There are songs everybody gets.
The single. The one with the video. The one that gets played on every tour. The song that becomes so attached to an artist that, eventually, it almost stops belonging to the album it came from.
And then there are the other ones.
Wednesday, early morning, I was standing in my kitchen and the house was completely quiet. My wife was out of town, the kids were still asleep, and the chorus of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Hold Me to the Light” started running through my head. Eventually I put it on the speaker.
And it just fucking got me.
Not in some dramatic, life-changing way. Smaller and more personal than that: the feeling you get every once in a while where a song suddenly locks onto something inside you. Maybe it has almost nothing to do with what the artist intended and everything to do with where you happen to be when you hear it. But you stop thinking, I really like this song. Instead, some part of you quietly decides:
Oh. This one is mine.
And then you play it again. And again. And probably an unreasonable number of times over the next few days, because whatever the song has found in you apparently isn’t finished yet. I love that feeling, and I think it’s different when the song isn’t the song. Not the single everybody knows, the one you’ve already heard in a thousand other places. An album track has none of that history weighing on it yet. It’s just sitting there, waiting for somebody to find it, and when you do, it can feel strangely private. Singles can mean enormous things to us too, of course. But there is something lovely about the songs most people never get to.
The eighth track.
The weird closer.
The song somebody listened to once when the album came out and never thought about again.
Meanwhile, for somebody else, that same song becomes part of the architecture of their life. They walk around with it. They put it on when they’re happy. Or wrecked. Or driving alone. Or cleaning the kitchen early in the morning. Years later, the first few seconds can still unlock whatever they originally found there.
That’s why telling somebody about songs like this can feel oddly revealing. If you tell me your favourite hit, I learn something about your taste. Tell me the album track you’ve quietly carried around for seven years and I might learn something about you. These are the songs you bury halfway down a playlist for somebody you care about. You don’t say anything about them. You just put one there and hope they eventually reach it. And then maybe later they text:
What the fuck was that song?
And that’s about as good as music gets. Because this thing that felt privately yours has found a way into somebody else too.
That was what I was thinking about in the kitchen. What are everybody else’s versions of this? And then, because apparently I can’t simply enjoy a thought anymore without eventually trying to find data for it, another question arrived: can you see any evidence of this happening?
Not the actual moment, obviously. There is no dataset that knows I was standing in my kitchen while the house was quiet and a chorus hit me harder than I expected it to. Data can’t tell us what a song means to somebody. It can’t tell us why they came back. And I don’t think I’d want it to. But maybe listening leaves traces.
Maybe there are album tracks relatively few people find, but the people who do find them keep playing them.
Maybe there are non-singles that spread farther than the songs that were actually promoted.
Maybe there are tracks everybody encounters once and moves past.
Maybe there are songs that slowly escape the album entirely and become part of the wider culture.
Those things aren’t identical, and none of them is the same as saying a song is “better.” But they are different forms of attachment. So I started pulling at that thread. That became Deep Cut Explorer.
The site uses Last.fm listening data, which comes from one particular kind of listener, the kind who keeps a record of every play, and it says so on every page. For every track on an album it asks two questions: how many of the album’s listeners ever reached it, and how often the ones who did came back. Reach and replay. Those two numbers are enough to find each of the traces above. The track few people reach but the ones who do keep playing is the album’s deep cut. The non-single that out-reaches the singles is a sleeper hit. The track everybody reaches once and moves past is what the site calls passed through. It’s an attempt to see the patterns that form after an album comes out and millions of people start deciding what they’re going to carry away from it.
But the numbers are only interesting because of what they can’t measure. Underneath every play count is a person. Somebody heard that track again. Somebody chose it. Somebody needed it that day. And occasionally, an artist making music for thousands or millions of strangers manages to create three or four minutes that one of those strangers experiences as almost private. Something that feels like it was waiting specifically for them. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
There’s a footnote to this, and I like it more than I should. “Hold Me to the Light” is track 21 on an album that came out this year, and the site won’t say a word about it. An album under a year old is too new to read: the plays are still arriving, and whatever that song is going to be to people, it hasn’t finished becoming it. So the site that exists because of that song has nothing to say about it, and won’t for a while.
For now it’s just mine.