Unlike every other Swiftie in the universe, I had been dreading April 19 for months. That was when Taylor Swift would release her newest album The Tortured Poets Department—and I was going to be on remote safari in Botswana. Would a satellite link in the middle of the African bush be enough to download the album?
“You could just listen when you get home next week,” deadpanned a colleague who clearly didn't get it. “Who cares about another Taylor Swift breakup album? You’re in the middle of bush!”
When the morning of the album’s release rolled around, the Wi-Fi at the new Natural Selection camp, Tawana, proved to be lightning fast. And so, at dawn in Botswana on April 19th, as we trundled out of camp for our morning game drive, The Tortured Poets Department rang through my headphones. What I didn’t expect was how much it would change the safari itself.
As Swift swooned on the country-tinged “But Daddy I Love Him,” I felt my eyes rest more easily on my surroundings as my brain parsed through new lyrics. I saw details I hadn’t noticed before: not merely identifying birds, but seeing how their feathers fluttered in the wind; not just seeing a leopard stalk through tall grass, but watching her tail flick in rhythm with each step. Eye contact with a cheetah guarding his freshly killed antelope during “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” sent shivers down my spine. The sweeping chorus of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” became all the more anthemic and cinematic in a safari vehicle driving at speed across the open plain. The entire experience grew in richness, complexity, and detail—I was struck by how deeply the music shaped my experience.
I’ve done numerous safaris across Southern Africa; but this was the first time I listened to music while on a game drive. Yes, music serves a sort of memory-marking function from our past—so often, a song can instantly take us back to a set time and place. But it shapes our present, too.
Consider the Los Angeles restaurant Verse, which calls itself an “acoustically perfect” dining experience. It’s the creation of 18-time Grammy award-winning mixing engineer Manny Marroquin, who built the dining room so that everything from the live music to the ambient conversation of neighboring tables complements your meal. Marroquin works with chefs to create tasting menus inspired by different musical artists and genres. (For whatever it’s worth, he also worked on Swift’s album Red.)
“The beauty of music is that our journey has almost nothing to do with the artist themself… it’s about how music gets you to a certain state of mind,” Marroquin says. At Verse, he uses acoustics to complement the food in order to create sensory experiences that go above and beyond. He recently put together a tasting menu of favorite dishes from his native Guatemala and paired the service with a soundtrack by Gaby Moreno, one of the country’s most popular artists. “There was this moment in the evening that we timed certain dishes to come out during certain lyrics,” says Marroquin. “Something magical and spiritual happens. The guest just feels a certain way.”
Studies show that listening to music increases blood flow to the parts of our brain that generate emotions and control memory. And according to Dr. John Mondanaro, director of expressive arts therapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, music helps us frame the world around us, especially when it comes to new environments.
When we travel, we experience an overwhelming amount of new information, Dr. Mondanaro says, and music helps us understand it all. Because we process music in the pre-frontal cortex, in the same neuropathways where autobiographical memories are formed and held, music fosters “an enhanced sense of connection to the world,” influencing our biological rhythms, our mood, and the very foundations of who we are. For that reason, Dr. Mondanaro has found success with music therapy for patients experiencing dementia or Alzheimer’s; as those patients become untethered from their own realities with the progression of the disease, music fosters not only a return to memory, but a connection to the here and now.
Safari is such an about-face from my day-to-day life back home that some of the infinite details of the experience are inevitably going to be lost. No brain can capture it all—but music creates a framework which allows the most essential, impactful details and emotions to be preserved. The control in what I was hearing seemed to allow my vision greater focus. I caught myself noticing cheetah paw prints in the dirt alongside our safari vehicle before we ultimately caught up to that cheetah; I can still see those tracks in my memory, gently pressed into the earth and growing fainter and fainter with each passing breeze.
“What we hear, smell, and feel creates a whole story around the experiences we’re having,” says Dr. Mondanaro. “Music contributes to all kinds of memories that are not just profound, but profound to who we are because they connect to moments of our life.”
That’s why hotels work so hard to fine-tune their atmosphere with the right playlists. “Music allows you to lean into your feelings or change your lens on the world,” says LP Giobbi, Global Music Director for W Hotels. For each property’s common areas, Giobbi curates playlists that change energy around the clock—from vibey and relaxing by day, to energetic and celebratory come nightfall. “Music amplifies inside of us whatever a song is evoking. It can bring us back to a moment in time or, depending on the song, can bring out certain emotions. It allows you to lean into your feelings or change your lens on the world.”
There was never any doubt that I would remember where I was when The Tortured Poets Department came out—but I couldn’t have imagined how it would help me connect with more of the trip itself. During the sixty-five minutes and eight seconds I had my headphones on during our game drive, did I miss out on a certain birdsong, or did I spoil the serenity of wild silence? Maybe. But what I did hear brought me closer to the landscape and to my memories of it. I was disengaged in one way, admittedly, but highly more engaged in another.
