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Most of us could effortlessly construct a list of our favorite songs, of songs that just make us feel joyful, or comforted, or spiritual, that remind us of who we are, who we loved, of groups we belong to. When I ask people to do this in my laboratory, it is always surprising to see how diverse these lists are. Music is large. It is made by as many different types of people, with as many different backgrounds, as there are listeners. New forms of music are being invented and evolving from earlier forms every day. And each new song is a link in a millenialong chain of evolutionary enhancements to previous song building—slight alterations in the “genetic structure” of one song lead us to a new one.

Some songs celebrate a particular individual, but then become enhanced (or diluted) by overapplication and overgeneralization. Anyone named Maria or Michelle in the 1960s (think Bernstein and Beatles) or Alison or Sally in the 1970s (think Elvis Costello and Eric Clapton) knows what it is like to be accosted by the song bearing your name, mentioned by a friend or new acquaintance intoxicated by his own wit at having made this childishly simple connection.

Anyone who has the lack of common sense to actually sing you the song with your name in it suffers from the doubly foolish notion that she was the first one to think of doing so. My own past has been bothered, annoyed, and taunted by endless choruses of “Danny Boy” or “Daniel” (Elton John), by people expecting me to howl at their cleverness. Steely Dan have made it a habit, a fashion even, to elevate main characters with uncommon names like Rikki, Josie, and Dupree. But the rarer the name, of course, the more exuberant is the tormentor. I have actually known people named Maggie Mae, Roxanne, Chuck E., and John- Jacob (think Rod Stewart, the Police, Rikki Lee Jones, and an old children’s song), and they are astonished when people sing these songs to them as though no one has ever thought to do this before.

Friendship songs like “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” and “Tobacco Road” legitimized and banded together tens of thousands of high school (or even junior high school) students who were otherwise marginalized at the fringes of their school, engaging in an illegal but oh- it- seems- so- cool activity. School songs and national anthems are an extension of this banding together song on increasingly larger scales, the ultimate perhaps being songs uniting the entire world, such as the Michael Jackson/Lionel Richie composition “We Are the World.” This sort of group formation and reinforcement finds its expressions in songs of friendship, and there is evidence that this type of song served a very important function throughout human history.

Love songs also bind people together; they express a love desired, a love found, or a love lost. They reflect a bond powerful enough to make people do things that are not always in their own best, personal interest:

When a man loves a woman
Spend his very last dime
Trying to hold on to what he needs
He’d give up all his comforts
And sleep out in the rain
If she said that’s the way
It ought to be.

Why does music have such power to move us? Pete Seeger says it is because of the way that medium and meaning combine in song, the combination of form and structure uniting with an emotional message.

“Musical force comes from a sense of form; whereas ordinary speech doesn’t have quite that much organization. You can say what you mean, but similarly with painting or with cooking, or other arts, there is a form and design to music. And this becomes intriguing, it becomes something you can remember. Good music can leap over language barriers, and barriers of religion and politics.”

The powerful mix of emotion and cultural evolution in our musical brains produced diversity, power, even history. And it has done it in six definable ways.

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