Daniel Levitin’s come a long way since his days playing in San Francisco punk rock band The Mortals. The lyrics he was writing back then, he now admits, “weren’t always very good.”

But the brilliant M.I.T. dropout managed to parlay his punk cred into a career as a sound engineer, producer and A&R executive. He’s known for whom he has worked with – big names like The Grateful Dead and Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan and Santana – as well as for whom he hasn’t – he passed on signing M.C. Hammer when he had the chance. Still, records and CDs he has contributed to have sold over 30 million copies.

Despite this success, in the early ’90s Levitin made a conscious choice to flip the record and play the other side of his talent. These days he’s better known as the world-respected associate professor of psychology and cognitive scientist who runs McGill’s Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise, for his international bestseller This is Your Brain on Music, and for his just-published book The World In Six Songs: How The Musical Brain Created Human Nature, which debuted on both the New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller lists.

So how – and why – did Levitin switch his career path from Side A to Side B? As he tells it, in an office cluttered with books, framed CDs, and pictures of himself with close friends Oliver Sacks and Sting: “The easy answer is that by 1992 the record business was already falling apart. Everybody that I knew was looking for a way out.”

Levitin was on the brink of opting for an early retirement in northern California running a llama farm, but changed plans over the course of a few beers and a couple of front porch conversations. Professor friends at Stanford and the University of Oregon convinced him he should give university life another try, “that I might like being around smart people,” he says. Turns out his friends were right.

After completing his degrees in his thirties, then a series of post-docs, he started his academic career teaching computer science, music, anthropology and the history of science at Stanford and Berkeley.
Then, in 1999, McGill offered him the chance to take over Professor Albert Bregman's auditory research laboratory.

“I came to interview because of McGill's reputation. But I stayed because of the people I met," he says. And the people he hoped to meet. “Principal Bernard Shapiro was planning to hire a thousand new professors in the next 10 years, and I was going to be number 23. It was exciting to be part of the new wave and help in the hiring decisions, to help build the next 20 and 30 years at McGill.”

Thanks in no small part to Levitin’s contributions, Montreal is now one of the world’s hot spots for cutting-edge work on music and the brain. In addition to writing bestsellers, he continues to run experiments with his students, examining everything from autism and musical proficiency to brain scans and what makes most of us able to instantly identify and even accuratelty hum well-known tunes. He holds additional appointments in McGill’s departments of Music Research, Computer Science, and Education, because his approach is necessarily interdisciplinary.

“There’s no one person that can know enough, and there’s no one field that can bring enough,” he explains. “Interdisciplinarity is really the wave of the future. There have been a few universities that have understood that and they jumped on it, and McGill is a leader among them.”