He gives examples of how perfect hooks give the listener “ecstatic moments”, but what exactly the rules are for writing them remain a mystery. What does he mean – “grips the rhythm”, “soars skyward”, and the “brain’s delight”? He doesn’t say. 7 Spoiler alert!īut, ah! Wait! It is not a recipe or a formula. The songs bristle with hooks, painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain’s delight in melody, rhythm and repetition.” The Song Machine – Inside the Hit Factory, by John Seabrook, p. Then, slicing through the thunderous algorithms, like Tennyson’s eagle – And like a thunderbolt he falls – comes the ‘hook’: a short, sung line that grips the rhythm with melodic talons and soars skyward. “Melodies are fragmentary, and appear in strong bursts, like espresso shots served throughout the song by a producer-barista. The only thing that serves as a sort of definition is this statement on page seven, in the first chapter, right there, in front of your nose: And it is about what makes a song a hit: the hook. I found the answers to my general questions about music in the book, but I did not find a satisfactory (definitive) answer to the one big question I had: what makes a hook, a hook? What exactly is a hook? The book is about the song factories that churn out hits, starting with a trend-setting one, Denniz “Dagge” PoP’s Cheiron Studio in Stockholm, Sweden, established in 1992. I read it on the recommendation of sound engineer Luke Garfield, and because I wanted to know: How do people make music these days, and what is a “hook” in music? Cheiron Studios But even if you are not a musician and still learning about quavers and semibreves and minims and whatnot, like I have been, this book will still intrigue and entertain you. All very clever, if you know what a quaver note is. Anyone who is a musician will recognize the image on the cover of John Seabrook’s book: it is a quaver note, and it has a tail coming out of the stem, and the stem and the note head have been made to look like a fish hook.