Vol. 29: When the Music Outlives the Moment
Every song begins in a particular moment.
It may be written quickly, recorded with whatever equipment is available and released without anyone knowing where it will lead. If it succeeds, the moment grows into something much larger. The song becomes part of an artist’s identity, an audience’s memory and, eventually, a piece of history.
What happens after that is less predictable.
An artist may spend decades trying to preserve the work, escape it, make peace with it or regain control of it. Four recent stories, involving DJ Shadow, Gregg Alexander, Carly Rae Jepsen and songwriter Cyril Vetter, show just how complicated that relationship can become.
Prefer to listen?
You can listen to the audio edition of this week’s Dad’s Music Muse below.
The Boxes We Leave Behind
DJ Shadow has spent much of the past two years going through boxes.
Some were in closets. Others were in his garage or scattered among various storage spaces. Inside were early track lists, studio notes, demos, live recordings and pieces of music stored on formats that are becoming increasingly difficult to play.
Among them was a VHS tape labelled “Coachella 99” and a yellow legal pad filled with handwritten notes.
DJ Shadow, whose real name is Josh Davis, built his reputation by finding possibilities in forgotten recordings. His 1996 debut album, Endtroducing....., was created entirely from samples using turntables and an Akai MPC sampler.
Thirty years later, some of his own work is now in danger of becoming the kind of lost material he once searched for in record stores.
That’s what makes his current archival project so interesting. It’s about an artist realizing that if he doesn’t organize his own history, parts of it could disappear, even from him.
Today, we may be producing more documentation than ever, but leaving behind less that someone can actually hold or even find.
Photos live on old phones. Recordings sit on hard drives that may eventually stop working. Creative decisions are buried in email accounts, cloud folders and software that will someday become obsolete.
A labelled tape in a box may survive longer than a digital file no one remembers saving.
The Man Who Left His Own Hit Behind
Gregg Alexander was the voice behind New Radicals and their 1998 hit “You Get What You Give.”
The song sounded like the beginning of a major career. Instead, Alexander disbanded New Radicals in 1999, only months after the group reached its commercial peak.
He didn’t disappear from music. He moved behind the scenes and became a successful songwriter and producer, helping create songs including Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” Santana and Michelle Branch’s “The Game of Love,” Ronan Keating’s “Life Is a Rollercoaster” and Adam Levine’s “Lost Stars.”
Meanwhile, “You Get What You Give” continued to travel without him.
It became especially meaningful to the Biden family while Beau Biden was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. In 2021, New Radicals reunited to perform the song during President Joe Biden’s inauguration celebrations.
Now, after nearly three decades, Alexander has returned with new original New Radicals music.
His measure of success is no longer whether a song dominates the charts when it gets released. He’s now focused more on how to ensure that his songs are still playing 50 years from now.
That’s a very different ambition from chasing another immediate hit.
A chart position tells us how much attention a song received at one point in time. Longevity tells us whether people continued to find something in it after the promotional campaign ended and the music business moved on.
Alexander walked away from the role the industry had prepared for him, but the song remained. It continued gathering meaning through other people’s lives, including people he’d never met.
When One Song Becomes Too Large
Carly Rae Jepsen has described “Call Me Maybe” as one of the greatest things that ever happened to her and also one of her biggest traumas.
That may sound contradictory, but it makes sense when one song becomes so successful that everything else an artist creates is measured against it.
“Call Me Maybe” became a global hit in 2012. It reached number one in numerous countries, spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and turned Jepsen into an international pop star.
Then she had to figure out what came next.
Jepsen has spoken about taking a break from the machinery surrounding the hit and accepting the lead role in the Broadway production of Cinderella. The decision confused some members of her team, but it gave her room to reconsider what kind of career she wanted.
Her next album, E•MO•TION, didn’t reproduce the commercial scale of “Call Me Maybe.” It did something equally important for her future. It attracted a devoted audience that cared about the rest of her music.
I can understand an artist becoming sick and tired of the song everyone expects to hear. Imagine singing the same three or four minutes night after night for decades. At some point, it must begin to feel less like a song and more like an obligation.
But that’s also where the audience enters the picture. Imagine going to see Billy Joel and leaving without hearing “Piano Man.” For the artist, it may be one song among hundreds. For someone in the crowd, it may be the song that brought them there.
Other artists face a different problem. Sometimes the old music represents a version of themselves they’ve worked hard to leave behind.
I think of a 2000 interview with Sebastian Bach, who was appearing on Broadway in Jekyll & Hyde. He seemed genuinely excited to discuss this new stage of his career. When the interviewer steered the conversation back toward Skid Row, Poison and the hair-metal world, Bach became visibly irritated.
Watching it, I got the impression that he wanted to be seen for what he was doing at that moment, while the interviewer still saw the singer he’d been ten years earlier. I understood the frustration, but I also understood the question. The past that an artist wants to escape may be the very thing an audience still cares about most.
The Song That Still Hasn’t Come Home
In 1962, Cyril Vetter and Donald Smith wrote “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” The song later became a hit for the Swingin’ Medallions.
In 1963, Vetter and Smith assigned their copyright interests in the song to a music publisher for one dollar and the promise of royalties.
More than half a century later, Vetter used a provision in United States copyright law that allows authors, under certain conditions, to terminate an earlier grant and reclaim their rights.
The dispute eventually centred on a much larger question. Had Vetter reclaimed only the American rights to the song, or had he regained the worldwide rights that were included in the original agreement?
A federal district court ruled in Vetter’s favour. In January 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld that decision, concluding that Vetter and his company controlled the relevant rights throughout the world.
Music publishers connected to BMG, Sony, Universal and Warner then asked the United States Supreme Court to review the ruling.
The dispute is now with the United States Supreme Court for a decision about whether the Court will hear the publishers’ appeal.
The case has attracted attention because its consequences could extend far beyond one song. If the Fifth Circuit’s interpretation stands, other American songwriters may argue that terminating an old agreement allows them to recover worldwide rights, rather than American rights alone.
The publishers say that interpretation could disrupt decades of established copyright agreements. Supporters of Vetter’s position see it as a long-overdue correction for creators who signed away valuable work before anyone understood what it might become.
Those legal arguments will be settled (or left unsettled) by the courts.
What’s already clear is that a decision made in 1963 can continue shaping who controls a song more than sixty years later.
What Do We Owe the Music?
These four stories show how much work begins after a song has already had its moment.
DJ Shadow is sorting through boxes because digital history can disappear surprisingly quickly. Gregg Alexander is thinking about whether his songs will still matter decades from now. Carly Rae Jepsen has had to make peace with a hit so large that it could easily have defined everything that followed. Cyril Vetter is still fighting over rights he signed away more than sixty years ago.
Success doesn’t settle a song’s future. Someone still has to preserve the recordings, protect the rights, understand what the audience values and decide how much of the past to carry forward.
Artists may get tired of their biggest songs. They may outgrow them, resent them or wish the public would pay attention to something newer. That’s understandable. The audience has its own relationship with those songs, though, and that relationship can last much longer than the moment that created it.
Maybe that’s the real measure of whether music survives. The song remains available, its history remains intact, and the people who made it still have some say in what happens next.
Listen Along
This week’s playlist brings together music connected to the artists, songs and stories featured in Vol. 29.
Listen to the Dad’s Music Muse Vol. 29 playlist on Spotify
What song has stayed with you long after the moment surrounding it had passed?