The Devil’s in the Drum Fills: The Pleasures of Listening Closely to Music

Every person has a song where they know every second by heart. They know where the exact beat when bass-line shifts; the precise moment when you’re able to gain a glimpse into the recording studio via a staticky whoop. We’ve all had moments when the rhythm seems to flow from our air-drumming fingers seamlessly like we are plugged into the speaker, electrified by 240 volts of energy. Many people carry more than one of those songs, holding onto the muscle memory of every tap and pluck from their chosen tracks, periods and genres within their bodies. Even outside of the melodies that carry significance to us, songs can elicit the deepest of responses from the gut or the soul. It’s this urge, and the chase we all take part in to grab those moments of pure bliss, that makes close listening such an enjoyable experience. It also fulfils an internal desire to know everything, at least in my case. This sounds like a sweeping and hyperbolic statement, but an important piece of the process. When I discover an artist that I truly love, creating a profound and all-encompassing connection with the music becomes imperative at that moment: I must know everything and anything to do with the artist, the songs, albums, tours, covers. Hours are spent watching music videos, Tiny Desk Concerts and live concerts; reading reviews, studying the minutia of the cover art until it feels like a second skin. The voices and melodies emanating from my laptop penetrate far within, and I sit with my heart beating stronger than normal as if the content I’m devouring is a line of coke to the system. It is a perfect high, a pure euphoria where the people you’re studying and listening to become more than strangers.

I was 10 when my teacher pulled me aside after music class to congratulate me for pointing out a shift in a melody that we were learning. This might have been an insignificant moment for her, soon to be forgotten, but has remained in my memory. I was so confused - there was no way that others hadn’t noticed, so why did no one see the importance of the change? The beauty within that tiny transformation of the refrain; how it immediately gave hope and interest to a tune that was, quite frankly, dull. As an adult, my delight in small details has become more pedantic, which led me to the journalist Grace Spelman’s Instagram. Here was a young woman who was talking about these singular moments within music, on social media, with the same unadulterated gusto that I had. Her content further strengthened the thrill I would get when noticing a nuance within a song, now solidified within the world of real, journalistic music appreciation. To a person not as obsessed as I, the intensity of feeling that a small drum fill can bring is perhaps odd, but I believe that it enhances the bond between the listener and the music. During the first 58 seconds of Boney M’s “Rasputin”, I sit waiting in anticipation for the drum fill right before the melody kicks in. It is like a dam breaking, a wave of tension dissipating, in those two seconds. Those two beats are integral, a melodic blasting cap that sends a seismic change out ahead of it. In “Gimme Shelter”, The Rolling Stones created a portal into 1969 by the simple act of refusing to edit out noise from the studio. On her third belt of the refrain, Merry Clayton’s voice cracks on the word ‘murder’, eliciting a joyous ‘woo’ from Mick Jagger, which can be heard clear as day on the record. It is in precisely that moment when the song morphs - another energy shift that leads the remaining few minutes into a world of crackling tension; of unity and a back-and-forth between Clayton and Jagger. We are there, sitting in the booth at Olympic Studios, watching the duo slip and slide around each other. In Heart’s “Magic Man”, Ann Wilson’s hypnotic vibrato is mimicked seamlessly by the following guitar riff, as if the waves of organic sound birthed a secondary metallic child. There’s a fusion both within the music and with the listener, creating a beautiful Frankenstein of man and metal. It’s finding those small details which fuel that artificial high of knowing something that others don’t, of getting closer to knowing everything about this piece of art.

Noticing changes within a pattern is inherent. Our semantic memories are wired to recognise a change in the chain of information we take in, creating connections between that information and our memories. In relation to music, a change within an established melody will pique interest both subconsciously and consciously, like a small zap of electricity directed at a brain that’s become lazy with familiarity. These changes don’t have to be big. There are few words to describe the all-encompassing thrill when you hear a singer’s voice break under the strain and power of their emotion, or a drumbeat hit just slightly louder than its counterparts so that it feels as if it is breaking through your chest. In those small moments, the reality of the situation you find yourself in becomes obsolete. It is no longer just you, with headphones in on a bus. There is an inextricable fusing of souls as if the artist is placing their rawest feelings in your hands as you sit and wait for the next stop. A song stops being simply a song and instead becomes an extension of you - at that moment, you own the emotions expressed within those fleeting few minutes. This is also why watching a live performance, whether in person or via recording, is so intensely, wantonly satisfying. It is near impossible not to become a mirror image of the person on your screen, like a sort of voyeuristic puppet. How could your body not writhe and react the same way as the artist does, when you both are experiencing the feeling of euphoria as the song flows out from you?

As the great Frank Zappa said, ‘Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.’ The absolute joy in those moments of listening are those decorations, making life just a little bit more exciting.

Photography by Seher RoyChowdhury