Windows rolled down, wind brushing against my chocolate-stained fingers, driving home from school on a random Wednesday in 2016, with my Spanish dad blasting Las Ketchup at full volume in the car. This happened more times than I can count. I’ve memorised every beat of the album Hijas del Tomate. I’m not just saying I know the lyrics to all the songs; I mean knowing which song comes next is a matter of muscle memory.

These memories have merged into one another. Listening to these songs doesn’t just remind me of that time – it makes me feel exactly the way I used to. There’s even a scientific term for this: episodic memory. It’s one of the eight mechanisms through which music evokes emotion in humans and explains why a single song can make me almost smell the crusty cheese puffs that lived under my car seat or feel the slight knot in my stomach because of an upcoming maths test.

Living alone for the first time as a student means acting simultaneously like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and a concerned parent trying to control them. Living abroad means anxiously asking every single person I meet where they’re from, hoping they know what “morriña” is. In this (mildly concerning) context, having the ability to induce a trance state that almost magically transports me through space and time has been a vital ally.

“having the ability to induce a trance state that almost magically transports me through space and time has been a vital ally”

Despite this, admitting how important these songs are to me feels somewhat shameful. There seems to be a paradox between the presumed musical quality of the song and the deeply moving effect it has on me. Letting go of the superficial judgement that differentiates an ‘objectively good’ from an ‘objectively bad’ song, and instead approaching music emotionally, resolves this conflict.

By pragmatically breaking a song into little bits – verse, chorus, bridge – to analyse it, are we not robbing it of its mystery? After all, if something has the power to transport us through space and time, there must be something magical hidden within it. Shouldn’t attempting to understand a song be more about immersive appreciation than scientific dissection?

Pushing the idea further, a song can’t exist in a sterile environment. This objective approach goes against its very nature. Music is often thought of as a soundtrack, interacting with visuals to evoke what a director wants to convey. When it comes to our lives, it’s not that different from the movies. We listen to a song, and it inevitably interacts with what surrounds it in that moment. There is no objective listening experience; music constantly weaves meaning between what is lived and what is heard. When we engage with it, we do so from our own perspective, so no two listening experiences can ever be identical. Ultimately, a song is malleable, taking different forms depending on the emotions of those listening.

”music doesn’t lie in the lyrics, melody, or rhythm of a song alone”

To see this another way, perhaps the song itself is so mutable it’s almost irrelevant to our listening experience. Part of its beauty is the fact that it acquires different meanings when received emotionally, inspiring unique thoughts and feelings depending on when or where it’s heard. To listen to a song is to change it and make it ours. We say we learn a song ‘by heart’: it’s as if the song becomes a part of you, figuratively inscribed among your organs.

In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag wrote: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art”. In other words, music doesn’t lie in the lyrics, melody, or rhythm of a song alone. To get remotely close to its artistic depth and understand its value, we must let it exist as a whole, rather than imposing our likely preconceived opinions on its individual aspects. By judging Las Ketchup, we miss out on what it could offer us if we simply allowed ourselves to feel it.

This phenomenon also has a name: rhythmic entrainment. It’s the reaction that occurs when we listen to a song and our heartbeat synchronises to the music. It evidences that our most natural response is to engage with a song emotionally. Wouldn’t it be appalling to violate the poetic beauty of this experience by claiming we should judge music with our brains, when we can’t help but listen to it through our hearts?