Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] Mindy Peterson. And this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the ways music makes our lives better and spotlight the resources you can use to enhance your life with music. When people hear that I’m a podcaster and they hear what my podcast is about, I can’t tell you how many people ask me immediately, have you heard about that book, This is Your Brain on Music? Yes, I’ve heard of it, I love it. It was published almost 20 years ago. Its author has written four more bestselling books and just released a new book today called, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. I’m thrilled to have the author with me today, Doctor Daniel Levitin, to tell us about this new book. Doctor Levinson is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and musician. He is Founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at Minerva University in San Francisco, and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University. As a musician, he has performed with Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, Sting, Renée Fleming, and Neil Young, among others. He has produced and consulted on albums by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell. In fact, right before we started, he was telling me about some contacts here in the Minneapolis area related to Steely Dan and some of those productions that he’s been a part of. Congratulations on your book release, and welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Dan.
Daniel Levitin: [00:01:32] Thank you Mindy, I’m looking forward to being enhanced today.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:36] Well, I’m sure our conversation will be enhancing other people’s lives too. Tell us about your new book, what is it about and what prompted you to write it?
Daniel Levitin: [00:01:45] Well, you know, I’m glad you referenced This is Your Brain on Music. That book has been a great gift to me in that I wrote it not thinking that anybody would read it, and I was just so gratified when a number of musicians who I had known over the years, reached out and said they had read it and they found it of value. And you read it and oh yeah, when I wrote it in 2004. So I wrote it 20 years ago, and at that time I wanted to write about all the lovely and magnificent ways that music could enhance our health and wellbeing. But there just wasn’t enough good science then. So I wrote about other things instead. I wrote about what music does to your brain, and I wrote about musical memory and things like that. But as a scientist, I felt it was my obligation not to stray from what we knew, not to speculate. Sure. And so all this stuff that I wanted to talk about wasn’t available. But a funny thing happened on the way to 2024, which is that a whole bunch of researchers have come into the field, and we now have 20 more years of data on music is medicine.
Daniel Levitin: [00:03:01] And that’s what motivated me to write the book. Talk about an enhancing quality of music for injury and recovery from surgery and disease and illness, chronic pain, uh, treatment of diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis, but also just part of an overall wellness strategy. How can I keep feeling good even, you know, forget about the focus. On what? I’m not feeling good. How can I feel better and stay productive and happy?
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:32] Yeah. Well. And you, as you said, there’s been this explosion of research and scientific evidence confirming the efficacy of music and in use for, like you said, a whole range of, of conditions. But you mentioned in the book a lot of that science and research had not trickled down to the average reader. And so that was one of your motivations. And an impetus for writing this book is to just bring some of this evidence more to the masses. Is that accurate?
Daniel Levitin: [00:04:02] Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s it’s all stuck in all these findings I’m talking about are stuck in dusty journals in libraries, and nobody reads them. So. Sure. I always felt, Mindy, that science belonged to all of us, that it’s a public trust and that we scientists have an obligation to share what we know. And some of us do it, and some of us don’t. But I think all scientists should. It’s a it shouldn’t just be the province of somebody who makes their way to the corner of a university library or the National archives.
Mindy Peterson: [00:04:37] Well, I appreciate that. And I feel the same way about musicians. I feel that we all are called to be advocates for music and the benefits of music. And some of the reasons that you started this or wrote this book are some of the reasons I started this podcast is I would see all these little nuggets in the news about music’s power like helping Gabby Giffords relearn how to speak again after her shooting, that she survived. And that story of her shooting was so big in the news back, what, 11 or more years ago when that happened? What wasn’t huge in the news was that music therapy is what helped her relearn how to speak. That was kind of buried in one of those articles, and I remember seeing that sentence and being like, hey, wait a minute, like, this is really huge. Do people realize the power of music? And I feel like as musicians, we get it and we just assume other people do too, because of that curse of knowledge and and they don’t. I feel that’s our responsibility as musicians to educate people and help them understand the the power that music has both as a public service, because I really do feel it makes lives better. And as job security for musicians and music educators, you know, people need to know the value that music brings to our shared human existence. What music.
Daniel Levitin: [00:05:59] Do you. What instruments do you play?
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:01] I’m a pianist. Um. For sure. Primarily a pianist. I took a few years of violin when I was in high school, but I taught piano lessons for years and years before taking my job. Now, where? I work for a Steinway dealer here in Minneapolis. And a fantastic role. Yeah. So do you.
Daniel Levitin: [00:06:20] Have a Steinway at home?
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:21] I don’t I have a key. We’re also the Kawai dealer. Kawai is great. Yes, yes, yes. I’ve been really happy with it. And maybe someday I’ll have a Steinway. And maybe not. The Kawai is working out great for me.
Daniel Levitin: [00:06:34] Well, it’s interesting you mentioned the Gabby Giffords story because, uh, not only did they not mention that music was involved, but it’s very hard to find out how it worked. And so I spent a lot of time reading the primary papers and figuring out how it explained to the average reader, how is it that music helped somebody who couldn’t speak, speak again And some of it rested on my own research that I had done in the early part of the 2000 with brain scans. So it was it was a nice full circle for me to see that this thing I did in a lab that I, you know, I do what’s called basic science, where we’re just trying to figure out how things work. I don’t do translational science, which is like the development of drugs and treatments. Okay. But it’s fun to see that every once in a while, one of these things that started out as pure inquisitiveness ended up as a technique in the clinic.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:29] Definitely. One of my first podcast episodes guests was Gabby Giffords music therapist Megan Morrow, and she did a fantastic job of explaining in Layperson’s terms what happens, why music has this ability to have our brain create these new neural pathways as detours around the damaged areas of the brain, and she did an amazing job of describing that.
Daniel Levitin: [00:07:54] I’ve come to think of it a little differently than that in recent months, which is that because, you know, knowledge is always advancing. Yeah, we’ve got we’ve got particularly think of, um, think of the brain as a bunch of circuits like circuits in your house, you know, and you’ve got a circuit box and you’ve got wiring. And think of the neurons as wires, basically that hook up different parts of your brain. And, you know, if a wire or a circuit goes bad, the light in one room may go off, right? Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:28] I just blew a circuit the other day, in fact.
Daniel Levitin: [00:08:33] An apropos analogy today, then in Minneapolis, uh, and so, um, in the brain, we’ve got redundancies. We’ve got a lot of overlapping circuits so that if one of them blows a fuse, as it were, there’s something else to fill in. And we had shown Vinod Menon and my colleague and I at Stanford had shown back in the early 2000 that music and language use a lot of the same circuits. Well, that makes sense. Of course they would. They both certainly when when you’re listening, they’re both using the hearing sense. And when you’re singing or speaking, you’re using your your voice. They both have timing. They both have intonation. So the difference between a question and an answer is kind of like a melody. And so all these features are in common. And yet there are separate dedicated circuits for each that live in parallel. And the music circuits are older, evolutionarily speaking. They developed first as far as we know. So if the language circuits become damaged in cases of aphasia, you know, from a tumor or a stroke or a bullet to the head, right, they no longer function. But the redundant circuits will. And you can train those musical circuits and some of the language redundant ones. If they’re still there to express yourself in song. And then the brain retrains itself through a process called neuroplasticity. It rewires itself. It sends out new wires to take the place of the damaged one. So Gabby would be singing things like, I’d like a glass of water. But she couldn’t say I was right, you know, she couldn’t say it, but she could sing it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:22] Well, you mentioned that you feel scientists have a responsibility to share the work with the the masses. And I just really appreciate researchers and scientists like you who have the science background and can explain it, but also have that ability to articulate it in layperson’s terms in an engaging way, both verbally and in written form. Because, you know, let’s face it, we all have different strengths, and some people are incredible scientists and researchers. But they’re not going to be an engaging person to talk to on a on a podcast and explain things in layperson’s terms. So, I mean, I, all of us musicians really appreciate those of you out there who can do both.
Daniel Levitin: [00:11:08] I wish I could take credit for being that wonderful person you described, but I’m not that good at naturally at explaining things to the layperson. But I am a college professor and I teach undergraduates, and they’ve trained me. If they don’t understand something I’m saying, they they stop me and they make me say it again in a different way. And so I’m, I’m the the fortunate beneficiary of all these students who let me try out the material on them, sir.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:35] Well, we thank them. Yeah. Tell us about the title. How did you come up with the title? I think it has something to do with a Leonard Cohen song.
Daniel Levitin: [00:11:44] There’s a one of the most well known songs by Leonard Cohen. The great Canadian songwriter is Hallelujah. And it begins with the line I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord. And, um, it just it was such an evocative way to title a book, and it suggested that there was more. I was originally called the book Music as Medicine and Neuroscience Explorers, you know, one of the oldest healing arts or something like that, which is a very straightforward title. But the book, I think, is more poetic than that and has more digressions into art and theories of art and what it means to be human. And I hope, without giving it away, that at the end the reader understands what the secret court is and how they fit into it. And so I’m hoping the title will intrigue people, because, I mean, it has that all important word secret. Like, like you will learn some secret if you read the book. And I think you I mean, you’d be a better judge. I think there’s secrets in there.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:58] Absolutely, yes.
Daniel Levitin: [00:13:02] Well, and they won’t be secrets for long.
Mindy Peterson: [00:13:02] Good. Yes. We want lots of people reading this. We could have an episode on each of the chapters for sure. I mean, there’s so many chapters that cover music therapy’s efficacy for different situations. Um.
Daniel Levitin: [00:13:15] Oh, well, let’s not do that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:13:18] Well, we could and it would be super fascinating. We have had lots of podcast episodes covering a lot of these different, you know, music as an intervention with stuttering, with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, trauma and PTSD, dementia and Alzheimer’s, pain management, eating disorders, substance abuse. You know, there’s so many that you cover in the book that’s all fascinating. Since we have talked about a lot of those on this show. I’m going to kind of mine some of the other treasures in your book. Tell us a little bit about, um, you go into the neuroanatomy of music and what makes it so effective and powerful for this litany of situations and conditions. Talk to us a little bit about the neuroanatomy of music and why it’s so powerful.
Daniel Levitin: [00:14:07] Well, so by neuroanatomy, what we’re basically talking about is which parts of the brain, which anatomical parts of the brain are activated by music. And it’s complicated because music isn’t I mean, to begin with, I’m going to sound kind of professorial here, but let’s define our terms. Music is not one thing. It’s thousands of different things. It’s it’s drum circles. It’s Tuvan throat singing, it’s Gregorian chants, it’s Nine Inch Nails and it’s Taylor Swift and it’s Miles Davis, and it’s the acid jazz of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and it’s bluegrass. And so when we talk about music, what are we talking about? And are we talking about the rhythm or the precise pitches or the frequencies. Are there magical frequencies that yield certain effects? Are we talking about melodies, harmony, the vocal timbre, the instrumentation? So you can imagine how complicated this is. And, um, the short version of it is that by music, I’m considering anything that anybody intends as music. I’m not going to start saying, oh, I don’t think that’s music that just sounds like noise to me, you know? Which is what my parents said about the Beatles and the carpenters. Uh, and, you know, we did a survey recently where we asked people what genres they listened to when they had a transcendent experience of music. And I define transcendent as something that takes you outside of yourself and puts you in touch with a larger power, or makes you feel part of a larger social collective, or gives you spiritual thoughts. You know, any of the above. And I think my colleagues expected, oh, well, it’s going to be Mozart and Bach and maybe John Coltrane, but 17% of listeners said they had those experiences listening to hip hop.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:08] Oh, interesting.
Daniel Levitin: [00:16:10] Hip hop is the dominant music form and has been for 40 years.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:15] That’s what I’m told.
Daniel Levitin: [00:16:16] Yeah, for people my age and younger people like you, it may not seem that, but for for the younger people than either of us, it certainly is. And so who am I to say what music is? That’s not my job. Uh, rhythm is processed in different parts of the brain than melody, and instruments are processed in a different part than that. And it all comes together in a really extraordinary way in which we can simultaneously, we can choose whether to listen to the collective, Just let the music wash over us. Or as you know, as a musician, we can choose to listen to just one instrument. You can listen to a symphony orchestra and pick out just the violins, or just the French horns or not. And part of music’s power is that it’s so multidimensional, and there’s so much complexity to it that it allows us to, if we’re lucky, never tire of it. It remains engaging, and we can engage with it at an infinite range of levels. Mindy. So I can put it on in the background at a party and it becomes sonic wallpaper. Or I can sit in a darkened room with headphones and just listen intently and let my mind wander, or anything in between. Um, the healing power of music comes from this multifaceted nature of it, and the fact that it triggers a lot of different neurochemical Chemical systems and a lot of different brain activity that together help to fight off infections and boost the immune system and mood and relieve pain and all these other things.
Mindy Peterson: [00:18:04] You talk a lot in the book about neuroplasticity, and you say it’s the ability for the brain to be molded and formed through the changing of synaptic connections and the growth of neurons, dendrites and myelin sheaths. The most profound, and I’m quoting here, the most profound brain plasticity effects have been observed in professional musicians, and quality of life is markedly higher for people who learn an instrument. If that shatters your stereotype of the suffering artist, surely there are those that fit this description. But as a group, musicians are happier than non-musicians. End quote. And then you go in, you kind of do a deep dive on the difference that musicians experience. If they’re professional versus amateur. And I found this really fascinating because obviously we’ve we’ve all seen plenty of statistics and stories about professional musicians who have substance abuse, you know, alcohol and drug addiction, depression, mental health issues. They die young. So talk to us more about this seeming paradox. If music is so healthy, why do we see so many professional musicians with substance abuse and mental health issues?
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:21] And you sort of have a personal experience with this, too, because you’ve been both a professional musician for over a decade at a point in your life, and now as a scientist, your music is a little bit more of an amateur role in your life.
Daniel Levitin: [00:19:37] Yeah. Um, but I still get to play with professionals.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:41] Yeah, I say amateur. Somebody’s an amateur who’s playing with Rosanne Cash and Bobby McFerrin and Renee Fleming and so forth.
Daniel Levitin: [00:19:50] Yeah Um, And by the way, those three do not have any drug addiction problems or any difficulties. They’re wonderful people and amazing collaborators. But I think so. Music is helpful. It promotes a sense of agency that I can create something in the world, and creating something is a powerful mood booster and self-confidence builder. Um, most music occurs in the context of groups, so it’s pro-social and it teaches us patience and negotiation skills. And to play with someone else, you have to step outside yourself and think about what they’re going to do, and you’ve got to work off of it. Bobby. Of course, Bobby McFerrin is is the master at this? Sure. He’s like a sketch comedy artist who reacts rather than acts. Whatever I do, he reacts to it. Then I try to react to him and he tries to react to me. And it’s wonderful. It’s a conversation like you and I are having. Yeah. And he’s listening not just thinking of some nugget he can pull out that will impress me at some point. The difficulty, though, when you talk about professional musicians, is the life of a professional musician is stressful. You’re on. If you’re a touring musician, which most professionals are. You’re on the road a lot.
Daniel Levitin: [00:21:08] Many are on the road 150 or 200 days a year. You’re flipping across time zones. Your nights become your days. You know, performances might not end until midnight. And so you’re out of sync with the rest of the world. Meal times get kind of screwed up if you’re sleeping until noon, you know, because you didn’t get to sleep till four. Um, the pressures of playing, of trying to work your way up through clubs and concert halls where the the concert hall owners and the club owners don’t always treat you well. Sometimes they don’t pay you. Uh, you’ve got all this equipment you’re carting around. You’re worried about whether your next song is going to be good enough, or whether you’re going to be thought of as a has been, and all those pressures would apply to any job. They’re not unique to music, but any job that required constant travel, constant reevaluating yourself, I would I would say it certainly applies to touring actors, but it probably applies to traveling salespeople and to people who are climbing the corporate ladder and having to travel a lot for their jobs. And, you know, all those things are not it’s not the fault of music. It’s the fault of the music business.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:25] That’s a perfect distinction to make. Yeah, yeah. And if if someone is a professional musician, any failure that they experienced is often pretty public.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:37] And kind of criticism of their performance or work is often published in the news. And so, yeah, it tends to be And any creative, I would say, is more susceptible to having their identity and self-worth wrapped up a little bit more in their creation than typical jobs or other vocations. So that can all be pretty stressful for professional musicians who aren’t just doing this as amateurs or as a as a hobby.
Daniel Levitin: [00:23:13] There are professional musicians, many, many professional musicians who have worked it out. The number of people who have the drug problems and the spiraling out of control, and the suicide or intentional or unintentional suicide. Self-destructive. It’s really a minor number, but you’re right. It’s outsized compared to the rest of the population, perhaps since, well, the Kurt Cobain’s and Janis Joplin’s are and Amy Winehouse’s are well publicized. But most of the musicians I know, even at the highest levels, are not plagued by those problems. They’re really quite together. And in fact, I’m thinking, you know, a few of them are just miraculous examples of humans.
Daniel Levitin: [00:23:58] I’m looking at this gold record behind me that Stevie Wonder gave me for a something we worked on together. And um, I realized this is a podcast so nobody can see it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:10] I can since we’re on a video call. Yeah, but yeah, nobody else.
Daniel Levitin: [00:24:14] I have this framed award here that I look at because it doesn’t remind me that we sold a lot of records. It reminds me of what an amazing man Stevie is and how I aspire to be like that. He’s so warm and generous and he’s spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical and all at the same time. It’s like he’s one of the most perfectly balanced people I’ve ever met.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:42] Wow.
Daniel Levitin: [00:24:43] And it’s an extraordinary thing to think that, you know, if the human race can produce people like that who live to to touch other people and help other people. People like that or Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama. Uh, you know, yeah, maybe there’s hope for us after all.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:00] I love that you talk in the book about prevention and the brain benefits of music training later in life. One of the quotes from the book, you say older adult musicians, whether amateur or professional, show much smaller declines in processing speed, and their nonverbal, auditory memory and verbal memory remain stronger. Musicianship also lowers the odds of developing mild cognitive impairment and dementia. End of the quote there. So if somebody’s listening to this and thinking, well, I kind of missed the boat here because I’m halfway through my life, I’m maybe in the last quarter of my life, as my dad tends to say, uh, how late is too late? How much music training is needed before brain benefits show up. And how long do the benefits last?
Daniel Levitin: [00:25:53] So this comes out of my previous book, Successful Aging. A lot of the research and its recast here, with some new research sprinkled on top. And the short answer is it’s never too late. What you’re trying to do is build up cognitive reserve. And think of this in terms of athletes. Let’s take a weightlifter who can maybe bench press £500. There are people who can do that. I can’t do that. But even on a bad day with a cold and a sprained arm, somebody who could bench press £500 can probably bench press £200. I can’t do £200 on my best day. They’ve got physical muscle, muscular reserve. Right. And so the equivalent is cognitive reserve. Build up as many skills as you can, particularly skills that involve the motor system and some sort of feedback between your body and brain. And then, as the inevitable slowing of aging occurs and the not inevitable but possible effects of dementia and Alzheimer’s set could set in the reserve means that the symptoms of the brain decline may not show up for years or decades later. You can mask Alzheimer’s with cognitive reserve. And right now, since we don’t have a cure for Alzheimer’s, the best you could do is hope that it doesn’t show up until much later.
Daniel Levitin: [00:27:23] I think of Glen Campbell touring when he was in the throes of Alzheimer’s, and I’ve seen his brain scans. Half of his brain was offline while he was performing, but still, with that, he was the best guitarist in the country with half his brain missing. And that’s cognitive reserve. That’s the tens and tens of thousands of hours of playing and practice that he did. And you’d put it, they’d put him out on stage and he wouldn’t know what city he was in. He wouldn’t know where he was in the set. He might play the same song 2 or 3 times in a row because his memory was gone. But once he started playing, he remembered every lick, every chord, not every word. He’d miss verses, but he had an iPad with the lyrics on it. But that’s extraordinary. And so it really never is too late. Um, I don’t know any musicians who started at. Well, I do know one. I know a musician who started at 80. My grandmother.
Mindy Peterson: [00:28:20] Oh, really?
Daniel Levitin: [00:28:21] My grandmother had never played music before, and when she was 80, she had she had been an immigrant to this country, as many people are. And, um, she told my mother and me that she would wake up every morning and sing God Bless America because she was so glad she was here. Wow. In the way that immigrants love the country, often more than natives. People who were born here, born here, we might tend to take it for granted or see the cracks in the seams. She just loved America and God Bless America was written by an immigrant, Irving Berlin. So my mother and I bought her a little keyboard at RadioShack, an electronic keyboard, and we put masking tape on the keys with numbers one, two, three, four, five, six so that she could play the melody.
Mindy Peterson: [00:29:12] Very cool.
Daniel Levitin: [00:29:13] And by her 81st birthday, she had worked out a rudimentary left hand accompaniment, and by her 82nd birthday, she’d removed the tape altogether. And she played that song every morning, and until she died at 97.
Mindy Peterson: [00:29:28] Oh, wow. What a touching story. That’s awesome. Going back to Hallelujah now, I’ve heard that there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord. Going back to David, you mentioned how David played for Saul in biblical times and it’s more a recent feature of Western society that we’ve separated healing and music. And I’ll quote here from your book, we tend to see healing as the province of doctors and music as entertainment. Perhaps it is time to reunite two of the most intimate parts of our lives. Scientific advances in the past ten years have provided a rational basis for this reunification, opening a dialogue between healthcare workers, health insurance companies and all the rest of us. The research allows us to take what had been speculation, anecdote and observations untethered from evidence and join them in equal partnership with prescription drugs, surgeries, medical procedures, psychotherapy and various forms of treatment that are mainstream and evidence based. So end quote. And then one final quote that I’ll share. I heard there was a secret chord. We’ll show you. What we know, how it can be explained and how we can harness the potential of music for healing and for staving off disease in the first place, for relieving pain, for helping us look forward and reimagine our lives. So I could give you lots of favorite quotes, but anything else that you want to say to listeners before we wrap things up with a quota?
Daniel Levitin: [00:31:07] I love the way you synthesize that at the end. That is what the book’s about. Um, there’s a QR code that will accompany the book, and we’ve created a playlist of all the songs mentioned in the book, like 300 of them in order. And you listeners, readers of the book can listen along on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:31] Love it. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dan. I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with musical ending a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. I understand you have a song that you’ll be sharing with us today. Tell us about your song, There Is Delight.
Daniel Levitin: [00:31:53] Well, so I’ve been writing songs since I was 18, and I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve had two songwriting mentors across the last 15 years. One is Rodney Crowell, one of my favorite writers and a multiple Grammy winning songwriter, Americana style, a little bit of country. And also Joni Mitchell, who sat down with me over a series of dinners and helped me to think about how to approach the writing of my songs. And with that, as a background, I felt like even though I’d been writing songs for 50 years, 48 years, even though I’ve been writing songs for decades, the ones in the last 15 years are feeling better, more, more authentic, and more, um like what I want to say. And the story of there is Delight is that for my book, Successful Aging, I went to visit people who were aging successfully in their 80s and 90s and really functioning at their peak. So I spoke to people like Jane Goodall and Secretary of State George Shultz, who is 97, and the Dalai Lama, who had just published his 125th book at age 84. So I went to India to visit him, and in anticipation of visiting him, I read a few more of his books that I hadn’t read.
Daniel Levitin: [00:33:21] And his teaching is all about joy and gratitude. And so I had this phrase in my head there is delight, there is delight. And I got stuck, and I only had the verses, and I was thinking of the Hallelujah song by Leonard Cohen and heard there was a secret chord that David played when he pleased the Lord. And then I was thinking about praying and how when we pray, we’re basically sending a song or a missive out there and not really expecting a literal answer. So the verse was there is delight in singing, though none hears beside the singer. There is delight. A later verse is there’s delight in calling out your name, though you don’t hear. But I was stuck. I didn’t have a chorus. And then after spending time with His Holiness, there was just something magical about it. And I went back to the little hotel room I was staying in at his complex, and the chorus just came to me all at once. And it was it was just this song that that, um, Rosanne Cash talks about how every once in a while you just pull up, put up your catcher’s mitt, and the song lands in it. And it was like that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:34:40] Wow. What a story.
Daniel Levitin: [00:34:42] There’s another fun story, which is that when we were recording the song in the studio. We had the whole song done, and in listening back I thought, oh, it really needs a piano solo. And so we had a piano player on the session and he great piano player, he played on the whole album. The album is Sex and Math, by the way.
Mindy Peterson: [00:34:59] Oh, do I want to ask about the title of that?
Daniel Levitin: [00:35:02] Well, it’s just two things that seem unrelated, but, you know, they’re both nature. They’re both, you know.
Mindy Peterson: [00:35:08] Yep.
Daniel Levitin: [00:35:09] Uh, so sex and math. Well, and it also invoked the idea that there was, there can be the logical and the sensual and that they don’t need to be separated.
Mindy Peterson: [00:35:19] Okay.
Daniel Levitin: [00:35:20] So the piano player who was terrific just he wasn’t playing what I wanted to hear, uh, or what he wanted to hear. And so we were kind of stumped. And we had this, uh, recording engineer who’d been working throughout the whole album all week, who had been a trained pianist at Oberlin and could not get a job as a pianist. And so was working as a recording engineer. He was a fantastic recording engineer, and during our lunch breaks he’d go out and, you know, just sort of, you know, to kill time. He’d play the piano. And I liked his touch. And I said to him, hey, you know, you’ve been listening to this song now for a few hours as we record it. Would you like to try the piano solo? And he sat down and he just played it in one take. It was awesome.
Mindy Peterson: [00:36:13] Oh my word.
Daniel Levitin: [00:36:14] It was just awesome. He played over the song. He played the solo, he played it out. And he had these beautiful, angular lines that invoked Chick Corea, but not as an imitation of Chick Corea as his own interpretation of Chick Corea. And I just I thought he was amazing. Wow.
Mindy Peterson: [00:36:36] Wow. Well, I hope he found work as a pianist at some point. That’s awesome. So here’s a little bit of There Is Delight.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai