Unexplainable - Are you a lyric person or a music person?

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answer goes way deeper than you might think — to the heart of what it means to hear anything at all. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guests: Charlie Harding, host of the Switched on Pop podcast; Dominique Vuvan, professor at Skidmore CollegeFor show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether life serves you an ace or an unexpected backhand, the high-protein yogurt, Oikos Pro, is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash. Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no added sugar, because true strength isn't about being able to take the hits. It's about being able to bounce back. Oikos Pro, feed your strength. Visit oikos.ca for more details.

If you sit in the sun, you may just get burned. But some people are willing to take that chance. There is this certain degree of nihilism of like, oh, well, the world is bad anyway. Why wouldn't I just also get a tan? Tan maxing. That's this week Unexplained to Me. Find new episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Noam. And today is a big day.

We're launching a video version of our show on Netflix, and we'll be dropping new episodes over there every Monday. We're still going to have two episodes every week right here in the audio feed. On Mondays, you're going to get the same episode on Netflix, just right here for audio. And on Wednesdays, you'll get another new episode just for the audio feed. So if you want to watch this episode right now, you can check it out over at Netflix.

And if you do, shoot us an email. Let us know what kind of mysteries you want us to explore on the video show. Unexblenable at Vox.com. All right. Here we go. A while back, my friend Charlie Harding, came to me with a question. Why do I pay attention to the music before I hear the words?

Charlie's a songwriter. He's the host of the excellent music podcast switched on pop. And he was wondering why when he listens to music, he can't really hear the lyrics. Am I a robot? I kind of feel like I've lost some human trait that is essential to the purpose of music. So I took this question, I went and talked to a whole bunch of researchers, and I found out that this is a way bigger question than I thought. It tells us a lot more about the brain and how we process what we hear than I realized. So what's going on here?

When we listen to Beyonce, The Beatles, or the Beastie Boys, do we actually hear the same thing? Or do we hear something entirely different? Charlie, thank you for coming on Unexplanable. I'm so happy to be here. A while back you came to me with this question. Why do you pay attention to music and not lyrics when you listen to a song? Yeah. Where'd that come from?

Where'd that question come from? It's like the fundamental question of my life. Music is my job. And yet, when I hear a song, I hear all the music first, and I'll listen to a song for the third, fourth, fifth time. And then I'm like, oh, there's some words. The music always comes to me before the words do. And I find remembering the words very challenging.

And I know I'm not alone. I'm the same way. Yeah, yeah. I'm a music first. Can't remember the lyrics kind of guy. What's wrong with us? This is a very good question. Am I a robot?

I kind of feel like I've lost some human trait that is essential to the purpose of music. But the moment that I really realized something is wrong was at my friend Stephen Abbey's. wedding. Okay. And me and my co-host, Nate, were asked to play a song at this wedding. We were asked to play the song California Stars, Billy Bragg and Wilco. It's a great sort of like Camp Fire song. And so I'm like driving in the car with my collaborator Nate, who's a brilliant musician,

and his wife Whitney. And we are trying to remember this song. We're singing it. We screw it up. go back and look at the lyrics. We sing it. We keep screwing it up. And Whitney in the front seat,

it's like, guys, what is wrong with you? And she just, like, knows all the lyrics the first time. She's been listening to you guys, mess it up over and over again. And, of course, at the wedding, we totally screwed up the lyrics,

but nobody noticed, right? Like, everyone was watching them. No one was paying attention to us or paying attention to the wedding happening. So it was fine. But obviously on the side, Whitney's just like, oh, my God. Okay, so I'm fascinated by this question.

I have felt this myself, right? As a music person who goes back listens to songs and can't remember the words. One of my favorite songs is by the band The Dodo's, and I was listening to the song in the car the other day, and I was getting to the chorus and I was singing, and then I was like, do I not know the words to my actual, like, one of my favorite songs? What is wrong with me? So, you know, I took your question, and I've been talking to music researchers, probably like two dozen, maybe 30 music researchers over the last two or so years. A lot of people, right? Because I've been working on other music.

stories. And every single time I get to the end of the interview, I'm like, hey, I have this other weird question. You know how some people listen to music more and some people listen to lyrics more? And they're like, yeah, I kind of do know about that. And then they stare off into space and they think a little bit. And then they're like, I don't really know anyone doing actual research on it. I talked to one researcher who wasn't even sure this is a real thing. Like, he was like, oh, it might just be a story we tell ourselves about how we listen to music. like I'm into melody or I'm into lyrics, I'm into what the song says, or I'm into how the song sounds, but it might not be a real thing.

Why is that researcher gaslighting my personal experience? We'll move on from that guy in a second because he did make me wonder if this whole thing was just, you know, a myth. But then I came across this one researcher who told me that he had a friend who was working on a study that has not been published. It's currently in review at a journal. And it's basically this exact question. So her name is Dominique Vuvan. She's in a band called Nice Hockey, which is great. She plays guitar and synth. But more importantly, than being in a band, she's a psychology and neuroscience professor at Skidmore. And Dominique's been researching the

connection between music and language for her whole career. When I think about the big questions about music, like how does that work? How does it function for us? Why is it important? These are questions that are literally just asking a basic version of like what makes us human. How do humans do their thing? A few years ago, she was trying to trace where these things are processed in the brain. So like which parts of the brain process language, which parts process music. Are they the same? Are they different? But she wanted to play people some music and examine them using fMRI, which is functional MRI, so it doesn't tell you the structure of the brain, but it tells you how the brain is actually functioning. But it was just way too complicated, because too much was overlapping. FMRI is actually kind of limited in how closely it can examine the brain. It has a resolution of three by three millimeters, which sounds really small, right? Like, if that's the smallest piece you can examine, that seems pretty good. I can see three by three millimeters, and like the brain is. You want to guess how many neurons are in one three by three unit? I guess 100 billion. Okay, you're a little

Oh, okay. About a million. About a million. It's a lot of neurons. Yeah, it's not very granular. And that's like the smallest unit they can examine, right? So she's not sure if, you know, the same neurons are being used for music and lyrics, or if they're just kind of near each other in that three-by-three-three-millimeter unit.

It's just really hard to tease it apart. But she was at happy hour after work one night where most good ideas come from. And she and another researcher, they were talking about going to a concert they'd been to and what they remembered. And Dominique was like, I personally am just a very non-liarics person. Like, even for my favorite music, I don't even process the lyrics. Like things that I've listened to dozens and dozens of times, like what I'm really hearing is the beat of the song, like aspects of the melodies like the baseline. And what the person is, like the melody that the person is singing, the quality of their voice, but not the words that they're saying. And then her friend was like, what are you talking about?

Like, the lyrics were incredible. I was totally hooked by the lyrics. It occurred to us during this conversation that one way to potentially pry apart the brain networks that are subserving language and music processing is by measuring the degree to which people differ on their sort of processing of the language materials versus the music materials in a song. And if you can see that the pattern of brain activation for those different needs, people look different, then that tells you a little bit of something about the degree to which

you're actually sharing resources in the brain for these two kinds of materials. Basically, you have this pattern happening in the brain. We don't know if it's music or lyrics, but if you find out if a person is a music person or a lyrics person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song, they're focusing on the lyrics. So this pattern we're seeing in the brain, that's probably lyrics. If they're a music person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song, they're processing music, they're focusing on music. This pattern that we see is probably music. Do that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, in order to find out whether people are music, people, or lyrics people, she had to do a study, which is basically the study that you've been

looking for, that I've been looking for for two years. She got over a thousand people. She gave them some prompts, and she asked them to rate them on a scale of one to seven. So one, meaning I focus mostly on music. Seven, I'm focusing mostly on lyrics. And I thought maybe we could do a few together. Want to do a couple? Oh, yes. Okay, so here's one. After listening to a song, I often think about what the words meant. I feel like for most of my life I've been at two. Not like lyrics are there, but just registering. I'm probably at two as well. I have songs that I remember the lyrics, but it's like songs that I have to force myself to go back and learn the lyrics. Yes. Okay. And here's another prompt. I always listen to what is being said in the lyrics.

Yeah, like, can you do a zero? I can give myself a 1.5. Okay, I give myself a 1 on that. When listening to music, I most often find myself drawn to the lyrics. I would say, once again, probably a two, because sometimes, like, a perfect rhyming pair will happen, and it will really get me. That happens, but it's like, it's almost like it comes into vision momentarily, and then fades away. And it also depends on the artist, right? Like, surely. I don't know, Stephen Merritt or Bob Dylan or like David Berman, like some of these great lyricists. Joni.

Like anyone who's like more in the sort of folk tradition. Yeah, Joni Mitchell. Where it really is just sort of vocal and accompaniment. Yeah. Right. Then I'm going to be, that's what I got to pay attention to. Right, right. When you only got three chords in the truth, the three chords is interesting as, yeah, what's happening in the words.

Okay. So I think my lyrical bane of my existence, comes from another artist that I really, really love. One of my favorites, which is Boni Vair, and the way that he kind of just mumbles sounds and then converts them into words. And I think a lot of artists do that, but then they convert them into meaningful words.

And Boni Vair doesn't really convert them into meaningful words. So I will do a dramatic reading for you. Okay. Only love is all maroon. Gloowy feathers on a flume. Sky is womb, and she's the moon. Sky is womb, she's... Whoa.

Yeah. That is deeper than I can understand. I love this song so much. But if I was a lyrics person, would I hate it? I don't know. All right. So, in the end, after testing all these people, over a thousand people, Dominique found that a lot of them were more strongly lyrics.

So closer to seven, a lot of them were more strongly music, closer to one. Some of them were right in the middle. around a four. But on the whole, there was sort of like a hump in the distribution, and that centered around five. So she found that most people are lyrics people. She said it's kind of like a cosmo quiz, basically, like how much of a X are you? But this is way more scientific. Like they didn't just pick random prompts. They took a bunch of prompts. They saw what worked, what didn't, which ones measured everything they wanted to measure, which ones actually led to consistent answers and not kind of random answers all over the place. And those are the ones they

chose to run by people. But that's just half the work. So here's how she described it. You want to make sure that someone who gets a seven on the test, you know, if you give them a test on lyrics memory or something, they should do better than someone who scored a one. They still need a test their results to see if it actually is giving real answers, like if it has predictive value. Because otherwise you're measuring some thing that you made up and maybe it behaves well statistically, but it's not actually validly corresponding to the thing in the world, the construct that you're actually trying to measure. So they wanted to have them listen to music and see if they got lyrics. But they didn't want to use music that people were familiar with. So they went to the

Australian pop charts, which apparently have like all the same genres we do. They got rock, rap, pop, country. Dominic told me that the Australian country songs for some reason are still about Texas. So do that what you will. And she asked them questions basically like who was the main character, who was sitting

in the car next to this person. And they did find that the people that scored higher on the lyrics scale were able to answer these questions better. So the way they answered those prompts did accurately represent how well they paid attention to lyrics and songs.

It's real. It's real. Okay. So this whole idea of some people are more music people, some people are more lyrics people, that one researcher who said it didn't exist, who was trying to gaslight you, no, it's real. It's a real thing. I feel so validated. One thing that immediately occurs to me is like, we're both musicians.

And I was wondering, like, does that have some inherent bias? Is there a musicianship bias? This is the question, I think. This is exactly what I went into this thinking, I am a musician. I've trained on many instruments. I know music theory. That must explain why I pay more attention to music. And this is the thing that blew me away.

Dominic told me that musical training doesn't really impact your score. Interestingly, we found really, really little evidence that these things matter at all. So I was really, really surprised. Music training didn't impact the score here? So there's small moments where it seemed to maybe matter, but there's no strong evidence. evidence that over our whole sample, you get these strong, lawful relationships between people's musical training and, like, their lyricsiness, which was really surprising to me. But Dominique says this actually kind of makes sense. We're just all exposed to so much music

and sound all the time. Like, even you and I, we're playing music a couple hours a day at, like, tops. I mean, I'm not practicing guitar that much anymore, but even people that play guitar for several hours a day, it can't compete with, you know, 15 hours a day that you're just like hearing ambient sound and pitches and birds and music and honks and all this stuff in the world. Like, musicality is fundamental to our human experience. Exactly. When we're talking, we are speaking with intonation. We're rising.

We are falling. Yeah. We hear the timbre of our voice is identifying who we each are. All the various components of music. Rhythm. Yeah. I am speaking in time. Exactly.

And pausing. And she also just looked at all kinds of things. She looked at age. She looked at gender. And she just couldn't find an easy way to explain the difference. And in the end, I think we get to this point where it's just a big mystery, right? Like, what makes someone a music or a lyrics person? At this point, we don't know.

Team music. Also team music. But she has a lot of questions about all this. This is like the initial research that's showing that this is a real phenomenon. Yeah. Do you have questions about this now that you know that this is a real thing, and we also don't know what explains it? I do want to know whether or not it's trainable to move from a one to a seven. It's something that has been happening in my life.

I've been writing a lot more songs. I profess about music and teach songwriting, and I'm required to listen at a level of granular detail to lyric in a way that I never had in my life before. And now lyrics are coming to me in this whole new way. It's so exciting. Because I feel like, oh my gosh, this whole new world of music is opening up to me. I wonder how other people could also move between these skills. That's actually one of her questions. Is it genetic?

How much of it is nurture? How long does it take for you to get nurtured into this? Like how long does it take for you to become a one or a seven? So I want to just play you what you sit there. And so I think a lot of the time when we think about these individual differences, we talk about them as though they're sort of like calcified forms where it's just like, this is who you are. Right, but that's not exactly how it works either

because we're continuing to develop through adulthood with all of the experiences and the training and the practice that we seek. And the reason this is important of like trying to tease out music and language is that there's really a lot of impacts here. Like I don't want to just say that scientific research only matters when there's like practical biomedical impacts, but there are practical biomedical impacts.

What? And I would tell you well about them. After a quick break. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Taking the leap and finally starting a business is not easy. There is always another excuse to wait and another and another. But Shopify helps remove some of those reasons by giving you the tools you need so you can focus on building and growing your business.

Shopify says they are the commerce platform powering millions of businesses worldwide, and according to their numbers, nearly 10% of all e-commerce. in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Jimshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. Their design tools make it easy to create a beautiful online store that reflects your brand, and they offer powerful AI features along with built-in marketing tools to help you grow. And when it's time for your first sale, they say Shopify checkout helps more customers complete their purchases if they haven't already. The next time they shop, their information is already saved, so they can check out with just one tap.

With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash unexplainable. Again, start your free trial with Shopify.com slash unexplainable. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free? Don't worry, we get it.

Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000. thousand dollars a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the princess margaret feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today raffle number one 55 two one nine four please play responsibly this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising operations fall out of sync everything else follows spotify and accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Charlie, I told you I was going to tell you all about the potential impacts of this research. So here's what Dominic said. We have a lot of interesting treatments for neurological and brain disorders. Like for stroke, for example,

there's this thing called melodic intonation therapy, which helps pay. rebuild their language networks by attaching language to song, right? So you sort of sing sentences on your way to being able to recover your ability to say the sentences again. You know, there's stuff with music and speech for dementia patients, how music can kind of get through to dementia patients a little bit. There's research on education, all kinds of things. I mean, music and memory is amazing. Oh, yeah. I was visiting my wife's grandparents and her.

her grandfather's in his 90s, was singing songs to me that he had learned in fourth grade that were all these mnemonic devices to remember classical melodies. And by putting words to the classical melody, he was able to sing them back. He's singing things that he learned in fourth grade in his 90s. I do this all the time. I mean, when I was in school and I had to memorize, like, the order of the books of the Bible or something, I actually put them into a rhythm. I mean, I was a drummer, but I put them into like a rhythm, and I would just go through it in my head.

And I still remember it, and it's gibberish. But the rhythm is still in my head. It helps, yeah. So at the end here, right, we've got basis for future research on what causes some people to be music or lyrics people. You know, we got to do more research, genetics, nurture, how long it takes, can you switch? We've got some interesting ways we could use this to actually help people, dementia patients, stroke patients, just this kind of basic understanding of, you know, the thing that makes

us us, which is music and language in a lot of ways. Where does it come from and how does it work? Great questions. But there is this question in here that I can't stop thinking about. If you hear a song, any kind of sound, really, it can seem like we're all just listening to the same thing, right? If you hear a noise, you and I might assume we're hearing the same thing. But I've done a lot of reporting showing that our brain isn't just, you know, hearing a sound that exists out in the world. It's editing the sound.

It's processing it in a unique way. and it's almost having a sort of performance in your brain. And what happens is that we end up processing sounds in actually pretty different ways. So this is the like, do you see the same color orange that I see? Or do you hear the same color orange I hear? Right. So basically, this is what we're getting at when we talk about,

okay, we're both listening to Billy Bragg and Wilco, and we're kind of hearing different things. Whoa. We're not just focusing on different parts. We are hearing different things. And here's what I mean. I talked to the psychologist, Diana Deutsch, a few years ago. She does tons of great research on audio perception, and she has this great example of how we hear things differently.

Like the same things. We hear things differently. So this is an audio illusion she made that listeners might have heard on the show before. But this is called the Tritone Paradox. And I want to just play you this one. Okay. Did you hear that going up or down? Down.

So you heard it going down? Yeah. I hear that going up. You're wrong. So here's the first one. Yeah, down. Up. Down.

Oh. I don't know. I thought we were the same. I thought you were my friends. So her idea is that different people, based on where they grow up and based on the sounds that they're exposed to, actually hear the same exact thing in different ways. So we just listened to the simplest thing, a tritone. And you heard it going down and I heard it going up. You heard the next one going up.

I heard it going down. Apparently, we are different. And there's a whole bunch of other allusions that she uses to kind of illustrate that people can hear the same thing differently. I don't know, there's a certain level at which I'm a bit, I'm kind of in awe about that. I think that's so cool that we can all hear different things and come together. And then I'm also kind of sad. It's almost like we're all at a concert with our AirPods in, you know? And I'm trying to like weigh these things that, you know, we go to a concert and we perceive different things.

I often go to concerts with my friend Harrison, who is the drummer in my band, will often be watching the same thing, and I will be drawn to the sound of the drums because he's standing next to me, and I can see him noticing. And that's not an experience that I would be having if I were not standing next to Harrison at that concert. I would not be paying attention to the drums, but knowing that his experience and his perception of that is different

has opened up a door in a world of perception to me that he didn't have before, which I think is really cool. She notices him noticing the drums. and that makes her more curious, right? Like, that brings something out in her that wouldn't come out if she was just listening to music and the way that she's comfortable to listen to. Yeah, I mean, there's maybe like a potential cynical conclusion

we could have come away with, which is like, we're all just having her own experience. We're alone together. But, in fact, music is inherently social. Right. That they are having a special experience, that connection, knowing that, yeah, we are hearing different things, but when we get to share that thing that we both enjoy,

it makes us very human. I mean, we're not ants, right? We're not the Borg. Right. We have to have differences between us in order to have meaningful social interaction. If you were exactly the same as me. He's so boring. If we both heard that tritone going down, it would be really boring, right?

But if we have differences in perception, if, you know, Nate's wife listens to the lyrics and Nate listens to the music, that gives them something to talk about. That's like a perceptual gap that actually allows them both. to step in and kind of learn something about each other or learn something about the music or like Dominique says, perceive the music in a different way. I love this. It's beautiful. I mean, it really is about fundamentally being a person.

And this happened to me very recently. I went to a concert with one of my good friends, Nolan, who loves the artist Jason Isbell. And I kind of know his work, but I wasn't as familiar. And Jason often plays with a band. It's like really engaging. But this show was a small, intimate theater show, Just Jason, and his acoustic guitar, which is mesmerizing and beautiful. And so at the time, I was like, this song kind of reminds me of that other song.

And next to me, Nolan is having a profound experience. There's like, a rhyming pair will happen. He'll just go like, oh. I'm like, oh, I totally missed that one. I was totally zoned out paying attention to the guitar. And what did that do? Like, did you talk to Nolan about it? Like, what did that feel like to go to a concert and just?

have an entirely different experiences somewhere. I feel like we don't actually have good social permission to talk about this music lyric divide. I feel like you were helping us create that. But at the time, I didn't want to deflate his experience at all. So I think right after the show was like, that was really moving. And I was like, I remember talking about like,

I can see it was really moving for you. I'm not as familiar with the music. What I meant to say was, I'm not as familiar with the words. I definitely came away being it was not as impactful to me at all. And since then, I have revisited Jason Nisbel's music, and it is.

Yeah. The song that stuck out to me was called Open and Close. Can we just play a clip for a second? The doorman's asleep. I don't think I'll wake him. He's always so sweet. He's here really late every night of the week. Letting right people in the real friend.

This one stood out because it's about someone from Alabama, from the south, and he has made this record in New York City. And you can tell that this is kind of like the first time someone's been like, what is a doorman? Like there's a whole social institution about dormant and how they provide services to the city. And he says it's just like the nice person like letting it all the right friends. And you can really hear the sort of contrast between the...

It's like a tension. Yeah, the tension between the sort of organic rootsy quality of his music and the manufactured nature of city life. That's so pretty. And you probably wouldn't have thought about it this way if it hadn't been for the experience of going to that concert, sitting next to Nolan. It was all through the transference of his experience.

Yeah, this is what I love about what Dominique was saying about going to that concert and seeing, you know, her friend, the drummer in her band Harrison, just totally losing himself in the drums. And then Dominic is like, oh, there is this whole other world that I'm not paying attention to. Like, in this case, it's not music and lyrics. It's drums.

But then it just makes you realize that, like, every single part of a sound, someone is hyper-focused on it, right? Like, every little part of a sound has some story to tell without getting too cliche. It's true, I believe it. But this difference of music and lyrics and what we focus on,

I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg. And the further down you go, you realize, okay, some people pay attention to drums, some people pay attention to guitar, some people pay attention to harmony, some people pay attention to melody. Right. And then at like a really base level at the bottom of the iceberg, like we can each hear the simplest interval, like a tritone, and we can hear totally different things. And you build up from there and you're like, oh, actually we have completely different takeaways from any song we hear. Even as a trained musician, I really have to work hard to try to hear everything at once. Yeah. Right?

It's the equivalent of like walking into a restaurant and trying to hear every conversation. Yeah. We don't actually have the mental capacity to do that. And when music is happening, we can only tune our attention to so many things at any given time. I think that's also why I love to hear a song again and again and again. It's that every time I'm hearing it, I actually truly am paying attention to different things. I'm hearing it with new ears. Yeah.

I think that feels like a good place to stop. Boom. Thank you for doing this. Wow. Thank you for the question, Charlie. Thank you for sending me down this two years long rabbit hole. I'd like to think that you were only doing this for two years. Yes, that's all I was doing.

I mean, I keep calling in sick and they're like wondering where I am. And I'm just like, I'm talking to music researchers and no one's giving me the answer. I'm stunned. I really feel validated. But also, I feel like I fit more in the world now. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me. Noam Hassanfeld. It was edited by Joanna Salataraff.

Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles. Our animator is Kareem Karea. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Devon Howard and Joe Nebress. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, Meredith Hoddenot runs the show. And Bird Pinkerton looked around and saw a large white chamber with black curtains.

Her beak beeper was going nuts. She saw a group of birds standing in the center, waiting to greet Flapton. This is Jeff Beak, he said. That's Jimmy Cage. And these are the yardbirds. Special thanks to Dave Baker. And thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you want to see the video version of this episode, you can find us on Netflix.

And if you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at Unexplanable.com. tell us what kind of mysteries you want us to look into on the video show. And if you want to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network,

and we'll see you right back here next time.