The Power of Music

What makes a song eternal? What makes a song so fundamental, so profound, so timeless that it continues to speak to us year after it was written? And what do such songs mean to us, as individuals and as a society?

Great songs can crystallise a moment in time. They can define lives and create – or at least shape – collective identities. That is, popular music reflects our personal history but also our collective public history. Songs have the power to influence events, alter the course of social history and change political history.

On an individual level, a song can echo our mood, and affect it. It can entertain us, comfort us in moments of sorrow, reflect who we are and what we believe. It can also reinforce group identity, and isolate us from those we deem different from ourselves. Songs can be transformative – anyone who has been profoundly moved by a piece of music knows this. Sometimes we can sense a song's meaning without fully understanding exactly what the song is saying; even if you don't know the words to 'Amazing Grace', its effect can be profound. Songs can make us laugh, listen and cry. While songs can bring us joy, they can also make us angry – angry enough to do something. The power of words, whether son or spoken, can change minds and move people to action. Some work by changing the climate of opinion.

Most people agree that poetry can change lives. And most will also concur that a piece of fiction – a particular well-crafted novel, say, or a brilliant short story – can change the way we think, alter long-held attitudes and beliefs. The American novelist Michael Chabon believes that 'words can kill, or save us' and author Tobias Wolff once said, 'You can only say what you can first imagine.' Speeches are also powerful forms of communication. Throughout the centuries, the power of a speech by, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr, Winston Churchhill, Gough Whitlam or, more recently, Barack Obama, has moved people to act or at least reflect. There is little doubt that a well-spoken and well-delivered phrase can goad people to action.

But what about songs? It's true they hold a particular power over us, over our emotions and memory. With one chord, one riff, one line from a lyric, we can be transported back to particular time and place, to an experience that feels as real as the day it happened. Individuals or couples have 'their song', and generations, eras and even countries do too. 'Waltzing Matilda', for example, could only belong to Australia.

In Sing Me Back Home, Dana Jennings explains the effect that a particular genre of music, in his case country, has on him and his family. 'Country,' he writes, 'profoundly understands what it's like to be trapped in a culture of alienation: by poverty, by a shit job, by lust, by booze, by class.' For Jennings, country music is a familiar place to turn to when down on his luck. It is a refuge in the hard times.

But can songs actually change lives? Yes, I think they can – and do. A song can soothe, comfort and assuage, but it can also anger, cajole and persuade. A song can free the imagination and allow one to be open to new experiences. A song can change the world because a song that comes along at the right moment, at the right time, can change they way one sees the world. And if attitudes can change, the world itself can change, even if only incrementally.

Whatever the intention of a songwriter, a song often assumes a life of its own. It may have taken Bob Dylan all of ten minutes, as he claims, to write 'Blowin' in the Wind', but the effect it had on people was immeasurable. Sometimes, songs make an impact only gradually. 'I believe in songs,' Sting told Daniel J. Levitin. 'But it's difficult to imagine that a song would change anything overnight. What you can do is to plant a seed in someone's brain, as seeds were planted in mine to make me the political animal that I am.

Songs also change the world in a more subtle way, by influencing the music of the future. Didn't a great songwriter like Carole King change the world as much, if not more, than other artists' strident sloganeering? Since their initial release in the 1960s, songs such as 'Up on the Roof', 'One Fine Day' and especially 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?' - which she co-wrote with then-husband Gerry Goffin – have influenced hundreds of musicians from the Beatles on down.

Just as other generations had epiphanies while reading books, many of what would later be called the rock and roll generation had their 'Aha!' moments while listening to a particular song or artist. When John Lennon first heard Elvis Presley on Radio Luxembourg, for example, his world turned upside-down. Rock and roll have Patti Smith 'a sense of tribe', as she prepared to enter a brotherhood – and sisterhood – of fellow seekers who sought to save the world, in her words, 'with love and the electric guitar'.

Things have changed since then, of course. We are no longer as committed to the idea that change can be triggered by a work of art, a piece of music or words on a page. And yet, some still stubbornly cling to the motion that these things are still possible. One should never underestimate the power of music.