Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.

Harburg contrasts three expressive modes—language, instrumental music, and song—to argue that song uniquely fuses intellect and emotion. Words alone tend to operate through concepts: they prompt analysis, argument, and articulated ideas. Music, by contrast, can bypass explicit meaning and move listeners directly through mood, rhythm, and tone. A song combines both channels at once: semantic content carried by words is intensified and transformed by melody, harmony, and performance, so that an “idea” is experienced viscerally. The line captures why lyricists and composers can make abstract themes—hope, loss, solidarity—feel immediate and memorable, and why musical theater and popular song can communicate complex feeling with unusual efficiency.