We were in the car — me, my wife, and our teenage son — listening to The Current, and "Frankie Sinatra" by The Avalanches comes on.

It's baffling. It sounds like calypso, as mentioned in the lyrics, but only kinda. It name-drops Sinatra but doesn't match his music stylistically. It sounds a bit like "Frank's Wild Years" by Tom Waits or even maybe klezmer, I think to myself. I have several musical points of reference I can use to make sense of this wildly imaginative song and band.

But my son is much younger than me. "I've never heard anything like this before," he said. "Where have you been hiding this stuff?" He was having a moment of complete musical discovery. Whereas I was having a Level One discovery, possibly a Level Two, he was having a Level Three, and Level Threes are extremely rare. You only get so many in life. I was happy to have been there for one of his.

What am I talking about? Glad you asked. There are three levels to discovering music, the kind of music that makes you stop what you're doing and give a focused listen.

LEVEL ONE, aka THE EXQUISITE KNOWN

The Exquisite Known is when you come across a song that matches a style with which you are already familiar but the song expresses that style in a highly effective way. No preconceptions are shattered, no need to forget everything you thought you knew, but it's a song that you would want to share with someone who has never heard a certain kind of music before and they only have time to hear a little bit of it.

I can think of many of Level One listening experiences over the last few years because they have often involved hearing something while driving and needing to pull over, either to look up the song or to just to let my brain focus on what is inbound. For me, Adele's "Someone Like You" was a Level One experience. I had heard songs of heartbreak, I think I had even heard a bit of Adele before, and I had heard stripped-down arrangements designed to push a good vocal to the front. But this was special. When her voice goes up and cracks just a bit on the "don't forget me" line, my jaw dropped. It reminded me of a similar Level One experience hearing Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan's "9 Crimes" a year or two earlier.

And I've had Exquisite Knowns outside the painful-heartbreak-solo-vocal subgenre, of course. Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic" fits the bill as well. I knew the band, I knew hip-hop, I knew all the parts but they somehow added up to way, way more than the sum of the parts. The Exquisite Known is like playing pick-up basketball at the gym and an NBA player shows up.

LEVEL TWO, aka THE TWISTED KNOWN

This one is when you hear something that is somewhat like something you've heard before but done in a way that is brand new to you. Maybe it has familiar instruments or arrangement, maybe you can even peg the genre it's supposed to be in, but there is something altogether different about The Twisted Known. A sort of cognitive dissonance occurs because the elements don't completely line up. It's the musical equivalent of seeing your teacher at the grocery store — like, of course your teacher lives nearby and needs groceries, but it feels like the world is out of balance.

Shameful admission: I never paid much attention to Modest Mouse until 10 years into their recording career. I had heard a little bit of "Float On" in passing and it was fine but that was it. Then I heard "Dashboard" and "Fire it Up" off the We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank album, then I bought the album, then I soaked in the dissonance. I mean, I knew it was alternative-rock music and one could find commonality with that form, but there were ships sinking and vocals that were sort of like singing but also sort of like atonal yelps of pain. Being a native of the Seattle area myself, I was intrigued by the fact that the band was mostly from Issaquah, Washington, a place that is now a schmancy suburb but was once a remote logging town where bears were not uncommon. Modest Mouse had a kind of woodsy, bears-are-all-around-us angle to the alt-rock substructure that sounded like a reinvention.

I've had fewer Level Two experiences than I've had Level Ones but still quite a few. Open Mike Eagle's music was a Level Two in that he takes hip-hop through tunnels I never knew existed and the songs come out all weird and pointy and fascinating. Ani DiFranco was a Level Two moment for me. The Twisted Known is when you know what something is but it's still not that. The Fables of the Reconstruction album is another one. The Decemberists, too.

LEVEL THREE, THE UNKNOWN

My son had The Unknown with The Avalanches. He's never been the musichead that I was even at his age, and my periodic pop quizzes administered whilst listening to FM radio in the car have not moved him much in that direction, so he's primed for Level Threes. Over the course of that song, he had brushed up against The Unknown. And loved it. And is now doing a deep dive into the band, the likes of which I haven't seen since his Level Two Lou Reed discovery.

When I was nine years old, my oldest sister was 19 and returned from college over a break with three albums by some British singer I had never heard of.

Kate Bush. I could not even process what was happening. Why was she singing like that? This isn't rock 'n' roll, I thought, and not jazz either, or country, or … what in the world was this? Frankly, I had mostly listened to Beatles albums up until then, but this busted my brain and in a good way. Later on, I was in good shape as my peers arrived at their own Kate Bush discoveries. She also brought home an X-Ray Spex album, which was a very good Level One discovery for me.

Later on, I had a Level Three with Tom Waits (maybe something about atypical voices guides me up a few levels) on "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and De La Soul on "Eye Know." Just finding roads that weren't even on the map, looking at your hand and spotting a new finger, running across a room in your house that you had somehow never entered. I think we only get a few examples of Level Three in our lives. Only very rarely do we truly stumble upon The Unknown. I could maybe come up with five of those experiences in my life, tops.

I haven't had any of those experiences in the last several years. Decades, really. But really most of the artists with whom I went through discoveries are still in my permanent rotation, especially the Level Two and Level Threes. I listened to Kate Bush's Lionheart album today. It still blows my mind.

What about you? What are examples of your three levels?

John Moe is heard every Wednesday on Oake & Riley in the Morning, commenting on the latest Internet trends. He also co-hosts the podcast Conversation Parade (with Open Mike Eagle) on the Infinite Guest network, and is an author of a number of books, including The Deleted Emails of Hilary Clinton: A Parody and Dear Luke, We Need To Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences.

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