One of the things that made the death of Sinéad O’Connor so profoundly sad was that the news came with a pre-recorded soundtrack. The singer made great music over many years, but the five minutes and 10 seconds of her version of Prince’s song Nothing Compares 2 U are, for more than one generation, the definitive sound of heartbreak.
The news caused millions of us to press play on that track’s haunting introduction and to hear its opening lines once again in our heads: “It’s been seven hours and 15 days, since you took your love away…” That spontaneous act prompts an age-old question: how exactly do great songs – Let It Be or Over The Rainbow or Everybody Hurts – become the shorthand of such powerful emotion? It comes as no surprise when you look into that question that O’Connor’s ballad has sometimes itself been used by psychologists and neuroscientists researching melody and the brain. After all, the empirical evidence for the emotional effect of this particular track could not be plainer: by all accounts the tears that rolled down O’Connor’s cheeks in the indelible video that accompanied its release were a surprise even to her.
As she explained in her 2021 memoir Rememberings, she had started crying because the lyrics and melody of the final verse had triggered overwhelming thoughts of her troubled and abusive mother, who had died in a car crash five years earlier (“All the flowers that you planted, mama/In the back yard/All died when you went away”).
In recent years, scientists have tried to deconstruct and quantify the ways in which songs can provoke and amplify such emotions. One of the most significant of those studies broke down the mechanism of music into component parts that included “brain stem reflexes”, “emotional contagion”, “visual imagery” and “musical expectancy”. That last quality has been of particular interest to researchers, who see parts the brain associated with pleasure and pain light up when they “hear” chords and notes that deviate from predictable harmony. “Our brains are wired to pick up the music that we expect,” one professor of music psychology explained of these studies. “So when we’re listening to music, our brain is constantly trying to guess what comes next. And generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. When that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives emotional frisson, because it’s unexpected.”
Listen to O’Connor’s performance again with this in mind, and its tone and phrasing wrongfoots such expectations constantly, in tiny ways, creating a cumulative effect of uncertainty and continual frustrated resolution.
But can such research ever really explain the mystery of the greatest songs? If it could, an algorithm might eventually put songwriters out of business. That it won’t relies on another component of music that we trust instinctively: the idea of heartfelt authenticity.
One of the curiosities of Nothing Compares 2 U is that its special power was not, it seems, recognised by Prince himself. He recorded it on a side-project album in 1985 and never thought to release it as a single. That’s not to say, however, that its genesis did not include the kernel of childhood pain that O’Connor’s cover so dramatically unlocked. In an unfinished memoir, Prince noted how after his parents split up he used to listen, aged seven and eight, to his mother pleading with his father to return. “She’d put on breakup music, have a drink and then make the phone call,” he wrote. “I think that’s why I can write such good breakup songs, like Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Can such emotional extremes be effectively seeded in a song, waiting for time and circumstance to germinate them? Last week’s tragedy tends to confirm a faith that they can.
