This was the only album on my black second generation iPod Nano for the first four years of its life. Everything else was either a cheap radio edit, some two euro single downloaded from iTunes, or a fizzled out file that had been ripped from the latest Now That’s What I Call Music CD and manually installed on the device via thick thirty pin dock connector. 

This is one of those albums I could transcribe from memory for the rest of my life despite not listening to any of the songs for a good few decades. Everyone who hails from a generation before there existed instant access to every song ever created has this disease. Where an early exposure to music mostly manifested in one or two CD’s that lived in their parent’s car and were played on every semi-long road trip ever taken. 

Lyrics burned into consciousness. Whether the song was actually liked or not made no difference. 

I used to only listen to three songs on the album: This Love, She Will Be Loved, and Sunday Morning. In my mind, in a time before I can actually recall, I had just decided that these were the only songs on the album I liked. The rest always seemed weirdly inaccessible. As in, I just didn’t understand them when I first heard them and so that was it. They didn’t hold the same power over me.

One thing I do remember is being frustrated by the fact that the band had organised the list of songs in a way that meant all the ones I liked were separated by others I did not. Kids, this was a time before you could queue songs, so you would have to manually select the next one using your magic touch-wheel. And I would do this process to the extent that it could be classified as a form of mental illness. Just infinitely bouncing around these three songs, staring out the window of a rental car travelling fast through some foreign landscape with my Dad at the wheel, mum holding a huge map, and sister doing the same process with her own three songs on her own iPod, all of us wondering when the hell we’ll get to wherever we’re going so we can finally pee.

I didn’t really get the concept of an album at this time. I knew it was a sort of collection of songs from one band, but that was about it. It took one mistake to open up my mind to a whole new world I was missing. On one of these long hot car rides from hotel to beach, I fell asleep, or probably more accurately, passed the fuck out, with wired headphones still delivering This Love into one ear. When I awoke with head buzzing on window I was listening to one of the songs I never dared play, Shiver, and I noticed that, although I hadn’t liked the song before, it offered this weird palate cleanser for the following song which I did like; She Will Be Loved. I noticed that the spiralling rising vocal at the end of Shiver sort of set me up emotionally for the drop intro of the following song, and it gave me a whole new fresh vibe to absorbing the same piece I’d be playing on repeat for the last few miles. 

I realise this sounds really abstract and whacky, but for some reason this mini-experience, this transition, flicked some sort of switch inside my mind. It provided me with the curiosity to test this theory out with other songs on the album that proceeded the ones I liked. Then, slowly, I began to love many of the songs which I had before avoided like the plague. Most of them even overtaking play priority to the ones I had always known to be my favourites. 

Then I tried listening to the whole album from start to finish to see what that experience was like, and if it uplifted any of the songs and made me perceive or love them in a different way. And through this I began to notice that every song sounded like it was about this one relationship, this one girl. And then suddenly it was like I saw the title of the album for the first time. Jane. These were songs about Jane. Fuck, of course. I felt so stupid for not understanding this from the outset, but also excited by the discovery of what this meant for other albums and songs I enjoyed. And I recall over the course of this family holiday being by the pool and listening to these songs over and over again in different order, playing with the experience of absorbing the music. 

And that was it. I was now on a path of viewing music as designed art and listening as an experience I could somewhat curate. 

I think it’s interesting to note that we often have to find our way into new ideas through the things we like and understand. I, for instance, wouldn’t have been able to jump headfirst into something like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon and appreciate it in a full conceptual way without Maroon 5 first guiding me into the concept of what an album is through the songs I loved. 

And I feel like this can relate to other areas of life too. Looking at the same things in a different way, having mental flexibility, curiosity. It rejects stagnant opinions and fosters forward movement. 

They tell us to never play with our food when we’re young, but when it comes to art, it’s all about playing with your food. It’s about owning the process of absorption and finding your own way into certain experiences and concepts that you may have tended to avoid because of misguided premonitions.

As an exercise, take a song you love from an album you haven't fully listened to and hear it in context. See if any other songs on that album become your new favourite. And if they do, think about what that means for other art you love.

And then, of course, thank Maroon 5.