The first time I chose music for a routine involving money, I played ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money.”
I want you to sit with that for a moment. I want you to imagine the scene. A corporate event in Graz, a room full of professionals, a performer who has just spent twenty-five minutes building credibility and connection — and then a routine involving currency begins, and from the speakers comes the unmistakable opening of a song that has been used in every money-themed montage, advertisement, and talent show cold open since 1976.
The audience smiled. A few people chuckled. Not because the routine was funny, but because the music choice was so obvious that it had a kind of comfortable, predictable charm. Like a dad joke. Like a pun. It was the musical equivalent of a wink and a nudge, a performer saying “get it? money song for the money trick!” The audience got it, all right. They got it immediately and completely, and then they moved on, because there was nothing else to discover.
The routine was fine. The effect landed. But the music had done something I did not intend: it had trivialized the moment. By being so literal, so on-the-nose, so transparently matched to the content, the song had turned what should have been a surprising and delightful experience into something cute. Cute is death in magic. Cute means the audience appreciates the effort but does not feel the impact.
I did not understand this at the time. I thought I had been clever. It took three more shows with the same music choice, and one very direct piece of feedback from a colleague, before I understood what I had done wrong.
The Literal Trap
The temptation to match music literally to effects is almost irresistible, especially for performers who are new to incorporating music into their shows. It feels logical. It feels like good showmanship. You are doing a routine about something, so you play a song about that thing. The connection is clear. The audience makes the link immediately. It seems like elegant design.
It is not elegant design. It is the easiest and most obvious design choice, and easy and obvious are the enemies of impact in entertainment.
John Graham addresses this directly in his notes on musical tie-ins. He acknowledges that you can play songs that specifically tie in to your effects — a song about lies after a lie detection routine, a song about money during a coin routine — and that this concept can work in moderation. But he warns, with characteristic bluntness, that overdoing it quickly becomes heavy-handed and downright corny.
That word — corny — stuck with me because it was exactly the right diagnosis for what had happened in Graz. Corny does not mean bad. It means predictable. It means the audience sees the choice coming before they hear it, and because there is no surprise, there is no emotional discovery. The music confirms what they already know instead of adding something they did not expect.
Graham suggests a subtler approach: using instrumental versions of songs, or choosing music where the connection to the effect is emotional rather than topical. He gives examples of songs that relate to what is happening not through their literal subject matter but through the feeling they evoke. The lyrics might be about love or longing or celebration, but the energy and the mood happen to complement the moment in a way that feels organic rather than calculated.
This distinction — emotional resonance versus literal connection — changed how I think about every musical choice in my show.
My Education in Embarrassment
The money song was not my only offense. Let me confess the full inventory of my early musical crimes, because I think there is value in honesty about how bad the starting point can be.
For a routine involving a prediction, I played “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” For a routine involving a volunteer making a choice, I played “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” For a card routine, I briefly considered — and mercifully rejected — “The Ace of Spades.”
Every one of these choices followed the same logic: the song’s subject matches the effect’s subject, therefore the pairing is good. Every one of these choices produced the same result: a momentary smile of recognition from the audience, followed by no discernible emotional impact.
The turning point came after a corporate event in Vienna where I had used two literal tie-ins in the same show. A friend who had been in the audience, someone whose opinion I trust precisely because he does not sugarcoat anything, pulled me aside afterward and said something I will never forget. He said: “The music choices made it feel like a theme party.”
A theme party. Where everything matches. Where the decorations, the music, the food, the costumes all point at the same idea with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Where the design principle is not “how does this feel?” but “how obviously does this connect?” A theme party is not an experience. It is a concept, executed to death.
That comparison — my show as a theme party — was the feedback that broke through my defenses. I was not creating mood. I was labeling. I was using music to narrate the content of my effects instead of to shape the emotional experience of watching them.
The Emotional Approach
Here is what I learned after I threw out every literal tie-in and started over.
The question is not “what is this effect about?” The question is “what should the audience feel while watching this effect?”
These are profoundly different questions. An effect involving money is not about money. It is about surprise, or impossibility, or the shattering of expectations, or the thrill of seeing something that cannot happen. The money is the prop. The feeling is the point. And the music should serve the feeling, not the prop.
When I reframed the question this way, my music choices changed completely. The money routine no longer needed a money song. It needed a song that evoked the feeling of astonishment, of the world tilting slightly on its axis, of something ordinary becoming extraordinary. I found that feeling in a piece of instrumental music that had absolutely nothing to do with money, finance, or currency. It was a slow build with a warm, ascending melody that created a sense of anticipation and then opened up into something expansive and joyful at exactly the moment the impossible thing happened.
The audience at the next show did not smile in recognition. They did not chuckle at a clever pairing. They watched the routine with a focus and emotional engagement that I had never achieved with the literal tie-in. When the effect landed, the music carried them into the reaction. Afterward, nobody mentioned the song by name. Nobody said “that was a good song choice.” They said “that moment was incredible” — which is exactly right, because the music had done its job invisibly. It had shaped the experience without drawing attention to itself.
This is the difference between music as decoration and music as architecture. Decoration is noticed and appreciated but adds nothing structural. Architecture shapes the space you move through without you ever being conscious of it. The best musical choices are the ones where the audience cannot explain why the moment felt so powerful. They just know that it did.
The Spectrum of Subtlety
I have come to think of musical tie-ins as existing on a spectrum from blatant to invisible.
At the blatant end: playing a song whose title and lyrics are about the same thing as your effect. Money song for money trick. Card song for card trick. Everyone gets it. Nobody is moved.
In the middle: playing a song with a tangential connection. Graham gives the example of playing a love song when a woman comes on stage — the connection is there, but it is playful rather than literal. The audience might register it or might not, but either way, it does not overwhelm the moment.
At the subtle end: playing a song whose emotional character matches the emotional arc of the routine, with no topical connection whatsoever. The audience never consciously connects the music to the content. They simply feel that the moment is working, that the experience has a coherence and a flow that carries them along. This is where I am trying to live now.
There is one more level beyond subtle, which Graham hints at when he describes choosing pre-show music that means something to him personally, even if the audience never catches the significance. The song connects to his intention for the show, not to the content of the show. This is music as private ritual, a way of centering yourself and setting your own emotional tone before the audience even knows the show has begun.
I have started doing this. Before every corporate keynote show, there is a song I play through my earbuds while setting up. It has nothing to do with magic or mentalism. It connects to a personal memory, a moment of confidence and clarity, and hearing it puts me in the right headspace. Nobody in the audience will ever know this song exists in my process. But I know, and that matters.
The Test I Now Apply
When I am considering a piece of music for a routine, I apply a simple test. I ask myself: if I described this pairing to someone — “I play this song during this routine” — would they immediately say “oh, because the song is about X and the routine involves X”?
If the answer is yes, the choice is too literal. I go back to the drawing board.
If the answer is “I’m not sure why those go together, but I can imagine it working” — that is the signal that I am in the right territory. The connection is felt, not figured out. The resonance is emotional, not intellectual. The audience will not decode the pairing. They will experience it.
This test has saved me from at least a dozen corny choices since I started applying it. It has also made the selection process harder, because emotional matching requires more thought and more listening than literal matching. When you are looking for a money song, you search for songs about money. When you are looking for a song that evokes the feeling of delightful impossibility, you have to listen to hundreds of songs and feel for the one that clicks. There is no keyword search for emotional resonance.
Why Good Taste Often Means Restraint
Graham makes an observation that has become a kind of mantra for me: good taste often means restraint. This applies to every aspect of show design, but it applies with particular force to music selection.
The temptation with music is always to do more. More tie-ins. More clever connections. More songs that match more effects. More audio decoration layered onto the performance. The ego loves this, because every musical choice feels like a creative decision, and creative decisions feel like progress.
But restraint — choosing not to use a clever tie-in, choosing not to play a song that has an obvious connection, choosing silence over music when silence serves the moment better — is also a creative decision. Often a more powerful one. The routine that plays against no music at all can be more striking than the one with a perfect musical accompaniment, because the silence forces the audience to supply their own emotional soundtrack. And the music that does play, when it is chosen for emotional fit rather than topical match, stands out precisely because it does not announce its own cleverness.
I still occasionally use music with a light topical connection. Graham is right that it can work in moderation, especially for comedy pieces where the wink-and-nudge quality serves the humor. But for the serious moments, the moments of genuine wonder, the moments where I want the audience to feel something rather than appreciate something — for those moments, the music and the content of the effect live in different worlds that happen to share the same emotional temperature.
The Lesson That Keeps Teaching
Every few months, I catch myself drifting back toward literal choices. I will be scrolling through songs for a new routine and I will think “oh, this one is perfect, the lyrics are about exactly what the effect is about.” And then I remember Graz. I remember ABBA. I remember the audience smiling at the cleverness of the match instead of being swept up in the impossibility of the effect.
The smile of recognition is the enemy of the gasp of wonder. They cannot coexist. If the audience is thinking “ha, money song for the money trick,” they are not thinking “how is that possible?” Their attention has been redirected from the experience to the design, from the feeling to the framework, from the magic to the machinery of the presentation.
The best music is the music that disappears into the moment. The music you cannot quite remember afterward, but whose absence you would absolutely feel. The music that does not narrate, does not label, does not explain — but amplifies, deepens, and completes.
That is what I am aiming for now. Not clever. Not on-the-nose. Not cute. Invisible and essential, like the air in the room that makes breathing possible but never calls attention to itself.