Music vs Lyrics

In episode 10 of our podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, Christopher Grey and I discuss music and lyrics, and whether one is more important when falling in love with a composition.  I concluded that with some exceptions, music is most important to me, and that as long as a lyric isn’t overtly lame (“Hey baby let’s go out tonight, Hey baby, I’m feeling alright”) a good melody will carry the tune to the finish line for me.  But a lyric that’s embarrassingly bad will often ruin an otherwise good song.

A few weeks ago, John McWhorter of the New York Times reviewed an upcoming book called Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and concluded that the book “is a reminder that one can be massively fulfilled by language one doesn’t fully comprehend.”  I love this summation because it perfectly captures my sentiment for a band like Yes, whose lyrics are complete nonsense to me, but that still manage to be profoundly evocative.

Consider a song most everyone knows: “Roundabout.”  The lyric of the chorus is:

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky
And they stand there

Nothing crazy there. Kind of poetic, maybe.  But nothing overtly comprehensible.  Now imagine if singer Jon Anderson had instead leaned on rock and roll’s worst lyrical instincts and composed the following over the same melody:

I’ve got to see you, babe
You know you’re all I crave
In the evening

Not exactly what I’m looking for in a song! And surely “Roundabout” wouldn’t be a classic if its lyrics were such garbage. It’s the same reason why a band like The Babys are hard for me to listen to. An otherwise competent song like “Every Time I Think of You” isn’t helped when John Waite sings:

People say a love like ours will surely pass
But I know a love like ours will last and last

Ugh, who farted, right? And the Babys actually outsourced this tune, written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy. You’d think someone could have come up with a better lyric. Terrible.

But then you’ll get words that are kind of lame but are backed up by such a terrific groove, that it hardly matters what’s being said. I think of a song like “New Sensation” by INXS.  I dig this song despite its lyrics:

Live, baby, live
Now that the day is over
I got a new sensation
Mm, perfect moments
That's so impossible to refuse

Somehow, this works for me. I can’t explain it, and I certainly can’t defend it. But I really like the song.

Of course, the best result is the perfect marriage of music and lyrics, an alchemy that’s rarely achieved, but when it happens it can move me to my core, and it’s why I admire artists like Jackson Brown, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Simon, etc. When Jones sings “And I can hear him
In every footstep's passing sigh/He goes crazy these nights/Watching heartbeats go by” or when Springsteen sings “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets”…well, damn. I’m all in. Tears, every time.

For my own compositions, just as I try to avoid musical clichés, I try to avoid pedestrian lyrics. Occasionally, I hit the mark, combining melody, harmony, groove and words that convey an emotion together that could never be achieved by their separate parts.

The beauty of song.

Rock and Roll Lyrics

Rock and roll lyrics run the gambit, from positively poetic to brazenly banal.  A friend of mine once made the claim that song lyrics are never poetry, which is a pretty bold statement and a pretty dumb one, I think, but there’s no denying that often song lyrics are embarrassingly bad:

Time to find the right way
It seems to take so long
When I find the right way
I know I will be strong

- Head East, “Lovin’ Me Along”

But it in the hands of a gifted lyricist, meaning and imagery jump from the speaker and grab you by the gut:

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets

- Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road”

Sometimes lyrics can reach us on a very personal level and describe us more succinctly than we could ever hope to achieve on our own.  A woman once gave me a hand-written copy of the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “Code of Silence,” explaining that the words described her “to a T.”   I had already owned Joel’s album, The Bridge, but had never really studied the lyrics before, and upon reading the feminine script on a pink sheet of notepaper with no musical accompaniment, I was given insight into a human being who was clearly wrestling with a difficult past (I never found out what it was, but I can take a wild guess).

But you can’t talk about it
And isn’t that a kind of madness
To be living by a code of silence
When you’ve really got a lot to say?

Many times lyrics – even good ones – are unimportant to me.  As a rule, as long as lyrics don’t overtly suck, then it’s the tune that matters.  So, for instance, the band Yes typical composes songs whose lyrics are so esoteric and so stream-of-conscious that they’re virtually meaningless.  Take the opening lyric for Yes’s “Going for the One”:

Get the idea cross around the track
Underneath the flank of thoroughbred racing chasers
Getting the feel as the river flows.
Would you like to go and shoot the mountain masses?

I don’t know exactly what goes on in Jon Anderson’s head, but I suspect it’s been aided by lots and lots of drugs.  But his lyrics lead to images that are malleable, subject to the listener’s own experience, so that as long as the words aren’t blatantly bad, to me it doesn’t really matter what they say.  But what if, for instance, the opening lines to “Going for the One” were the following:

Get the idea come and take me back
Underneath the sheets like thoroughbred racing chasers
Getting the feel as my love blood flows
I would like to go and shoot your mountain masses

Well, now, that would lead to a very different image, and it would suck!  There’d be nothing left to the imagination except an overwhelming desire for the song to finish as quickly as possible.  It doesn’t matter how good the tune is, the lyrics would make it completely unlistenable.  Ridiculous lyrics are the main reason why I could never get into the big-hair metal bands of the 80s; the words were so pitifully bad that I couldn’t possibly excuse them.

The lyrics to Prince’s “Darling Nikki” were no doubt titillating to me when I first heard them as a sixteen-year-old:

I knew a girl named Nikki
I guess you could say she was a sex fiend
I met her in a hotel lobby
Masturbating with a magazine

Hearing it today, it may turn you on, it may turn you off, but there’s no denying what the lyrics are about.  There’s nothing left to the imagination, and really, there’s nothing to be moved by.  It’s just…there.

But then I consider a pop song like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” by ELO, and I realize that even the worst words in the world can sometimes be rescued by a great melody:

I was searchin’ on a one-way street
I was hopin’ for a chance to meet
I was waitin’ for the operator on the line
She’s gone so long
What can I do?
Where could she be?
Don’t know what I’m gonna do
I gotta get back to you

Pretty soul-grabbling stuff, huh?  And yet, it’s a fun song!  Why can I overlook terrible lyrics in some instances but not in others?   What’s the secret?

And then, why can I overlook great lyrics in some cases but not in others?  Take “Limelight” from Rush, a fantastic tune whose lyrics I never really thought too hard about until I saw the documentary, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage.  Sure, I had known some of the words and I got the Shakespearean reference, but I never knew that the chorus had the word “seem” in it, as in:

Living in the limelight
The universal dream for those who wish to seem

Didn’t know it, never thought about it, didn’t care.  I just knew that Geddy Lee was singing Neil Peart’s lyrics, the music was unbelievable, and the message was something about fame or something.  It didn’t really matter to me.  And even now, the lyrics aren’t so important to me. I just know the song rocks and the lyrics don’t suck, and that’s enough for me in this case.

But then I look at another Rush song, ”Subdivisions,” whose lyrics are so strong and whose message of suburban conformity is so relatable to me, that they elevate the song to new heights:

Growing up, it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass-production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone

When I consider lyrics that have reached me over the years – songs like like “The Logical Song,” “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” “Read Emotional Girl,” etc., – the words are simple, direct and heartfelt.  Take Elvis Costello, an undeniable wordsmith, but who often packs way too many words into a song, with too many syllables, too many metaphors, and stories that are too abstract to understand just what the hell he’s so pissed off about.  Ah, but then he offers us a respite in a song like “Painted from Memory,” co-written by Burt Bacharach, and you have – in my mind – lyric perfection: simple, meaningful, relatable:

Such a picture of loveliness
Didn’t you notice the resemblance?
Doesn’t it look like she could speak?
Those eyes I tried to capture
They are lost to me now forever
They smile for someone else

And that’s often what it takes: simplicity and directness, not only for the lyric, but for the tune.  Sometimes the simplest forms of human expression are the most pure and most effective.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and listen to my favorite power pop album, On by Off Broadway, and sing along to the deeply moving “Full Moon Turn My Head Around”:

We got a beat, we got a good good beat, we got a good beat.
We got a band, we got a good good band, we got a good band.

When Music Meant Going to Hell

As a thirteen year-old in 1981, I was faced with the unpleasant realization that my favorite pastime of listening to rock music was leading me into the fiery depths of hell.

Word of the subliminal message craze had reached the masses, and as a soon-to-be confirmed Lutheran, this was serious shit. I’d already worn out the black Led Zeppelin T-shirt I’d purchased in sixth grade, my copy of Physical Graffiti wasn’t far behind, and now I was being told that they were devil worshipers. Just look at the symbolism on the intricate artwork of their third album, people told me. A goat’s head! Pentagrams! When I’d purchased the album I thought nothing of stars and goats. So what? Ah, but this seemingly innocuous artwork was code for something more sinister, to say nothing of the discovery that “Stairway To Heaven,” when played backwards, invited the listener to worship Satan, and – if interpreted a certain way – when played forward notified the listener of this very fact. (“In case you don’t know, the piper’s calling you to join him.”) 

This was an unwanted addition to the growing list of concerns in my life. As if acne, divorced parents and a math teacher who entered my school straight from the Third Reich weren’t enough to worry about. Now I had to fear for my very soul.

I was a good, church-going-because-my-mom-makes-me kind of kid. Sure, I’d toilet papered a few (dozen) homes, hung out with a boy who shall remain nameless who vandalized a car, and shot off firecrackers on the front stoops of people’s homes from time to time, but deep down in my essence I was a pretty decent human being.  (This would become more apparent a decade or so later – call it a long road to maturity.) So hearing that my favorite pastime of rock music was jeopardizing my cushy afterlife was extremely troubling.

I’d avoided the overtly satanic bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. Their covers alone were enough to put the fear of God into me. But even comparatively airy fairy band favorites like Supertramp were under fire. While driving up to northern Wisconsin with my friend Todd, his brother’s girlfriend informed me that the song “Goodbye Stranger” included the line, “Say the devil is my savior/but I don’t pay no heed,” and she said this was a sign of devil worship.

I shouldn’t have paid any heed to the stupidity of that conclusion, but as a young teen who’d been taught about the very real existence of hell and who’d made the serious blunder of watching The Exorcist on network TV a year earlier, I absorbed this information with great trepidation. After all, if Satan could enter the body of Linda Blair, what was stopping him from entering me?

I soon learned about a lecture taking place at nearby Brookfield Assembly of God, where a pastor was to discuss rock and roll lyrics. I don’t know what the heck I expected. I guess I was secretly hoping he would say, “This is all nonsense.  Don’t worry about it.” Instead, I sat through a litany of offenses committed by my favorite bands. I may have been in the clear with the hard core metal groups, but the pastor went on to attack many of my favorite artists, concluding with a long dissertation about the Pink Floyd song “Sheep,” in which an alternate version of Psalm 23 is recited. The pastor found particularly offensive the use of the word “bugger,” even reading aloud the word’s definition from the dictionary (but avoiding – if memory serves – the anal intercourse meaning).

I went home distraught, wondering how I was going to live my life without rock music, knowing full well I couldn’t, which only meant one thing: eternal damnation. My mom was in her familiar perch on the family room recliner with a bowl of popcorn in her lap, our dog Butch begging for a piece from the floor. Noticing the apparent look of dread on my face, she asked me about the evening. When I shared with her my concern, she responded with something along the lines of, “You’re a good kid.  I don’t think what you listen to matters all that much.” This was from a woman who to this day is a God-fearing Lutheran. 

Chalk one up for level-headed parenting.

I’ve learned since that lyrics are a slippery thing, often meaning little if anything at all, sometimes meaning much more than they would suggest. Just yesterday I listened to the song “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung, reading the lyrics to the song for the first time ever, and was floored to learn that the line isn’t “We were cool on Christ” as one of my Christian friends told me back in high school, but rather, “We were cool on craze.” 

Hey, whether it’s craze or Christ, I’m cool with all of it. Whatever. You aren’t the words you listen to, and in my case, I’m not even the words I sing, as I’m now a Jew who in my classic rock band sometimes has to sing, “Jesus Is Just Alright” from The Doobie Brothers.

As Rick Davies of Supertramp sang, “I don’t pay no heed.”

Art: What We Bring to the Table

Recent movies and commercials have highlighted our tendency to mishear lyrics, especially those by Bernie Taupin, who penned Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and “Bennie and the Jets”:

But sometimes the lyrics we think we hear are more revealing than the words actually sung.

My favorite mishearing of a lyric is Paul Simon’s “Song About the Moon” from his Hearts and Bones album.  I was certain Simon sang the words, “You really can’t remember what you can’t replace” and thought it yet another example of Simon’s artistry.  A more careful inspection revealed that the lyric is in fact, “Think about the photograph that you really can’t remember but you can’t erase,” a fine lyric, but to me far less compelling.  So I did what any songwriter would do – I stole the line I originally attributed to Simon and used it as my own on the first song of my first album.  In “A Fine Place to Start”  I sing (and, ironically, in the line prior I reference the aforementioned “Rocket Man”):

               “Rocket Man” is sent to me

               By tantalizing frequencies

               It sets my tempo at the right pace

               It reminds me of a girl I used to know

               I wonder why I let her go

               But I really can’t remember what I can’t replace

Recently, I read a lyric on-line of Yes’s song, “Your Move,” and was convinced that it was incorrect because I own an old biography of Yes in which Jon Anderson quotes the line: “Cuz his time is time in time with your time and his move is captured.”  It’s not a meaningful lyric, but it’s kind of cool, and even makes a little sense to me.  His time is in time with your time.  Has a nice ring to it.

Well, I was wrong.  I rechecked the line in the book (my memory be damned), and it’s the same as on all the various lyric websites.  “Cuz it’s time it’s time in time with your time and his news is captured…”

Not nearly as good, I think, and now I wish I’d never have looked the lyric up!

In the liner notes of Seal’s second album, he writes:

One of the most popular questions people seem to ask is “why don’t you print your lyrics on the album?”  Well, the answer in that is that quite often, my songs mean one thing to me and another to the listener.  But that’s OK because I think it’s the general vibe of what I’m saying that is important and not the exact literal translation.  How many times have you fallen in love with a lyric that you thought went, “Show me a day with Holda Ogden and I’ll despair” only to find that it went “Show me a way to solve your problems and I’ll be there.”  I guess what I’m saying is that the song is always larger in the listener’s mind because with it they attach imagery which is relative to ther own personal experience.  So it is your perception of what I’m saying rather than what I actually say that is the key.

Nicely done, Seal.  I couldn’t agree more. 

What we bring to the table is really what makes art work in the first place.  I see a painting that means one thing to me, another thing to you, and something completely different for the artist.

My friend recently played Oscar Wilde in a play, and although he researched the author in preparation for his role, he told me he didn’t find it particularly helpful when it came to acting the part.  “That had to come from me,” he said.  An actor has to pull from his own experiences to imbue a role with emotion.

It reminds me of a story about the playwright Harold Pinter.  It’s said that a director once asked Pinter about what the characters were up to before they enter the stage, thinking it might help him stage the scene.  Pinter replied, “Mind your own fucking business.”

Which only goes to show that Pinter’s demeanor was as poor as some of his plays.

But it also hits upon the point that what each of us brings to the table is what feeds the art.  It’s what makes Yo Yo Ma’s interpretation of a Bach concerto different than Emmanuel Feuermann’s.  Or, if we want to stick to the Elton John theme, what makes his version of “Pinball Wizard” distinctive from The Who’s original.  It’s what makes one staging of Macbeth unique from another production of the same play in the same town, but by a different theater group.

In this sense, we are all creators of art.  We extend the life of and shape the meaning of a work of art by fusing it with our own life experiences.