last two posts have been about so-called sensory hypersensitivity, and the fact that he hears things in music that most people don’t – which might partly explain why some songs and musical moments become so addictive. There’s something going on here to do with a sort of thrilling familiarity, and the way James can insulate himself against sensory overload by seeking refuge in music he knows inside out. I sometimes wonder if some autistic people’s fondness for enclosed spaces might also be relevant: repetition, after all, is a kind of limitation, and it might provide a deep comfort that I can only imagine.

But here are two other suggestions: that millions and millions of people, both autistic and neurotypical, simply love musical repetition, and that we all like returning time and again to particular songs, because their allure never fades. In that, there is a deep kind of contentment: I think loads of us can empathise with what John Adams said about certain musical moments delivering the feeling that “the world was right and everything was together”, and how repetition amplifies exactly that sensation.

A lot of my listening habits are still based on playing songs on a regular basis –relentlessly! – for weeks at a time, and craving particular sections of them, something that a lot of musicians beautifully manipulate. Watch, for example, what happens in The War On Drugs’ euphoric performance of Under The Pressure at Glastonbury in 2023: a deliriously looping, repetitious breakdown that the crowd clearly luxuriates in (at 3:02), and then the great blissful explosion of the song’s full return at 4:55, which everyone was expectantly waiting for. To state the blindlngly obvious, this kind of dynamic also defines a huge amount of dance music, and the ecstatic moments delivered by rave culture.

In Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s an exploration of why this stuff happens, and the identification by neuroscientists of double dopamine rush from music people love – in response not just to key moments, but the sheer expectation of them. It illuminates one of music’s most reliable bits of magic – and how for me, listening with James has been a reminder of why songs are such a source of wonderment.

Bonus feature! In response to much people liked last week’s rendition of Autobahn, Here’s James on a huge church organ in Hinton Charterhouse, playing a song he listens to almost every day, sometimes at least four or five times: Shot By Both Sides by Magazine…

You can pre-order Maybe I’m Amazed here

Current listening!

Tracks: Strawberry Letter 23 by Shuggie Otis, 1971; Hi-Heel Sneakers by Tommy Tucker, 1964

Album:

Just As I Am by Bill Withers, 1971