Invisible, without palpable form, a song, unimpeded, enters our ear; then, if its sounds seduce us sufficiently, we open ourselves to the song completely: we are defenseless against it. Within us, it takes a shape that borrows from the shapes that exist there already, the peculiar contours of our feelings, memories, and imaginings.

Any sound, or combination of sounds, in a song—the crystalline timbre of the flute; the singer’s kittenish lilt that shifts abruptly to a growl; the tension that builds, then breaks, as the chorus approaches and explodes—can lift into consciousness a part of ourselves that otherwise lies hidden, as the fine powder that detectives dust a surface with reveals the hidden fingerprint.

A song that haunts is not merely the pleasing vehicle for delivery of a message. Even a song with lyrics operates largely beyond words. It might contain ideas, but it is, itself, not an idea; it is an intense, compact rendering in sound of what it feels like to exist in a given moment or situation. Its pleasures may be partly intellectual, but they are first, and unavoidably, sensual—the pleasures the body knows—so whatever a song is about is something one’s whole being, not just one’s intellect, recognizes. The song is a complex experience, unparaphrasable and incompletely fathomable—and dynamic: it moves. Everything in it but the words—its rhythmic patterns, harmonies, melodic turns—is the sound of the song saying what words, alone, cannot. Thus, the song summons the parts of ourselves—shreds of memory, flutterings of feelings—that are equally obscure, shifting, and inscrutable, the parts of ourselves that language cannot name, that make us feel in the presence of the inexplicable. As songwriter Joe Henry says, a song is “not about dispelling mystery; it’s about abiding mystery.” 

. . . . 

Often, the songs that root themselves most stubbornly in my psyche are ones whose pleasures are inextricable from some conflict within them, some paradox they cannot resolve, some riddle they are content not to answer and that appeals to me probably because it reminds me of the riddle I am to myself. 

The Roches, “Runs in the Family,” 1979

“I can’t get over what I saw.” These are the first words we hear, an utterance of intense subjectivity, anchored by those two singular, first-person pronouns. This is an “I” contemplating the “I,” a self in the present moment feeling its inextricable link to the self of the past. Yet something tugs against this inwardness. From the first syllable, the lyric’s emphasis on the sole self is contradicted—or, better, complicated—by the fact that the words are sung by three separate voices, three separate selves, joined in harmony.

The singers are sisters: Maggie, Suzzy, and Terre, holding the low, middle, and high parts, respectively. Their voices’ complementary timbres alchemize into the kind of unforced and unreplicable beauty we expect from sibling singers, whether they be the brothers Everly, Wilson, Neville, or Gibb or the sisters Pointer or Andrews. These three voices belong together.

Paradoxically, the subject of “Runs in the Family” is the urge to go solo: the yearning that each family member, in turn, feels to escape the fold, to forsake the comfort of the group for the risks of “the danger zone.” Throughout the song, as the words refer to this inescapable desire to journey away from others and toward the self, whatever that self might become, the harmonizing reminds us that, wherever we go, we carry our family with us. The instrumentation is spare: for the most part only an acoustic guitar, fingerpicked. (Late in the song, a triangle is struck lightly a couple of times for color.) The simplicity of this accompaniment allows the voices to predominate: each of the three is inescapably present, high in the mix; each has an equal and simultaneous say in this matter.

“I can’t get over what I saw.” What did she—what did they—see? They don’t say, as if this “what” is too large to be contained in words, as if it might be all of reality itself, all that is available to be discovered if one looks in the right direction. It is, after all, something impossible to get over, as the wonderful second line confirms—wonderful in the way the line is witty yet sung full-throatedly, with earnest resolve and honest heartache: “I can’t change the law of averages.” The statement introduces a sense of determinism, of fatedness, which the next line—“I’m going down”—underscores; it descends from a high to a low note, and that falling feels at one with an unavoidable submission to something overwhelming. It is a force this daughter’s uncle and father submitted to before her, a habit of restless exploration that she is beginning to fear “runs in the family.” 

The second verse continues to dramatize the tension between the singular and the plural, the individual child and the family of which she is a part. The first line, “One by one we left home,” calls attention to each person—each “one”—in turn, yet the reference to “we” affirms the presence of the group; in seeking a life different from what the family provides, each of its members, paradoxically, is behaving just as someone in that family would be expected to. The particular experiences of anyone who strays from the group might be unique, but the compulsion to stray is a shared one.

In the song’s bridge, the rhymes are predictable. The words “school” and “fool” have been paired so often in the products of popular culture as to offer no surprise, and they have, in fact, already been heard elsewhere on the album (The Roches) on which this song appears. Yet something is unsettling about the context in which the rhymes appear here: “All the boys / Could have gone to school. / All the girls / Were pretty enough to play the fool.” The implication is that in this family, maybe this society, the means to conventional achievement for boys is getting a formal education—getting smart—and for girls is relying on their sexual wiles and playing dumb. The poignancy of this dispiriting observation is intensified by its being made by three women; when they refer to “the girls,” they refer to themselves, to their own narrow path not chosen.

Ironically, the path they have chosen—the one they have followed away from the family—is the one worn well already by other family members before them, and it will be a path walked, too, by the next generation: the last verse announces the imminent arrival of a newborn child who is also fated to “run in the family.”

From first word to last, “Runs in the Family” is charged with an energy that flows from a central contradiction: it is the lament of an individual tempted to stray, alone, into danger, yet it is simultaneously a confirmation of community. In the song’s final seconds, as if enacting one last time this tangle of impulses, the three sisters sing, together, the word “family,” and they extend its last vowel, the three voices separating, each going its own way, as if competing to see whose breath will hold out longest—to see who will go farthest “out there.” One sister—Terre—wins, barely.  

This seems just; it is her song, after all. Remarkably, she says it is the first song she ever wrote entirely by herself. She had been singing with her older sister, Maggie, for years, and the two of them had released a great and underappreciated album containing devastatingly piercing songs written almost wholly by Maggie. Maggie was the family songwriter. Maggie was the family genius. In “Runs in the Family,” Terre sneaks off and finds a genius of her own.