Remember all those physics majors in college who spent their time holed up in labs? If they are anything like Wes Miles, the songwriter for Ra Ra Riot, they might very well be writing songs as well as working with spectrometers. That's not to say that Miles (a physics major and 2006 graduate of Syracuse University) was writing music when he should have been working with mass and magnets; instead, it's pretty clear that being a physics major has made Miles a better songwriter. This is not the first time a songwriter has told me that, as you'll read, and it's something that I find fascinating. It's easy to see the link between, say, writing lyrics and reading literature, but I'm intrigued by the link between music and mathematics.
So read my interview with Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot. You'll learn more about how being a physics major helps him as a songwriter, how many of his lyrics start as pure gibberish, and why he likes Wuthering Heights.
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