Senses working overtime: on heightened perception, music... and autism

In Television's Marquee Moon, Tom Verlaine's lyrics evoke what psychologists call Sensory Hypersensitivity - the key to an overlooked part of musical creativity

Jan 27, 2025

How to get from the aspects of autism that involve sensory processing to a near-perfect piece of music released in early 1977 by a quartet based in New York? Bear with me…

One of the most curious sub-plots in the history of our understanding of autism centres on the sensory differences that most autistic people experience. Some of these are a matter of the limiting of sensory inputs, but others involve an often amazing intensity that can run across sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.

For a long time, they were acknowledged as an apparent part of autism, but not included in any definitions of it - until 2015, when the relevant official medical manual (the USA’s unpleasantly-titled Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) made them one of the criteria for a diagnosis.

In my son James’s case, all this is most vividly manifested in his relationship with sound.

On the downside, he has a profound aversion to such everyday irritants as dog-barks, police sirens and vacuum cleaners. Extraneous noise in general can be problematic (it is for me: I have an ingrained loathing of whistling, people who tap their fingers on train tables, and extractor fans in hotel bathrooms). But for James, this sensitivity also has a huge, massively positive side: his astounding musical memory, and the fact that he plainly hears things in songs and pieces that most people don’t. In the right situations, in fact, this fuses with his heightened visual perception to create experiences that seem absolutely incredible. Gigs are the best example: a lot of the relevant stories are told in the book.

Observing all this and understanding the meaning of neurodiversity has taught me one key lesson: that 1)What psychologists call Sensory Hypersensitivity is part of what makes some people creative, and 2)The intensity of sensory perception wildly varies among human beings. I think most of us know those things as a matter of instinct, but in my case, reading about musicians – and meeting and interviewing quite a few – has only confirmed them.

While I was writing Maybe I’m Amazed, I tried to think of particular songs that might express some of this stuff, but I kept drawing a blank. The basic point shades too easily into the kind of altered states that are delivered by drugs: there’s a flavour of hypersensitivity to everything from The Move’s I Can Hear The Grass Grow and The Who’s I Can See For Miles to the most lysergic examples of electronic dance music, but they tend to draw on things that are seemingly inseparable from chemical refreshment, which rather gets in the way.

One song really does it, though. The title track from Television’s Marquee Moon evokes a dazzling, overwhelming, slightly anxious experience of everyday reality, and the way some of us feel the onset of night. It contains one of the few extended guitar solos that is both fascinating and thrilling; revisiting it always involves the expectation of the moment when it snaps from frantic, almost panicked exploration to the wondrous ascending passages that begin the song’s gradual conclusion (at 7:20). The fact that it lasts over ten minutes is a big part of the spell it casts. And for me – and, just to make this clear, this is only my interpretation – its lyrics and music go deep into sensory hypersensitivity, via some perfectly-written poetry:

I remember
How the darkness doubled
I recall
Lightning struck itself
I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else

There are some weeks when I still play Marquee Moon every day, and the images Tom Verlaine conjures up – of a Cadillac, a graveyard, and the man he encounters “down at the tracks” – form something simultaneously strange and familiar, and completely compelling. When it was first released in 1977, some very acute writing captured exactly those qualities. The great Vivien Goldman, for example, nailed Verlaine’s brilliance in her review in Sounds:

“Verlaine isn't tied to being literal. He leans more to evocation; magic lantern shows flicker from vista to vista. The vistas in this case remind me of a camera moving very slowly over a complex Hieronymous Bosch painting. A twilight hinterland where Philip Marlowe lurks in rain-lashed dark doorways, and giant waves flood the hall of madmen in Fuller's Shock Corridor. Sometimes Tom Verlaine wakes up from a dream and can't remember where he is.”

Last summer, I read a brilliant piece by Alex Abramovich in the London Review of Books. It was ostensibly about the 50,000-plus books Verlaine accumulated before his death in 2023, but what he wrote was really an exploration of what a singular mind Verlaine had. It quoted his sometime creative partner Richard Hell, who said that “the world seemed incomprehensibly weird to him”, something that attracted Verlaine to “all kinds of irrational explanations for that, from things like flying saucers, to extreme conspiracy theories, to obscure religious mysticism.” It covered his intense obsession with the valves in old-school amplifiers, and how he insisted on different ones for songs in particular keys. But the anecdote that really stood out came from Jimmy Rip, one of Television’s later members.

It was about a soundcheck before a show. “Tom stopped,” Rip recalled. “He said: ‘I hear a buzzing.’ We didn’t hear anything but Tom insisted. We looked for the buzz and we finally found it, way, way in the back of the room. You had to be underneath it to hear it, and Tom noticed it from the stage.”

Some musicians can do this. Some non-musicians can, too. Those stories about people who are able to tell if a turntable is a quarter-revolution too slow, or hear the rustle of a leaf 200 yards down the street are true. Acknowledging it doesn’t have to involve the crass business of posthumously speculating if this or that person was on the spectrum: it’s just a window on to the wildly different ways human beings process reality, why intense perceptions open the way to feats of artistic magic… and what autism can teach us about all this, and so much more.

Pre-order Maybe I’m Amazed here

Maybe I'm Amazed

Discussion about this post