Melody for a Memory: 5 Songs About Being Overtaken by a Song
This weeks songs are from Allan Sparhawk & Trampled by Turtles, Preoccupations, Merle Haggard, Blur, and David Byrne & Brian Eno
“Certain music has the ability, at least temporarily, to fill the void, making us feel whole…We feel complete when we listen to music we love, while being guided towards the goodness of things.” - Nick Cave
I had “Add Some Music to Your Day,” from last week’s entry fresh in my mind while immersing myself in the excellent new album from Allan Sparkhawk & Trampled by Turtles, and seeing the above comment from Nick Cave. So this all came together rather quickly.
Music has a transformative, transformational capability. I’m pretty sure we’ve touched on this before. Music can paint a picture in your mind. Songs can change how you feel, reset your mood, captivate you.
Some pretty well-known songs touch on this idea—of a song-within-a-song, or a melody taking hold of one’s thoughts: “Piano Man,” “Hallelujah,” “Bittersweet Symphony,” almost like they’re songs being written about themselves.
Here are 5 songs that touch on the power of a melody.
“I’m having to accept the possibility that maybe the universe is different from what I thought, from what I was taught about our spirits being eternal. Maybe there is nothing – and this has been the first time I’ve had to look at that possibility. But just in the past couple of months…I’m starting to believe again that there’s an eternal nature to our beings, that we somehow are more connected with magic and mysticism in the universe than we realize.” - Alan Sparhawk
Alan Sparhawk & Trampled by Turtles - “Too High”
I’ve always thought Allan Sparhawk had one of the best voices in modern music. I first heard of Low with 2007’s Drums & Guns, and his vocals on “Murderer” are menacing and cool, suiting the subject of the song. The last two Low albums before Mimi Parker’s death - Double Negative (2018) and Hey What (2021) — buried, fractured, and distorted that voice. Sparkhawk’s first solo album White Roses, My God (2024) followed that trajectory, taking his voice into alien noises and autotune ramblings. It seemed he’d lost any sense of who he was as a person and an artist, or maybe just wanted to hide. His friends and fellow Minnesotans Trampled by Turtles extended an open invitation to join them on stage any time he felt compelled to do so, which he did throughout 2023. That gradually turned into a desire to record together, hence the mesmerizing new album.
Sparhawk’s voice is back with an immense clarity. Instead of his voice, what gets fractured and distorted is the instrumentation from Trampled by Turtles. They play less like a strum-heavy Midwestern bluegrass band and more like an avant-garde string sextet. The mix of the two creates a rich dynamic—it’s emotional and artful, but doesn’t feel heavy, dark, or inaccessible. It’s the first album in a while that has struck hard on the first listen. “Too High” is pensive and static until the song pushes him through dwelling on a memory, and gets to the point, where the music breaks open with a sense of deliverance.
“You put the words to a melody
And try to make it fit
Sometimes it kills you, but it sets you free
It cuts right through it”
Preoccupations - “Unconscious Melody”
Preoccupations were born out of the dissolution of the Alberta post-punk band Women—a break-up that followed an on-stage fight. Women lead singer Patrick Flegel now records and performs as Cindy Lee. Cindy Lee kept the lo-fi elements, and the rest of the group took the angular post-punk to form Preoccupations.
“Unconscious Melody,” was included on their first release, when the band was doing business as Viet Cong. It’s Bowie and Joy Division and the Fall all at once—a song about songs appearing in dreams with the shadings of a little bit of nightmare in too. Plus it’s got a razor sharp kick-in-the-door pre-chorus. 2025’s Ill at Ease shows the band evolving towards more of a New Order sound, which I have no complaints about. It’s just that “Unconscious Melody” sounds like a song that was recorded in late 70s/early 80s England, and Ill at Ease is more like a band paying tribute to that era.
“I had had the idea for some time to make a record like this, but until I met Booker, I wasn’t really sure how I could do these songs, ’cause they’re really complicated, and they have a lot of chords in them, and I needed someone like Booker to write and arrange it, ’cause I couldn’t write this stuff down for my guys…There’s this old saying: ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’” - Willie Nelson
Merle Haggard - “Sing Me Back Home”
Merle Haggard was famously among the prisoners in the audience for Johnny Cash’s performance, recorded and released as At Folsom Prison. In his time in jail, he was close with a number of death row inmates. For almost any other country singer, a song like “Sing Me Back Home,” would be contrived and hokey, but for Haggard it was written from experience. Setting aside the grim circumstances, the sentiment is all about the power of a song to transport someone to a better place.
Blur - “Music is My Radar”
The 90s Oasis/Blur rivalry was largely contained to the UK, as was Blur’s success. “Song 2” maybe omnipresent at sporting events, their self-titled album sold as many copies in the US as Duncan Sheik. Rather than a Beatles/Stones sort of rivalry, in the US it seems more like a Beatles/Lonny Donegan type thing. I didn’t get Blur then, but I’ve come around a bit. One thing that drew me back was Damon Albarn’s collaboration with Tony Allen, “Go Back” which has a popping groove and great chorus. I’ve wanted to get it in here at some point, so you have it now as a bonus. What I’ve since come around to find is Albarn’s appreciation for the Afrobeat drummer goes further back.
To hit on the Oasis/Blur rivalry again —it’s not like there was much overlap in sound at all. If “Music is My Radar” has a similar sound to anything, it would fit in very well on Radiohead’s In Rainbows. It’s got the frenetic drumming-with-twigs, muffled guitar lines, fuzzed out bass, and then all sorts of knobs and whizzing feedback enter the mix just as we’ve come to expect from Radiohead. Albarn sings about how music extracts many different feelings and modes for him. In this particular case, it gets him dancing, Tony Allen in particular.
David Byrne & Brian Eno - “Strange Overtones”
Off of the long-time collaborators’ Everything That Happens Will Happen Today from 2008 “Strange Overtones” is as close as both have come to bringing back Talking Heads’ pop-inflected grooves. As Byrne described the project, Eno sent him a batch of instrumental compositions; he picked ones he liked and sang over them with minimal changes to the tracks and they traded tracks back and forth over email. If that’s accurate, “Strange Overtones” sounds like a perfect near-accident. The structure and interplay of Byrne’s vocal—and especially that gospel-tinged chorus—are wonderfully bright. One notable overdub: the guitar solo that sets the table for one final chorus is by the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones. This is a great summer song. The lyrics sound like Byrne is commenting on the tracks Eno provided him, and singing what he’s thinking as he’s singing it.
Your song still needs a chorus
I know you'll figure it out
The rising of the verses
A change of key will let you out
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs:
Wow - that Alan Sparhawk/Trampled by Turtles album is really astounding.