David Byrne on How Music Works

Music tells us things — social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies — in way that other art forms can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from a combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that communicate, as has been said by others, in ways that bypass the reasoning centers of the brain and go straight to our emotions. Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world — people we have never met, sometimes people who are no longer alive — and it tells it in a non-destructive way. Music embodies the way those people think and feel: we enter into new worlds — their worlds — and through our perception of those worlds might not be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.