all shook up

You meet a person whose conversations are considerably strings of sentences that have an exceptional habit of drawing you in. They seem to have always get you 'hooked' to every single chat that you have with them.

For starters, the 'hook' is, basically, a part of a song that reaches out, grabs into your mind, and gets you invested in the song. Often than not, in pop music, it contains the title similarly when Bruno Mars goes, “'cause you're amaaaziiingg... juuust the waaay youuu aaaaaareeee!” Now think of an interesting conversation you’ve recently had. Is there an inside joke, a comment, a metaphor, or something in that conversation that got stuck in your mind and echoed endlessly for hours?

So far, I am having the pleasure of meeting so many amazing, intellectual, creative, diverse people in my young lifetime. And yet only a small number have really gotten stuck in my head. I realized why, and tried explaining it to one of these catchy individuals.

You speak in 'hooks'. You know that? You know, a song's hook. It is catchy, intriguing, somewhat blunt, but gets the song stuck in your head. If our conversations were a song, and your words were the melody, more often than not, they’d be the hook.

In other words, banter with these hook-speakers is composed of, or summarized with, one liners and phrases that give you subtle closure on the topic, while keeping you hooked, thus, a hook. And they resound in your head, and you kind of want to write them down, just so you can read them out loud and clear.

However, I’m thinking there’s still a danger with this kind of conversationalism. If a song is supercatchy, you keep wanting to hear it, and it soon becomes overplayed. And if a song was all hooks, the listener would be very overwhelmed. There needs to be the in-between, that is more basic and straightforward. The words and tunes that aren’t what get you in, but they keep you there. They grow and build and resolve and carry you to your hook, so that it’s strong, and melodious, and generally unforgettable. It's the perfect recipe for everyone's new Last Song Syndromes.

My personal opinion? A hook is no good without verses, a resolution is no good without a bridge. A catchy conversation is no good if nothing’s really being said.

You see, words are their own kind of beauty and art. So always make them count.