I accidentally invented game.

It goes like this:

I give ChatGPT a song I love.

Not necessarily my favorite song. Just one that has stuck around. Something I keep returning to, or something that immediately makes me think of a person, a room, a road, a period of my life, or occasionally absolutely nothing I can explain.

Then I ask one question:

Why do I love this song?

The trick is that I don’t tell ChatGPT the answer.

Instead, it gets to dig.

It looks through the increasingly ridiculous pile of evidence I’ve collected for the Wygle Wide Web: old tweets, blog posts, playlists, messages, photographs, family stories, music-library data, previous conversations, and whatever else has survived twenty-five years of me leaving digital debris everywhere.

Then it makes a hypothesis. And then I tell it what the answer actually is.

We call it Song Why‽

The interrobang is important. Probably.

What makes the game interesting is that the guess and the answer are kept separate.

ChatGPT might find that I’ve been quoting a lyric for fifteen years. It might discover that an artist shows up repeatedly around one specific period of my life. It might notice that the song fits some larger pattern we’ve already found elsewhere.

But none of that means it gets to declare what the song means to me.

Evidence can tell us what twenty-eight-year-old Adam tweeted.

It cannot automatically tell us why he tweeted it.

So first comes the evidence.

Then the theory.

Then Present-Day Adam gets to walk into the room and say:

Yep.

Almost.

Nope.

Or, increasingly:

Oh shit. I forgot about that.

Those are the fun ones.

Sometimes the archive gets surprisingly close.

Joanna Newsom’s “Emily” looked like a song about one of my recurring obsessions: memory, naming things correctly, distinguishing an object from our perception of it, and trying to preserve something before it disappears.

That was basically right.

What the archive couldn’t know until I told it was that, when I was in high school, I told someone I loved that whenever I saw the Pleiades, I would think of her.

I still do.

Suddenly a song about stars, memory, naming and keeping things became a lot less theoretical.

Other songs turn out to have traveled through half my life.

Damien Jurado’s “Yuma, AZ” started in 1999. My friend Elton and I used to yell-sing it at each other around school. Eventually other people joined in. Later I sang it to the woman I married. Later still, I sang it to my kids at bedtime.

That isn’t just a song I like anymore.

It’s a little piece of culture I’ve been carrying from person to person for almost three decades.

Then there are songs like Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” where the answer is partly that I think the thing is nearly perfect: the writing, the arrangement, the instrumentation, the enormous feeling created from almost no exposition.

And sometimes after several thousand words of archival investigation the answer is basically:

Because it fucking slaps.

This has also turned out to be important.

One of the rules we’ve had to add to Song Why is:

Do not over-psychologize the catchy little number.

Not every song is secretly about childhood, religion, divorce, identity, memory, mortality or the fundamental architecture of my personality.

Sometimes I like a song because the hook is great.

This is probably healthy.

The unexpected part is that Song Why has become one of the best tools in this whole project.

Music is weirdly good at attaching itself to things.

People.

Cars.

Bedrooms.

Churches.

Road trips.

Breakups.

Inside jokes.

Parents.

Children.

Versions of yourself you haven’t thought about in twenty years.

A photograph can show me a moment.

A journal entry can tell me what I thought.

But sometimes a song can bring back the weather.

And because I’ve spent so much of my life listening to music, sharing music, quoting music, making playlists, sending songs to people, driving with music, working with music and apparently documenting all of that online, there is often an evidence trail.

So Song Why‽  isn’t really trying to answer:

What does this song mean?

It’s asking something more specific:

How did somebody else’s translated experience enter my life, attach itself to memory, and become useful for understanding myself or somebody I loved?

Which is an absurdly grand description of a game that often begins with me pasting lyrics into ChatGPT and saying:

Okay. Why this one?

But that’s pretty much the Wygle Wide Web at this point.

Start with something small.

Dig.

See where it goes.