The Music That Brings You to Tears

I'm gonna walk with my granddaddy.
And he'll match me step for step
And I'll tell him how I missed him
Every minute since he left.
Then I'll hug his neck.

 I tear up every time. 

There's also the song "Walls" by Tom Petty. I was listening to it right before my mom died, and I knew that I would never be able to hear it the same way again. These particular lyrics made me think of her:  

And some things are over

Some things go on

And part of me you carry

Part of me is gone

But you got a heart so big

It could crush this town

And I can't hold out forever

Even walls fall down

But those songs were about the words. 

Over the weekend, I experienced something entirely different. I think it was Friday night, and I was scrolling Instagram before bed. I was already kind of frustrated about something, so my emotional state wasn't exactly at its best. I love watching old performances from some of my favorite bands from the 19''90s on that particular app, so my algorithm feeds me a lot of '90s music-adjacent videos. 

Let me back up here and say that Pearl Jam was one of my mom's favorite bands. She knew more about their music and each band member than anyone with good sense should, and she loved to share those tidbits to the point that my dad and I would roll our eyes and mock her for having a crush on Eddie Vedder. She would listen to their music over and over again. She was also quite possibly the only person on the planet who understood most of the lyrics.  

I remember one time when I was about 13 or 14, two of the hottest teenage guys in my town — guys every girl I knew had a crush on, including myself — were in a local grocery store parking lot, blasting "Yellow Ledbetter." My mom took it upon herself to approach them and talk about the music with them. I was mortified and hurried to the car, where I tried to sink down into the floorboard.  

I laugh about it now. The truth is that over the last year or so, Pearl Jam has grown on me. I never hated them or anything, but no one wants to like the same music your parents do when you're growing up. I've also spent a lot of time doing work outside this summer, and the 90s Alternative station on Pandora has kept me company through that. It plays a lot of Pearl Jam, including some songs I wasn't really familiar with. I enjoy them now. 

So, back to Friday night, I'm on Instagram, and I run across this Brazilian singer named Rafa Bettu. I know nothing about this guy other than his bio says "Voice. Truth. Feeling. I sing what I cannot always put into words," and he appears to be pretty young. He does a lot of '90s grunge-style covers, particularly Pearl Jam, and I'm thinking, okay, Pearl Jam is not one of those bands you can really cover, so it's probably not that good. 

Then I hit play on one of his videos. 

Oh my gosh. I was blown away. I actually shared it with my friend and colleague here, Chris Queen, and my dad the next day and said, "I think this guy does Pearl Jam better than Pearl Jam does."  

He has about 77 videos of himself singing on Instagram, and that night, I went through every single one. And I cried the entire time. It wasn't the lyrics — I'd heard these songs a million times — but there was something so pure and raw and emotional about his voice that it just touched me in a way few musicians ever have. And I wanted so badly to share it with my mom. I think she would have loved him.   

All weekend, I've been thinking: Isn't it wild how music can simply move you to tears for no apparent reason? It can do the opposite too. There have been many times when I'm down or in a bad mood, and a favorite song comes on and cheers me up. 

I've read many explanations for this, but my favorite one suggests that music is its own language. Just like English, Spanish, French, etc., it has its own structure, progression, and syntax, and the brain processes it as such. 

Our own life experiences also play a role. In Western culture, we hear music all the time from an early age, whether we seek it or not. Parents sing to us. Music plays on TV and in stores. We listen to it in the car or when we're doing things around the house. Our brains learn to associate various musical sounds with certain emotions. We learn to connect specific notes, keys, and rhythms with certain emotions just by being subjected to them, sort of the same way we pick up languages. 

And here's something else kind of cool and a bit more science-y from the American Institute of Physics: 

...some of our most powerful responses to music come from expectation, tension, then resolution. But calculating something that complex requires much more of our brain’s vast processing power. Humans are expert predictors -- we are always trying to figure what’s going to happen next and why. As we listen to music, our brains are continuously trying to guess what’s coming up, based on what we’ve just heard and on our experience of music over our lives. You can even see the moment we’ve realized the meaning in the music by a spike in the recorded electrical activity across the brain.

To make simpler harmonic and melodic predictions, we use our auditory cortex. But for more abstract syntactic and structural changes, we use the frontal lobes. These areas are heavily interconnected with the limbic system as well -- which both aids in processing the music, and adds emotional texture as information loops back and forth between the regions, with the ebb and flow of the piece.

Using these circuits, our brains try to calculate what’s coming next, and to judge the accuracy of those predictions we use the brain’s reward system -- dopamine. A correct guess gets a little pleasurable puff of dopamine, an incorrect guess gets nothing, and an unexpected, pleasurable resolution gets a great big burst! You know the thrill you get at a particularly beautiful musical moment? That chill that runs across your skin? You can predict when you’ll feel that from a rush of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens — a key node in the reward system. The nucleus accumbens then triggers the physical response that you feel, by activating the autonomic nervous system.

I think some of this kind of explains why this particular guy's voice hit me so hard. Love it or hate it, I'd come to associate Pearl Jam with my mom. When I heard him sing, I knew exactly what song and lyrics were coming, but I didn't expect his voice to be even better than Vedder's (in my opinion). I didn't expect it to be so raw and pure, especially while singing songs that are quite hard to get right and do the original any justice. It did give me those chills because it was unexpectedly positive. It did give me that rush of dopamine. 

But I still think there was something else, something science can't or hasn't figured out yet. Some voices just hit us in ways we can't explain, and for me, Rafa Bettu's is now one of them. He's gained a new fan. 

Is there a musician whose voice gets to you like this? Let us know in the comments. 

On that note, I'll end with a video from Bettu's Instagram page. If you like '90s/alternative/grunge music, I highly recommend checking him out.  

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A post shared by Rafa Bettu | Artista (@rafabettu)