Are These Your Cues?

My favorite Pat Benatar song is "Promises In The Dark." This is not just because it is an instant click on the eighties refresh button. It is also because it has one of the great rock and roll pauses. Just as the song is building to its melodramatic climax, Pat sings "they whisper promises in the", and then nothing. There is a big open space where nothing happens. Nothing happens until you hear Pat's husband and guitarist in the background counting the band back in. Then Pat belts out the last word, "dark!" It doesn't read like much on the page, but when I hear it, I still get goosebumps.
My visceral reaction is probably due to the years I spent playing in bands. Not rock bands, but there were moments in high school Pep Band that felt like it. Playing music has always been as much about silence as noise. Those pauses have always been magic. Bruce Springsteen knows. Just about the time "Born To Run" is going to come roaring into the station, The Boss pulls it to the side and the band idles loudly as the crowd builds to a frenzy. The last verse cannot be played until he hollers out "one, two, three, four!" That is the only way we know that the highways really are jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.
It's a lot like atoms, or the solar system, where we discover that most of the universe is made up of empty space. It's not all those notes in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it's the rests.