The melody is the part of the song you take home with you. The rhythm stays in the room. The harmony stays in the speakers. The melody walks out the door in your head and rides the subway with you and sits in your kitchen while you make coffee and you did not invite it but it is there. The melody is an uninvited guest that you are glad showed up.

Mozart wrote melodies that children can hum two hundred and fifty years later. That is the test. Not whether scholars study it. Whether a five-year-old can sing it in the bathtub. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. A melody so simple it sounds like it was always there. Like it was not written but discovered. The great melodies feel like they existed before the songwriter found them. The songwriter just happened to be in the right room at the right time with the right instrument.

Chuck Berry wrote Johnny B. Goode and the melody is a declaration of independence. Four notes that say I am here and I am not leaving and you cannot make me leave. Rock and roll melody is not pretty. Rock and roll melody is insistent. It does not ask you to listen. It tells you to listen. The difference between a folk melody and a rock melody is the difference between a request and a demand.

On the corner the melody was the fishing line. The rhythm got their feet moving but the melody got their ears. A stranger hears a melody they recognize and the recognition is the connection. The melody is the handshake between the song and the stranger. I played melodies everybody knew because the known melody is a bridge. After the bridge I played melodies nobody knew because by then they were listening. The melody earns the attention. What you do with the attention is up to you.

Hum something. Right now. Whatever comes into your head. That is a melody that somebody wrote and it is living inside you rent free. The songwriter is not getting paid for the space that melody takes up in your brain. The melody does not care about royalties. The melody cares about survival. A melody that lives in a million heads is a melody that cannot die. You can burn every copy of the record. You can delete every file. But you cannot delete a melody from a human head. The melody is the most permanent thing in music and the most fragile. It takes nothing to destroy a recording. It takes everything to forget a song.