Lyrics vs. technology, take 2

I needed something to rhyme with "on my own," or possibly "alone." Hmmm. How about "waiting by the phone"?

Not bad, not bad.

Oh, wait. Nobody waits by the phone anymore. Cell phones have destroyed that cliche forever. I've already lost one decent song to advances in telecommunications; no point in making another one obsolete before I've even finished it.

Back to the drawing board.

Or the tablet. Whatever.

Grammatical Gotye?

A lot of elements go into writing good lyrics. Finding the right words to express what you mean. Matching the syllables to the beats. Avoiding cliches. And, of course, impeccable grammar.

Wait. Grammar?

Yes, according to Joe Hadsall. He wrote a whole article about how the title of "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye is grammatically incorrect. He cites the Associated Press Stylebook, which states that "who" should be used when it stands in for a human being. For instance:

I bought a drum machine that didn't cost a lot of money.

But ...

I listened to a drummer who plays with a local band.

Therefore, says Hadsall, the song title should be "Somebody Who I Used to Know."

Gawd. Where to begin?

So much of lyrics depends on how the words sound. Does "I can't get no satisfaction" work better if you eliminate the double negative? How about Beyonce's line "Don't be mad once you see that he want it" Is "Single Ladies" better if she fixes the subject-verb disagreement?

"Fixing" the Stones example would be more obviously wrong. The rhythm gets thrown off if you change the line to "I can't get any satisfaction," whereas it would still scan correctly if Beyonce were to sing "Don't be mad once you see that he wants it." But "want it" (actually pronounced "wannit" in the song) is easier to sing and more pleasing to hear.

It's possible that Hadsall would concede those points. He does make allowances for creative expression. He just isn't willing to make them for Gotye.

... songwriters take creative, musical license with grammar when coming up with unique turns of phrase, and I'm OK with that. But "Somebody That I Used to Know" is so boring and bland that it should really be grammatically correct -- because grammar is boring and bland.

Nope. I'm lukewarm on this tune myself, and I still have to disagree. When faced with the prospect of breaking a rule, songwriters do not and should not base their decision on how good they think the song is. They base their decision on whether breaking the rule makes the song better. By that standard, Gotye made the right choice. "Somebody who I used to know" doesn't flow as well.

Listen, I care about grammar too. I care more than the average person. Writers pay me to correct their grammar. But this guy is just wrong.

[Late update 11/4/2013: Hadsall actually argued that the title should be "Somebody WHOM I Used to Know." I should've caught that. I probably didn't because, while "whom" is grammatically correct here, it sounds just awful.]

* * *

Hat tip to Jeremiah Tucker, whose article Songwriting should always trump grammar alerted me to the original post.

What draws us in

"What sorts of things do you look for in deciding what music you like?" asked Facebook friend Don. "Technical ability? Lyrics? Etc.?"

An interesting question. The quick answer would be that all of those things are important. A more accurate answer is that it depends on the song.

For instance, back in 1995, a friend turned me onto "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette. I was putting together a mix tape of breakup songs. She informed me that "You Oughta Know" had to be on it. She quoted some lyrics:

And every time you speak her name
Does she know how you told me you'd hold me
Until you died, till you died
But you're still alive

Morissette's raw, angry lyrics expressed my raw, angry emotions perfectly. They pulled me in. The music? By itself, it was nothing much. The melody didn't do anything for me. Morissette hadn't quite mastered the art of singing yet. But that didn't matter. The music fit the words. And yes, she made it onto the mix tape.

On the other end of the spectrum are tunes like "Love Rollercoaster" by the Ohio Players. I was listening to this gem the other day in the car, singing along, and it suddenly occurred to me that most of the song only consists of two phrases. These are:

Rollercoaster ... of love
Rollercoaster ... ooh oooooh oooooh ooooooh

and ...

Your love is like
A roller coaster, baby, baby
I wanna ride

Without having to ask, I know that Don would hate this. His tastes run toward songs that tell stories and contain deep metaphors. He likes Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and, yes, Cinder Bridge. Songs with inane lyrics over catchy melodies make him run screaming, hands over his ears. I can respect that.

On the other hand, could you even imagine "Love Rollercoaster" with profound, Dylanesque lyrics? Here—I'll make up something sensitive and thoughtful, and you sing the words to the "Rollercoaster ... of love" part of the melody:

There's a place in
My soul
Where I hide from
The world outside

Doesn't quite work, does it?

Which leads to a realization. It takes a special kind of talent to write mindless words that simply feel good to sing along to. That sounds sarcastic, but I don't intend it that way. For all the songs I've written, I'm not sure I'm capable of something like "Love Rollercoaster."

It might be worth trying someday. Challenges like that are a good way to avoid falling into a creative rut. The irony is that it would be ten times harder for me than writing something intelligent.

And for my trouble, Don and others like him would assume I'd gotten lazy.

Unintelligible

Ron the Drummer, a veteran of many pre-Internet bands, has recounted how tough it was to cover songs back in the day. If you wanted accurate lyrics, you had to buy the album. If the lyrics didn't come with the album, you had to transcribe them yourself, which meant listening over and over again until you got them right—hopefully.

I was reminded of this tonight when I attempted to look up the lyrics to "Of Thee I Sing" by Leon Russell.

I love this song. It is joyful and exuberant and catchy and always makes me want to sing along. Except I can't, because the vast majority of the words are unintelligible. So tonight, I finally got around to tracking them down. I fired up Google, entered "of thee i sing" lyrics leon russell, and found ...

... nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. I did come across abridged lyrics on a message board, but I have no way of knowing whether the guy who posted got them right. Maybe he has inside knowledge. Maybe he's just guessing.

Hell, the one line I thought I could understand was "Middle of the night" at the beginning of the chorus, and according to the poster, it's "Beauty like a knife." Listening again, I still can't tell which one of us is right.

I feel oddly betrayed. I've become used to the ability to find this stuff whenever I want, and I've developed a sense of entitlement about it. Where are my lyrics? Give me my lyrics!

Lyrics vs. technology

Lately I've been going over songs that we haven't rotated onto our set lists in a while. It's a good idea to dust these off every now and again, as it's easier than you'd think to forget the words to your own stuff.

To that end, I practiced a song we hadn't performed in ages, "Good Intentions." In the process I realized that it could do with some revision. The basic setup: the narrator has been sitting around at a diner for an hour, waiting for a friend who never shows up. The problematic passage:

Slide the quarters in the pay phone
Softly ask your answering machine why you're not there

I wrote this in 2002, back before absolutely everyone carried cell phones everywhere. (Or maybe I was the only holdout. I don't remember.) Should I change the line, I wondered? On the one hand, there must still be people out there who can't afford cell phones. On the other hand, pay phones are nearly extinct. If I leave the lyrics as they are, listeners won't assume the narrator is poor; they'll assume the lyrics are dated. Which they are.

No problem, I mused. We never put "Good Intentions" on an album, so I still have the opportunity to bring the lyrics in line with current realities. It wouldn't be that hard.

Dial your number on my cell phone
Softly ask your answering machine why you're not there

Perfect. Except ...

It's one thing to wait an hour before heading to the pay phone to confirm you've been blown off. I can imagine myself doing just that. But it's another thing entirely to wait an hour before reaching for a phone that is attached to your person. Change "pay phone" to "cell phone" in the hypothetical scenario, and any sane human being would wait 15 minutes at most before calling to ask what's up. Change "pay phone" to "cell phone" in the song and it says something about our narrator's character that I hadn't intended to say.

Oh geez. I hadn't thought of this until right now, but the answering machine bit is dated too. You wouldn't call the friend's house first. You'd call the friend's cell.

Maybe I should just leave it alone ...

No one listens to the lyrics

It's an odd thing sometimes, being a songwriter. You work so hard at crafting lyrics that will move your listeners in some way, trying to get every word right ... and you forget that those listeners mostly don't pay attention to the words. Or they do, but only in a superficial way.

This is why you get people who play songs like James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" at their weddings. They hear "You're beautiful, it's true" in the choruses without ever catching the "I will never be with you" bit at the end.

I was reminded of this last night while playing at Cottage Bakery. A couple of people were actually listening to us (a beautiful thing at an atmosphere gig), so I tried to keep them engaged by occasionally telling them something about the songs we were about to play.

"This is 'Sky Palaces,'" I said. "It's about daydreaming."

"I thought it was about procrastination."

Casual listener? Loyal Cinder Bridge fan? Nope. That came from Ron. The drummer.

Maybe I should sing louder ...

Melody exorcism

When I write songs, the lyrics are usually the greatest stumbling block. The vocal melody tends to fall into place pretty easily. Now I'm working on a song where the lyrics are almost writing themselves, but I don't like the melody. It's serviceable, that's about it.

So I should just think of something better, right? Problem is, I can't seem to get the merely serviceable melody out of my head to make room for something else. Every time I try something new, it morphs into what I had before.

The original melody may start to grow on me before I think of a new one.

More musical grocery store revelations

While pushing my cart through Sunflower Market this afternoon, a familiar song made its way through the intercom. The singer, female, had a polished coffeehouse style:

Every time I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
The past is gone

I knew right away that this was a cover of a song I'd heard many times before, but it took a few more lines before I identified it as "Dream On," originally by Aerosmith.

Funny thing was, the lyrics seemed so much more profound in this dialed-down, folksy version. I found myself nodding along with those first lines, thinking, yes, "All these lines on my face getting clearer" is a poetic way of describing the observation of one's own aging. I'd never really noticed any of the words in Aerosmith's version, aside from the refrain.

Why? Part of it was just that the chick singer enunciated the lyrics much more clearly than Steven Tyler did. Another part of it was pure classical conditioning: if it's slow and folksy, the words will be thoughtful and meaningful; if it's hard-driving, kick-ass rock 'n' roll, the lyrics probably don't matter that much.

It's all in the presentation.

What cross? What ballpark?

In response to my recent musings on lyrics that might or might not mean something, a regular reader of this blog (okay, my mother) e-mailed me to say I'd reminded her of an interview with Paul Simon. Someone had asked him about a line from "The Obvious Child" that goes, "The cross is in the ballpark." In context:

And in remembering a road sign
I am remembering a girl when I was young
And we said These songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free
And hey
The cross is in the ballpark
The cross is in the ballpark

He said it didn't mean anything. He just liked the sound of it.

How disappointing.

There are songs for which the sounds-cool/actually-means-something distinction doesn't matter so much. Take "I Am the Walrus." Sure, the lyrics seem to be dripping with symbolism, and maybe I would have analyzed them to death if I'd been around when they were new, but now they're just big goofy fun. "The Obvious Child," on the other hand, skims the seas of purpose and intention just enough to make me wonder if I'm missing something.

How about you? Can you think of a song whose meaning has eluded you for ages? Does it bug you to think there might be nothing there?

But it sounds cool

When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine dashed off some lyrics to a piano riff I'd been playing with. The resulting song -- all about the evils of materialism -- was quite good. All it needed were a couple of lines at the end, something that would rhyme with "... never is enough." I volunteered the following:

You bribed yourself with trinkets
And now the world has called your bluff

Larry liked my little contribution, so it stayed. I was pretty pleased with it myself. Just one thing bugged me. The lines sounded cool, you know, like they meant something profound. But when I really thought about it, the "bribed" part didn't make any sense. Bribed yourself to do what? What I was really getting at was something like "distracted," but that word didn't scan.

No one else seemed to notice when Larry and I played the song for them, though. Because it sounded cool.

I thought of this earlier today while listening to Porcupine Tree's In Absentia. During previous plays I'd never paid much attention to their lyrics, which sort of got lost in the gestalt of the band's engrossing and echo-y prog rock sound. This time around I had headphones on, and I decided to see if the words would be easier to make out.

They were. I found myself grooving to the chorus of "Blackest Eyes":

I got wiring loose inside my head
I got books that I never, ever read
I got secrets in my garden shed
I got a scar where all my urges bled
I got people underneath my bed
I got a place where all my dreams are dead
Swim with me into your blackest eyes

I love that last line! I also am not entirely sure what it means. In the context of the song I can come up with a couple of vague ideas, but I don't know if either of them are correct.

Had I never attempted writing lyrics, I would hope that I'd someday become clever and sophisticated enough to decipher the meaning of these deep words. Now I wonder if Steven Wilson, the songwriter, even knows. Maybe he just thought it sounded cool.

Who hasn't done nothing?

I was driving around, running some errands, when "You Haven't Done Nothing" came on the radio. Soon I was singing along best I could, even though the only words I knew were the refrain and the parts where Stevie Wonder goes "Dooooooo de wop."

I've always loved this song. The lyrics (which I've since googled) are so biting and accusatory:

But we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nothing

I'd always imagined that his accusation was leveled at people like me: well-intentioned liberals who pay lip service to defeating social injustice, then flip open the TV Guide to see if there's anything good on. Hearing it this time around, though, I began to wonder if Mr. Stevie had another target in mind:

We are amazed but not amused
By all the things you say that you'll do
Though much concerned but not involved
With decisions that are made by you

Yeah, seems likely that he's talking about the powers that be rather than our lethargic citizenry. Probably it was guilt over my own tendency toward inaction that made me misinterpret the lyrics when I first started paying attention to them. Possibly it was my current frustration over the state of health care in this country that got me to listen more closely.

In any case, it's funny how much of our own baggage we bring to the songs we hear.