How to Live with Songs That Carry Hard Memories

A Portuguese fado plays in a documentary about Lisbon, and I’m weeping though I understand not a single word. The singer’s voice carries something that transcends vocabulary—a particular quality of longing that speaks directly to whatever it is in us that recognizes sorrow as universal human currency.

Music proves that meaning exists beyond language.

The melody tells me everything I need to know: someone is singing about loss, about the weight of memory, about love that exists only in past tense. I don’t need translation because emotion has its own grammar, its own syntax that human voices carry regardless of the words they’re shaped around.

Voice is the most honest instrument—it cannot lie about what the heart is feeling.

When we don’t understand lyrics, we hear pure emotion without the interference of specific meaning.

I listen to Bulgarian folk songs, Japanese enka, West African griots, and feel moved by something that bypasses my intellect entirely. Without words to analyze or interpret, I receive the music as pure feeling—grief that sounds like grief whether it’s sung in Portuguese or Mandarin, joy that translates perfectly across every linguistic barrier.

Perhaps words sometimes get in the way of what music is really trying to communicate.

My son hears K-pop with fascination, drawn to melodies and energy that speak to something in him that Bengali and English haven’t yet learned to express. He doesn’t need to understand Korean to know when a song is about celebration, heartbreak, or the particular loneliness of being young.

Music speaks the emotional language we learned before we learned any spoken language.

The human voice carries information that transcends the words it’s pronouncing.

When I hear flamenco, I don’t need Spanish to understand I’m witnessing someone wrestle with passion too large for ordinary expression. The singer’s voice tells me about struggle, about the weight of tradition, about emotions that require the entire body to contain them.

Music in unknown languages forces us to listen with our hearts instead of our heads.

What songs in languages you don’t speak have moved you most? What does it mean that melody and voice can communicate across every barrier that divides human experience?