Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

We've all sat listening to music and thought to ourselves, what does this song mean?

What's the singer of the band trying to say? Sometimes it's nothing. It's just a bunch of words

strung together in a way that sounds and feels fun.

Other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing

that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time. More, maybe it didn't.

I mean, a lot of songs are written in altered states, right? A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that's supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener.

There have been many times would have asked a singer, what does this song mean?

And their answer is, well, what does it mean to you?

Whatever you say is the right answer.

Okay, I get it. It's art. Art is supposed to be

open to personal interpretation. When you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring,

who cares what the initial intent was, if there even was one? All that matters is that the song

somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that's

difficult or even impossible to quantify or describe.

Then again, some songs have a very specific point.

They tell a story or they're inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer

was trying to capture what he or she

felt and saw. And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves.

Something happened for that song to be born. What was it? And what were the circumstances,

the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life.

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