ABSTRACT
I have argued throughout that songs mean. In many spheres of understanding the meaning of ‘mean’ is to point elsewhere – we may say that seeing smoke means that there’s a fire, that failing an exam means insufficient work was done, that the use of a particular word means that I had some idea in mind when I chose to use that word. A meaning that is not open to communication, that is not available to be made available to others, seems incomplete. Sometimes, we don’t know ‘what we mean’ until we try to express it. I want to argue here that if we find some music meaningful, if we find meaning in a song, that finding is incomplete until we have passed it on.
