A melody? In this economy?

During my last trip to Nebraska, I was in the car with my dad when he said, "man, I'm just a sucker for melodic music." We were listening to 10,000 Maniacs, a band I'd heard every so often growing up but certainly couldn't identify sonically. All I could make note of was that the lead singer, Natalie Merchant, reminded me of Florence. I bobbed my head and tapped along to the beat. I really liked it.

It was such a nonchalant comment, a conversation-starter to make the drive go faster. Yet, for some reason, it stuck with me: am I, too, a "sucker for melodic music"? Isn't music, by its very nature, melodic? Isn't a melody, a beat, a tune, what separates a song from, say, a spoken-word poem or a monologue? What the hell do I know about this stuff, anyway? Maybe these are questions better suited for my doubly music-educated little brother.

But this remark also made a lot of sense: ever since I was little, I remember my dad playing Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, The Carpenters, Paul Simon. It was music that makes you want to sing along if you know the words and tap your foot if you don't. "Catchy" might be as good a synonym as I can think of, but even that feels a little reductive. Melodies aren't always catchy. What I've learned from my very cursory research is that most memorable songs employ a "stepwise" or "conjunct" motion, where the melody moves to the note on either side of the preceding one. This not only makes it easier to sing along, but to predict: do you ever wonder how, even if you've never heard a song before, you can sometimes hum along with little to no error? That's a stepwise melody, baby.

Like many others, quarantining for 18 months opened a lockbox in my brain containing all of my middle school obsessions. Stored between my World of Warcraft subscription and Lord of the Rings box-set was my adoration of punk and emo music. It may not seem like it, but punk, emo, grunge, and metal are among the most melodic genres out there. This is in part because they tend to rely on conventional instruments (guitars, drums, keys, bass), which are more conducive to conjunct melodic motion. But it's also because these genres plead for audience participation: head-banging, jumping, moshing, singing. It's kinetic.

While I've listened to plenty of My Chemical Romance, AFI, and New Found Glory over the past two years, I've spent more time finding artists I've missed since my chubby, prepubescent years. Many of them are only "new" in the sense that they're new to me (American Football, Joyce Manor, Hotelier), but some are new-new. Chief among them is Hot Mulligan, an emo/pop-punk band out of Lansing that I haven't been able to stop listening to since the pandemic began. According to the band's Wikipedia page, they formed in 2014, but their first full-length album wasn't released until four years later. They just wrapped up their latest U.S. tour a few months ago, opening for Knuckle Puck. I was fortunate enough to catch the final show in Chicago, which was probably the most fun I've had at a live performance without the help of psychoactive substances.

I may not have the musical vocabulary to verbalize what makes Hot Mulligan so deeply enjoyable to me, but I know it's got something to do with melody. It's catchy, of course – having people scream along to your songs with their fists in the air is pop-punk's modus operandi – but it also unearths those 2006 feelings that had been locked away for so long. If the pandemic let my emo-punk sensibilities out of the box, Hot Mulligan dusted them off, made them fresh again.

The band isn't necessarily carving a new path for themselves vis-à-vis subject matter: like most emo artists, their lyrics have to do with past relationships, self-medication, and general nihilistic helplessness. So what is it about their music that makes me want to learn every word to every song and turn the volume up so loud I risk blowing a speaker? The melodies? I don't know, man. I'm admittedly a little out of my wheelhouse here.

I've given an earnest effort toward experimental music with scale-skips, distortions, and other indeterminacies, and there's certainly a place for that. But at the end of the day, I concur with my dad: I just love me a good melody, whatever that means.