I chose to practice repeated listening with Summertime, written by George Gershwin and performed by Lena Horne. I listened for about 45 minutes straight, and the whole experience was much more interesting than I anticipated. As soon as even the second listen, the overall tone of the piece appeared to transition from grandiose to more intimate and melancholic. Horne’s singing stood out nearly immediately, as she often pronounced words in ways I didn’t expect. But as time passed, I became accustomed to it, and instead all that stood out in her voice were the long full notes she held at the end of each phrase. As time passed, I began to notice small moments, such as when the band went from a swing feel to straight eighths to perform a horn lick, and then back to swing. With each repetition of the song, the intro served as a signifier as another turn around the carousel, each time I heard it I thought “well I’m about to go a lever deeper,” but at some point, maybe half an hour into the experiment, this seemed to wear off, my subconscious appeared to completely accept it’s new reality of only hearing this song for the indeterminate future, and who can blame it, it’s a pretty good song.

The beauty of a song such as Summertime is that there is simply too much going on in the mix to fully appreciate each element on first listen, same goes for a large majority of modern music. This shouldn’t overwhelm the listener, but instead excite them, as the complexity and layered instrumentation gives the song more replay value. There’s not much like the feeling of noticing a tiny detail in a song after hearing it countless times, I recently felt that while listening to Roses by jazz-hip-hop group Manwolves. The outro of the song is structured around a wonky horn lick that feels completely disconnected from the rest of the song, but if you’re listening closely, you can hear a lone trumpet playing the same lick earlier in the verses. Tiny details like this really show that the artist really cares about the music they’re making, and as a listener and fan, that means a lot. What repeated listening reveals most to the listener is how much of the music is left at the surface to be noticed by everybody, and what tiny details the artist sneaks in to make the music any little bit better.