Why Your Brain Is the Worst Judge of Musical Influence

How somatics revealed my sonic DNA — and the exercise that will unlock yours

Sonic Genealogy: Finding Your Musical DNA Through Your Body

The minute I heard I'd Die Without You by P.M. Dawn again after thirty years, my heart cracked open. I was suddenly ten years old, sitting in my bedroom, burning with the desperate need to be loved and convinced it would never happen.

I didn’t know it then, but my parents' divorce was a year away. Which explains why I was beginning to weave elaborate fantasy worlds to escape reality.

I had completely forgotten this song existed, but my body remembered everything.

This is when I realized that the traditional approach to mapping your musical influences—the kind producers give musicians before making an album—was fundamentally broken.

The Problem with Thinking Your Way to Influence

I recently embarked on just this type of sonic genealogy project as part of making my debut album.

My goal is to trace the roots of my musical influences so I can intentionally craft a universe of my own, full of the rich textures and sounds that can only come from the mix of who I am, what I love, and where I have been.

This stems from the idea that each of us has a unique antenna, pulling in and synthesizing consciousness in our own cross-sectional way.

If the universe is full of vibrational frequencies existing everywhere all at once, we're like radios that can tune in and receive these messages by calibrating our antennae.

Our experiences, traumas, delights, desires, and tastes all influence what comes across and gets picked up by our receiver.

What moves us and why is particular to our own station—there is no other who can tune in and synthesize exactly the life experience you're having, because only you are having it.

What you like matters.

The original instructions I got for mapping my musical DNA were deceptively simple:

• Create a playlist of songs from your childhood that had a big influence on you

• Another for your adult life

• Another for songs currently inspiring you—stuff on repeat, songs that make you think "damn, I wish I wrote that," or artists you've paid to see live

• Study the why: Pick apart common themes, chord progressions, lyrical motifs, vocal styling, mixing techniques

• Chart the commonalities into constraints for your studio work—your unique sonic palette and commit to using this palette for a time period. For example, you might discover you’re consistently into heavy 808 hip-hop beats, winding funk grooves, 80s pop synth, and layered female harmonies. That’s your palette. Work with those elements.

There's so much to love about this concept. Brian Eno talked in our class about the importance of creating false constraints in your artistic practice as a way of building the proper pressure needed for expression.

When too many options are available to us, it can make work feel diluted, unfocused, the process arduous. What seems like a blessing — all the options in the world — actually becomes a huge hinderance.

Where to start and where to end if every option is an option?

Counterintuitively, when only a few elements are available, we start combining and thinking in novel and imaginative ways. We get familiar with how things relate to each other. Form emerges.

All good on paper.

The idea of distilling my musical influences down to a pure form that could be made into a set of guiding limitations in the studio sounds good in theory, but in practice, I found this exercise nearly impossible.

I couldn’t even get through step one.

When the Mind Gets Stuck

Step one was to find influential songs from childhood, but I didn't even know how to begin looking. Many songs I might consider influential I don't even listen to anymore.

Then I had the idea to search through the MTV's top-rated videos from 1985-2000. While most parents warned their kids away from the bad influence of MTV, my dad gave us the explicit instructions to watch only PBS or MTV — he saw it as a safe haven for art and culture.

I spent inordinate amounts of time watching music videos, which in the early days were arguably more artistic and counter culture.

Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, Liquid Television, Dial MTV, Unplugged — these were the shows that instructed me on music, iconography, sex, and culture.

I rummaged through the top 100 lists of each year and I recognized nearly every song, that’s about 1500 songs. I felt nostalgic about so many, like seeing old faces in a school yearbook, but kept stumbling on the same question: were they actually influential?

Discerning which songs I don’t like is easy: it’s a gut reaction, a visceral ew, no. It’s abrasive. It makes my skin crawl. Turn. It. Off.

And things I love today, the music that is currently turning me on and throttling all my buttons? That’s also easy to decipher. It’s clear what delights me now. If all else fails, I can look at my listening patterns and see what I’m obsessively hitting repeat on.

But going backwards in time and figuring out how I got here? That is much harder than I thought it would be because it gets tangled up with memory.

Do I like this because I like it or because I like having the memory of the time this existed within?

Do I truly love this, or do I feel I should love it?

Maybe it should be on the list because, like a good student, at one point I enjoyed listening to it and I get why it matters in the scope of musicology?

I was not getting clear answers on what my influences were.

As part of my experiment in going Dumb and giving up my smartphone for the summer, I had to purchase and upload songs to my Lightphone. Money was a constraint, so I had to be selective.

I thought this would help narrow things down, but my final list was weird as hell and not something I actually wanted to listen to regularly.

When I tried to sort songs by "influence," I was entirely in my head, thinking hard about whether a song was worthy, cool, part of the pantheon of legendary music that would qualify me as someone with taste.

But influence isn't about taste. It's about impact.

And impact happens in the body, not the mind.

The Body Knows What the Mind Forgets

This is where somatics saved my entire project.

Somatics is about being in your body, feeling what's happening—expansion, collapse, floating, constriction, numbness.

When I focused on what these songs were doing to my body, I started getting different answers. Real answers.

There's a concept in somatics called overcoupling—when we have a charged or traumatic event that gets over-linked with something else in our nervous system.

Like someone who grew up with a parent who yelled a lot might find loud noises unbearable as an adult because they've overcoupled fight-flight-freeze responses with loudness.

Music, you guys.

All of us are walking around with music overcoupled to pivotal, super hormonal moments from our youth.

The music doesn't have to be objectively or even subjectively good to hold emotional resonance because you might have heard it at the exact moment something intense happened.

A crush, a school dance, your mom screaming at you, your sister punching you, a friend gossiping about you…all the high drama of being a tween and teen.

And now it's in your subconscious, worming its way through and making its way out.

If you’re sitting over there and going like, huh? Somatics? Expansion? Let me help you out real quick with a primer on what these sensations actually might feel like in your body:

Expansion feels like opening, breathing deeper, your chest or belly getting bigger, energy moving outward, a sense of "yes" or aliveness spreading through you.

Contraction feels like closing, tightening, pulling inward, your chest or throat constricting, energy drawing back, a protective "no" or bracing against something.

Numbness feels like nothing—a flatness, disconnection, like you've left your body entirely, or like there's cotton between you and your feelings.

The Somatic Three-Pile Method

Instead of using my mind to decide what was influential, I let my body choose. No judgment, just feeling. Listen to the track, notice my body, then sort it into one of the piles quickly. Do not overthink it, I’m noticing how my body feels, not what I think.

Pile 1: Neutral Recognition
Songs I remember that were frequently in my space (radio, home, MTV). I feel neither expansion nor constriction hearing them again. Hint of nostalgia mixed with neutrality.

Pile 2: Clear Response
Songs I like, love or respect. My body feels specific expansion or contraction when I hear them.

Pile 3: Undeniable Impact
Songs that make my heart hurt or ache, bring specific memories, put me in a time and place, make me cry or dance, force me to close my eyes. There's something undeniably me about these songs, even if I don't know why. They might not be favorites or songs I'd recommend, but they make me feel. I can probably tell a story about this song with vivid details. Think sonic equivalent of smelling a scent that triggers a memory.

Here's how songs my MTV deep-dive sorted out, a random 7 songs in each group:

Pile 1: Neutral Recognition
Finally (CeCe Peniston)
Something To Talk About (Bonnie Raitt)
Thank You (Dido)
Both Hands (Ani DiFranco)
To Be With You (Mr. Big)
Come & Talk to Me (Jodeci)
Cold Hearted (Paula Abdul)

Pile 2: Clear Response
Under the Bridge (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Patience (Guns N' Roses)
Come As You Are (Nirvana)
Epic (Faith No More)
I Will Always Love You (Whitney Houston)
Weak (SWV)
Human Behavior (Björk)

Pile 3: Undeniable Impact
Alive (Pearl Jam)
Tennessee (Arrested Development)
I'd Die Without You (P.M. Dawn)
Walk On The Ocean (Toad The Wet Sprocket)
More Than Words (Extreme)
She Talks To Angels (The Black Crowes)
Crazy (Seal)

What My Body Taught Me

Let's look at P.M. Dawn again. The minute I heard I'd Die Without You I was back in my bedroom in 1992, age 10, beginning to weave an elaborate fantasy life to escape my family's reality.

Songs like this were rocket fuel for my limerence-style crushes. Why be here at home, steeped in the tension and depression, when I could be off imagining walking around the baseball field sharing headphones and listening to Ice T with my dream-boat crush with the feathered blond bangs?

P.M. Dawn was alt-R&B—not taking you to church like Jodeci with pleading vocals and runs that brought the house down, but taking you to space with something more subtle. Tender. Cosmic. Soft. Padded. Dreamy. The masculine shrouded in feminine. Purple and pink.

The through line? I still love alt-R&B artists who play in this space—Frank Ocean, Khalid, Mk.Gee. It's vulnerable, dripping with nakedness, esoteric contemplations, love letters for weirdos who need a spiritual groove to get down.

The title of P.M. Dawn’s album was The Bliss Album…? Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderence of Life and Existence.

I was 10!!! and recognized myself in this. I’m 43 now and go, yup. That still makes sense.

Is I'd Die Without You objectively a good song? I have no fucking idea. But I fucking love it.

Kurt Kurting.

Then there's Walk On The Ocean by Toad The Wet Sprocket. I specifically remember knowing it was uncool to like this song. I was nine but understood this wasn't Nirvana. This wasn't even R.E.M., both wildly popular that year.

But here I am at 43, listening to it and crying my eyes out.

It's so earnest:

"And somebody told me
That this is the place
Where everything's better
And everything's safe"

These male voices harmonizing, singing about safety, the earth, the ocean.

Music programs our subconscious at an early age about sex, relationships, what's hot, what we should tolerate, how we can expect to see ourselves through the others' eyes.

In the world I grew up in, I was supposed to want to chase after Axel and Slash, the self-destructing Kurt types. They were the real rock stars.

But what about these men singing about what actually matters to me now as an adult woman? What about the tender ones, the ones who harmonized about safety and earth and ocean?

I'm not sure I even like this song. But it made me cry. And that tells me everything.

Why This Matters Beyond Music

Toad the Wet Sprocket all grown up: middle age dudes who seem pretty decent.

This approach reveals something profound about how we're shaped—not just musically, but emotionally, relationally, spiritually.

The songs that hit us in Pile 3 aren't just nostalgic; they're blueprints for the kinds of emotional experiences we crave, the energies we're drawn to, the parts of ourselves we've been developing since childhood.

When I trace the through lines from P.M. Dawn to Frank Ocean, from Toad The Wet Sprocket's earnestness to my current need for authentic vulnerability, I'm not just mapping musical taste. I'm mapping the evolution of my heart.

Your Pile 3 songs are breadcrumbs leading back to your most authentic self—the one that knew what it needed before it learned what it should want.

Sure, I also listened to a ton of Nirvana back in the day and I’m sure it’s rattling around in there and influencing something. I understand why Nirvana matters, big picture.

But does it makes me feel something unnameable? Like catching the scent of your first sweetheart’s laundry detergent on the wind, whirling you back in time in unexpected reeling heart palpitations?

And the other day when I was in the recording studio, which sounds were coming through? Was it more P.M. Dawn or more Nirvana?

Hands down, the sonic palette that I gravitate towards much more heavily is the lush, synth, purple, dream world of P.M. Dawn, even though I would consider my music to be more psychedelic rock.

Without an exercise like this to discover those roots, I could be chasing shredding guitar riffs around when really the thing that lights up my heart is a prophet set to a distorted outer space-like wobble.

Your Turn

So here's your assignment, should you choose to accept it:

1. Find a chunk of time when you won't be interrupted.

2. Put together a playlist of songs from a specific era of your life—childhood, adolescence, your twenties, whatever calls to you. Don't overthink the selection; just go with what you remember.

3. Then listen. Not with your mind, but with your body.

4. Notice what expands you, what contracts you, what makes you want to turn it off immediately, and what stops you in your tracks with recognition so deep you can't explain it.

4. Sort into piles based on feeling, not thinking.

Pile 1: Neutral Recognition
Pile 2: Clear Response
Pile 3: Undeniable Impact

Reflect

Then sit with your Pile 3 songs and ask:

• What were these songs telling me about what I needed?

• What were they promising me about who I could become?

The answers might surprise you. They might reveal desires you've buried or parts of yourself you've forgotten.

But they'll be true.

Remember: you are a unique antenna in this universe, calibrated by every experience you've ever had to receive a frequency that only you can tune into.

No one else—not before you, not after you—can be responsible for bringing in that specific flavor of consciousness that moves through your particular receiver.

Your sonic genealogy isn't just about the music that shaped you; it's about honoring the irreplaceable signal you were born to receive and transmit.

What you like matters because only you can like it the way you do, darling.

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Want to take a trip back to 1992? Here's the full playlist that cracked my heart open. Warning — may cause unexpected crying.

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I’ll be seeing you through the portal 🌀