Some songs are hallways. Some are basements.

I don't mean this as a metaphor, or not only. When you put on a song, before you have processed a single lyric, before you could tell anyone the key or the tempo, you know how big the room is. The reverb tells you. A voice recorded close in a dead studio is somebody standing next to your ear. A voice in a cathedral is somebody standing very far away in a very large space. Your ears were built to size rooms from echoes, because for a long time knowing how big the cave was could keep you alive. Music borrows that machinery. Every recording is an architectural drawing that your skull reads without asking.

So a song is a room. What I want to talk about is what it means that you can go inside.

Hallways

Hallway songs are the ones that move you through. They're going somewhere and they take you along. A good driving song is a hallway. Most pop is a hallway, a long corridor with the doors all on one side, chorus, chorus, chorus, and then it lets you out. You don't stay in a hallway. You use it.

Some hallways are magnificent. The kind that curve so you can't see the end and every few steps there's a window. But they're still hallways. You're moving. The song is the motion.

Basements

Basement songs are the other thing. A basement song doesn't go anywhere. It's a place you go down into. It's dim and the walls are close and there's a specific smell, and you sit on the floor of it for four minutes and then you come back up the stairs slightly changed.

Everyone has a few. They are usually not the songs you'd put on a list. They're the ones you do not play in front of people. The one you played on repeat in a bad month. The one that was on when a specific thing happened that you've not told anyone about. You don't visit often. But you know exactly where the door is.

The furniture is still there

The thing that gets me is what happens when you walk into a room you've not entered in fifteen years.

You hear the first two seconds of something from a summer when you were seventeen, and you're in it. Not remembering it. In it. The furniture is where you left it. The light is the same. There is a person in the corner who isn't in your life anymore, and they're sitting there like they never left, because in this room they never did.

Nothing else does this to me. A photograph gives me the outside of a moment. A smell gets close. But a song is the moment with the walls still up. I can walk around inside it. I can notice things I didn't notice at the time. There's a bassline I never heard when I was seventeen because I was busy being seventeen, and it was there the whole time, holding up the floor.

Rooms you have worn out

There's a sadness in this, and it's the songs you can't go back to.

Some rooms get used too much. You play a song a thousand times and one day you realize you can't hear it anymore. You can hear the sound. The room is gone. You wore through the carpet and the walls and now it is a diagram of a room, a floor plan, you know where everything was and none of it is there.

I have a handful of these and I mourn them a little. Songs that were the best songs I knew and are now just familiar. I did that. I loved them into flatness. Nobody warns you that this is a way you can lose something.

And there are rooms other people have changed the locks on. A song that was yours and someone else's, and now it's theirs, and you can hear it in a store and it won't let you in. It's polite about it. It just doesn't open.

Building one for someone

The best thing you can do with a room is give it to somebody.

I mean the mixtape thing, the playlist thing, whatever people do now. It looks like recommending music. What it actually is, is handing somebody a key to a room you spent time in and saying: go in, see what I saw, sit on the floor. They won't see what you saw. They'll see their own version. But now there's a room you both have a key to, and that's a strange, quiet form of intimacy, and it's one of the few that survives when the rest of a relationship has gone.

I still have rooms from people I do not speak to. I go in sometimes. They aren't there. But the room is, and it was built by them, and I didn't build it, and so I can't wear it out.

Songs with the lights off

There's a category I haven't mentioned, which is the songs you can only hear in the dark.

Driving at night is the main way I find them. Something comes on, a thing I'd skip in daylight, and at eleven at night on an empty road it's suddenly the truest sound in the world. The room the song builds is a night room. It has no windows because it doesn't need them. I've tried playing these songs in the morning to see what happens, and what happens is nothing. The room is still there but the lights are on and you can see it's just a room.

I don't fully understand this. Something about the reverb, maybe, the way a dark road already feels like a big empty space and the song fits into it. Or something about the listener, that at eleven at night you're a different person with a different set of doors you'll open. Either way the songs know. They wait. You'll find them again in the next car, on the next empty road, and they'll be exactly where you left them, with the lights off.

Standing in a doorway

There's a Talking Heads song with a line about home being where I want to be, and it is, as far as I can tell, a song about exactly this. About a place that isn't a place. About a room that's a person. David Byrne said he was trying to write a love song without any of the words love songs use, and what he ended up with was a house.

I put it on in a doorway once, literally, moving out of an apartment, and stood there with the boxes, and I understood that I wasn't going to be able to take the room with me, and also that I did not need to, because the song had it. The song had the whole apartment. Every time I played it I'd be standing in the doorway with the boxes.

That was ten years ago. I'm standing there now.