Night Moves

We can't control the songs that get stuck in our heads.

The algorithm fed me a clip of "the most iconic acoustic guitar intros of all-time," and Bob Seger's Night Moves has been looping in my brain ever since. I went so far as to learn how to play it on guitar, under the pretense that I'd get bored with it, or maybe it would get bored with me and finally leave. But once Eliza told me how annoying she finds the song, I naturally wanted to play it more, sometimes appearing in her office doorway unannounced, guitar in hand, working on those night moves.

Most of the song is the repetition of a simple chord pattern. Many great songs are like that. Simple. Repeatable. Familiar. These are the characteristics of great stonework, too. My favorite work isn't fussy or ornate. It's clean. Simple. You can almost hum along with it.

There's something in us that resonates with repetition in music. It's soothing. Almost trance-like. A stone wall is the repetition of stone after stone after stone, like a series of notes. Individual, but parts of a greater whole.

All songwriters work with the same building blocks. There are only so many notes to choose from. But there's an alchemy that happens when an artist combines those chords with their own point of view, their own experience, their own soul. It becomes a song only they could have created.

With stonework, we all draw from the same materials. But every stoneworker combines them in their own way, making each finished work similar but unique.

I'm not, by the way, a big Bob Seger fan. That song's just been stuck in my head all summer. And now, hopefully, in Eliza's too.