Rare Kind of Listening Freedom
When memories and feelings outrank status and genre
Michael Learns to Rock (MLTR), the band from Denmark is having its first concerts in the US, three decades after their very first album was produced in 1989.
When I was a kid in China, I had this condensed CD, with hundreds of songs crammed together, sorted alphabetically. No cover art, no text descriptions, no “cool” or “uncool” labels. Just a sea of titles.
That’s how I met both Michael Jackson and Michael Learns to Rock, who were alphabetical neighbors.
“Heal the World”; “You Took My Heart Away”
I didn’t know one was the King of Pop, and the other was the soft-rock darling of South and East Asia. I didn’t know the West called one “legendary” and the other “cheesy”… They just both reached me.
The Unfiltered Signal
When you don’t yet know the rules of cool, you hear music for what it is: The way the melody stays with you after one listen; the way the voice sounds like it means it; the way it makes something inside you unclench.
I heard MJ’s pure, sincere voice lifting the whole world, and I heard MLTR’s tender tone holding one person close. To me, they were doing the same thing, protecting something fragile.
For me, MLTR’s Stuck in the Heat and One Way Street were the songs I discovered and listened to at 19 when I first fell in love. They say you can love someone before you even know what love is, and I think their songs taught me exactly how.
Simple Melodies
周治平 (Steve Chow) once explained why simple melodies are hard to write:
“Take a song like “Encounter”. Its melody is very simple. Precisely because it’s simple, everyone can hum it; it quickly becomes a classic that people love and that can be passed on for a long time. So when you write songs, don’t make them too complicated, simpler is better. But honestly, the simpler the song, the harder it is to write. Because for melodies that simple, everyone’s already written them; they’ve been done over again and again. To find, within those oft‑repeated shapes, a melody no one has written yet, and one that’s still beautiful, is really not easy.”
That’s the paradox MLTR embodied. Their melodies were deceptively simple. But they were also hard to write in the way Steve Chow describes: to write something direct, stripped of complication, and still make it feel beautiful and new.
Take the song You Took My Heart Away. The chord progression is familiar, the words are plain, but the melody hits a spot that feels inevitable once you hear it. That inevitability is what makes it endure. MLTR also are not afraid to create resolution in their music in ways that feel true rather than clever.
It’s not “safe”, it’s risking nakedness. It makes them a band that works in the most unforgiving terrain, where every note has been tried, and only sincerity can make the old new again.
Official Ranking, But Who Cares
Years later, I learned the “official” rankings: MJ was a cultural giant; MLTR was… fine, but safe. Background music.
It’s strange. Knowing this didn’t change the way I felt. Heal the World and You Took My Heart Away are still the Music I believed in.
People sometimes rewrite their past tastes to match consensus. “Oh, I liked that? That was embarrassing.” While doing that, they missed the opportunity to embrace the rare kind of listening freedom, the chance to say: I heard the sincerity wherever it lives, I kept what moves me, even when the culture shifts, and letting memory and feeling outrank status and genre.
Cultural Immunity
It’s a kind of cultural immunity I wish I had in other parts of life: The power to notice when something is good for me before the world tells me whether it’s good for everyone else. And the courage to not mistake what is not valuable when the mass swear by its value.
I don’t go back to that CD much anymore, but I like knowing that somewhere in those alphabetical seas, MJ and MLTR are still side by side, waiting for another kid to find them. And maybe that kid will grow up with their own rare kind of listening freedom.
