Should songs be about THINGS?

This is derived fromm some thoughts I found myself idly tapping-out this morning, so apologies for long. I realise there are no hard and fast rules here. I'm mostly talking about my relationship with words and music and how I take it in, but I'd be interested in knowing your thoughts.

Should songs be about things? Are songs, generally speaking, about things? Do you prefer it if they are, or is it less important to you?

Me, I've never been that much of a lyrics guy. I tend to hear the voice as just another instrument and it can take several listens (or someone pointing it out to me) that a song might have a meaning beyond pretty words.

I could probably sing the whole of Pavement's "Brighten The Corners" album out loud to you from memory but I don't know what "One of us is a cigar stand / And one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine" is meant to mean - and I've had people attempt to explain to me that this is a metaphor. I can't take them seriously though. It's just cool words that sound amusing and unusual to me.

I've had people try to defend things like "Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball", and I'm like get real. Sure, it's Oasis, who aren't exactly known for their lyrical prowess, but people sing along drunk to this line as though it has a very deep personal meaning to them. What are they hearing here? What do they think it means?

Now don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic songwriters out there who write very explicitly about THINGS, of course. I was enthusing about Mountain Goats' 'Goths' album the other day, where every song is a meditation on the eighties and nineties goth subculture the writer grew up around. Every song is amusing and tells some sort of story. I think stuff like this is capital-"E" Exceptional though, and that's why it's good.

Then of course you've got styles like hip-hop or dancehall (and vocal house I guess) where very often there is an explicit meaning but it follows genre-specific tropes, uses particular thematic touchstones, or is clearly autobiographical. Perhaps the sprechsang or repetitive modes often employed by those styles don't really require the words to work in quite the same way as a trad singer-songwritey type of thing. I find I prefer trap and mumble-rap to more wordy, conscious hip-hop because I find concentrating on meaning quite exhausting. I find I have to invest less effort in Young Thug's wholesale linguistic mangling than to focus on MF Doom's dense wordplay, no matter how clever it is.

If we're to use the Mehrabian formula, a significant part of communication comes through tone of voice as opposed to the meaning of the spoken words. I would agree? What if a song has no meaning and I'm wasting my time trying to find one? Why waste my time if the words just sound good? A good bassline doesn't have words, but often it will have implicit meaning in the phrasing, the way the notes move together etc.

My own limited experience of songwriting is that 99% of the time I write the chords, then the topline melody, then some gobbledegook glossolalia which I eventually mush around into proper words without really thinking too hard about the meaning. It's kind of like doing a puzzle, like Wordle a lot of the time: "What word can I end this line on that has the right cadence and scans nicely and potentially rhymes?" - explicit meaning tends to be the last thing I think about.

Now sometimes, granted, the words end up having a meaning. An early song I wrote was a whole story about a sixties rocker who falls in love with a Mod girl and sells his bike so he can buy a tailored suit to impress her. It was kind of corny, but as a fully-formed story, it worked - it had a beginning, a middle and even a twist at the end where he sees the girl riding off on the bike he sold. I also wrote a fairly abstract song which one could say is about smoking and nicotine addiction, with some horror movie imagery thrown in. Another one was influenced by environmentalism and the book Oryx & Crake. But these songs didn't arrive to me neatly packaged - it often took weeks of drafting, re-drafting, getting hacked off and throwing it away, starting again, then thinking "hey maybe this could be about something?", then changing my mind...

BUT more often than not, it's really about working with this glossolalia and finding words that just sound good together. I doubt very much that many songwriters sit down and write out the lyrics to a song from beginning to end without knowing at least what it's going to sound like first. David Byrne of Talking Heads writes about this method in his book "How Music Works", claiming that listeners will often make out their own meaning from the nonsense he's managed to jigsaw together.

So are we kidding ourselves when songwriters say "Oh yeah, this song is about blah blah blah..." when it's more likely that they smooshed together a bunch of words and then retro-fitted a metaphorical meaning to it later on? Is it giving artists too much credit - this false illusion that someone gets a mad look in their eye and starts hurriedly scribbling things down on a piece of paper as though inspiration just fell fully-formed from the sky?

How important are lyrics to you in the first place?
Do you look for a meaning in everything you listen to?
Do you get frustrated if you can't find a meaning?

Strange, was thinking about this only yesterday. I was pondering on older songs that have titles/meanings about things I'm totally unfamiliar with. It could be about something obtuse from history or about another semi-famous person I'll have never heard of
Usually this seems to me (as a non musician) that this is pretty cool and how great songs are born. But then the line gets crossed into pretentiousness and the meaning of the song is both nonsense and cliched.

I'm trying to think of examples from both sides here but right now drawing a blank.

ok for instance, London Calling, these lyrics are insane to me. I like The Clash a lot yet most of their work I have no idea what they're singing about.

The way I think about that question has less to do with my particular circumstances as a non-native speaker who does not mind not understanding the words in most cases as the least interesting aspect of voice anyway (but still always happy to find a significant line, and no mumble rap thank you). It has more to do with it being worthwhile for popular music to have a subject matter, whether by trying to move the listener through experience and feeling, or to reason with him/her with a message (it could be both). Which requires talent and establishing a level of understanding, and it can backfire, so most artists leave it in a zone of vagueness and abstraction that is not very interesting. I'm not saying we need a generalization, I'm just wondering which side popular music tilts (5% message, 60% feeling, 35% no lyrics / bullshit nowadays ?), which side listeners tilt, and how it has evolved in the last 50 years (probably a lot) and what does it all mean.

I would add that even dancehall can speak to me, if I vibe with the personality projected by the singer, especially if it's a Shenseea. In that case, just one-two lines can be enough to give a lyrical identity to the song.

yes, and this is why The Sound of Music is the only 'real' music that exists

“Songs” are overrated. Many artists would improve if they just shut up and play.

Works of art don’t have to be “about”anything. Let’s bring back non-programmatic music!

In a way, though, I think it takes effort, or a particular type of brain, for people to put together a combination of lyrics, melody and tone of voice that doesn't carry some kind of meaning, or that carries a significantly different meaning to each listener. Like, take the New Pornographers, for instance - they stand out in my mind as being able to write apparently complex lyrics that convey virtually no meaning. Each phrase seems like it means something, but put them together and they somehow cancel each other out.

I suppose mass-produced pop also conveys very little meaning to me, but in a different way; a lot of it seems to be built up of placeholder phrases that are as generic and meaningless as possible, so that the song stays lyrically empty. But that's not really the same thing.

I certainly look for meaning in lyrics, but not really in the sense of trying to figure out what the writer meant, and I think listening to a songwriter talk about what their songs mean is invariably disappointing, because you get only one part of it - what they put in, or think they put in, or remember putting in, to the words themselves. I think part of the fun, as a listener, is making the effort to draw meaning out of that combination of lyrics and music and phrasing, and maybe also the context of what came before it on the album and your knowledge of the artist. I like songs where the meaning feels a little bit elusive, just out of reach on a first listen, but still there somewhere - and maybe you have to bring in a little bit of yourself to build a bridge to it.

I personally think lyrics are really important, I also think they are easily the least important aspect of a song. There a zillion great songs with terrible lyrics but I've never heard a song I didn't really like musically and then heard lyrics and thought "wow what a great song!"

I think part of the fun, as a listener, is making the effort to draw meaning out of that combination of lyrics and music and phrasing, and maybe also the context of what came before it on the album and your knowledge of the artist. I like songs where the meaning feels a little bit elusive, just out of reach on a first listen, but still there somewhere - and maybe you have to bring in a little bit of yourself to build a bridge to it.

― Lily Dale, Tuesday, February 15, 2022 3:33 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Definitely agree with this, well put. Art should always invite us to actively take part and fill in the blanks.

Sometimes I wonder if Robert Pollard or Tobin Sprouts lyrics are truly supposed to be about things, or are they just mostly collaging (as Bob literally does as well) with words.

In a way, though, I think it takes effort, or a particular type of brain, for people to put together a combination of lyrics, melody and tone of voice that doesn't carry some kind of meaning, or that carries a significantly different meaning to each listener. Like, take the New Pornographers, for instance - they stand out in my mind as being able to write apparently complex lyrics that convey virtually no meaning. Each phrase seems like it means something, but put them together and they somehow cancel each other out.

Ooh, Iron & Wine seemt o do this - these grand, expressionistic lyrics that really suit the music but seem more like landscape?

Yeah, I'm with Lily Dale and Nabozo - there are loads of songs I love where the lyrics convey meaning in a clear and direct way but I think my favourite music is that which suggests or evokes something and leaves you space to fill the rest in.

Re: London Calling, that's one I heard when I was first paying attention to pop music and I assumed it was about some sort of apocalyptic scenario but yeah never quite knew exactly what, for one thing I wasn't sure if it was "a nuclear era" or "a nuclear error".

songs should be about things, as in inanimate objects.

songs should be about The Thing

in all seriousness, it takes multiple listens for me to pick up lyrics as anything other than sounds, and i know that many lyricists (yes's jon anderson for example) just keep the phrases they know sound good in the melodies they're singing without regard for building a coherent picture behind the words they're painting. which is fine.

i also don't necessarily think songs need to be about anything concrete to have meaning

I prefer songs about stuff.

Okay, I'll do a serious answer - there is no SHOULD here. Can they be about things? Yes. Are there good songs about things? A lot of them! Are there good songs that aren't about things? Also a lot of them!

I'm with Boring, Maryland in that I don't think music needs to be "about" anything. One of the coolest things about music is that it can be evocative and moving, and in a sense meaningful (as voodoo chili notes), even if it isn't about anything specific. This is one of the reasons I write & produce strictly instrumental music; I think that's an endlessly interesting possibility space.

Of course, you aren't asking about music in general, but about song. It gets complicated when the human voice enters the picture, because we're surely wired to hear meaning in it. In normal conversation, if someone starts spouting word salad, it's pretty disconcerting! I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of popular music listeners expect the songs they hear to be about something more or less concrete. And for the most part, songwriters are happy to oblige this, which is why so many songs are about the same old shit.

Speaking for my own taste, I think lyrics should either be excellent or ignorable. Whether they convey a specific meaning is less important. However, I often wonder why certain styles of lyrical nonsense appeal to me (above-mentioned Pavement & GBV lyrics being good examples), and other kinds of nonsense I find just embarrassing to hear ("Wonderwall" is the ur-example of this for me).

the author's dead kids, not sure if it made the obituary thread

songs should be about things, as in inanimate objects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptNlsaAsibg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/6b/6c/dd6b6c960e63d1c4fd17785153ee7c63.jpg

Okay, I'll do a serious answer - there is no SHOULD here. Can they be about things? Yes. Are there good songs about things? A lot of them! Are there good songs that aren't about things? Also a lot of them!

― emil.y, Tuesday, February 15, 2022 10:04 AM (one hour ago)

emil.y speaks for me here, as well, i think.

some random kabobs:

I've had people try to defend things like "Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball", and I'm like get real.

oasis are one of those bands who are so completely empty and vacant that it eventually killed my interest in their music. i used to sleep under a gigantic liam gallagher oasis poster in my dorm room, i was obsessed. but yes, very vapid, it's too bad. slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball is not the worst of their lines, though (i always think of "I can see a liar, sitting by the fire", which is just lazy. and is that the same person who was earlier standing by the fireplace?), and it does have some meaning. to me it means the sensation of dissociation, trying to keep yourself together to the outside world but racing uncontrollably on the inside. or something. of course to the gallaghers they were just like "whoa, i finally found a word that rhymes with hall!!!"

I could probably sing the whole of Pavement's "Brighten The Corners" album out loud to you from memory but I don't know what "One of us is a cigar stand / And one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine" is meant to mean - and I've had people attempt to explain to me that this is a metaphor. I can't take them seriously though. It's just cool words that sound amusing and unusual to me.

- DL

i think pavement/malkmus is an exemplar of a certain kind of lyric-writing that supports the "all of the above" ethos emil.y referred to. i think a lot of songwriters, and people who write in general, keep a little notebook where they jot things down. maybe the verses come out fully formed, sometimes, but most of the time it might just be one line, or a pair of lines, or a certain rhyme (liar...FIRE! gotta write that down!"). these little snippets add up over time, and get mixed up and moved around and integrated into other lines. i don't know, hard to explain what that process is or what it looks like, other than that it's an accumulative process that includes elements of serendipity. beats me, maybe i'm totally wrong about malkmus. but listening to him, and then also knowing his friendship with d. berman, the liner notes, the marginaliia, the jagged half-phrases and nouns that appear on the sleeves and liner notes, etc - what the fuck am i talking about? no one is reading this.

let me say some other dumb stuff. what about the idea that for some songs, there IS a core meaning to it, but it's contained in only a few lines, or a single line, or part of a verse. and then there's the rest, which is there to provide the flavor or some supporting imagery, but it's not so important that it fits perfectly.

this is "Spud Infinity" week, and as the world's number one fan of that song, i have access to the official lyrics of the last verse. i feel a little bit like that part in dead poet's society where robin williams is blandly, dryly reading the introduction of a textbook that explains how to analyze a poem, but here is how i break this down:

What's it gonna take?
What's it gonna take?
What's it gonna take
To free the celestial body?

[Verse 3]
When I say celestial
I mean extraterrestrial
I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart
When I say heart, I mean finish
The last one there is a potato knish
Baking too long in the sun of Spud Infinity
When I say infinity, I mean now
Kiss the one you are right now
Kiss your body up and down, other than your elbows
'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
Wandering like a rolling stone
Rubbing up against the edges of experience

the bolded lines. that is the core of the song, for me. accepting yourself. seeing yourself in others. seeing others in yourself. that's not a story, and it doesn't need a dozen verses to the get the point across. but the rest of it isn't perfunctory; the whole song circles around those ideas.

I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart
When I say heart, I mean finish
The last one there is a potato knish
Baking too long in the sun of Spud Infinity
When I say infinity, I mean now

how does she get from heart to "finish"? i don't know, and i don't know where this race to the finish came from, but the tone of her voice and the penalty for being last is so warm and friendly and non-threatening, so it makes me think of warmth and being with people you love and can goof off with. what is "Spud Infinity"? i don't know, but spuds have to do with potatoes, and at any rate it leads to a definition of infinity (now) which leads to the other essential message, "Kiss the one you are right now", and that's what matters. the inbetween lines are like when ice skaters do cool graceful shit to connect their last trick with the new one.

or not. i don't know, big thief is not a great example i guess because lenker is not an average songwriter or writer, she's absolutely brilliant.

This is a great discussion, hopefully I will have time to read properly later and see if there is anything left for me to add, not that that's stopped me before/pvmic

emil.y otm

i will always think nowhere by Ride is perfect no matter how many times they rhyme high with fly and sky.

xxp My take on "Spud Infinity" (which I think I've mentioned in the Big Thief thread) is that it explores how humans are both earthy (like the humble potato) and celestial (part of the "infinite").

I don't like Big Thief's music at all, but I am very pro them having a song called 'Spud Infinity' and it makes me like them way more just knowing that they do. So I guess that's a way a song being about a thing appeals to me. More songs about potatoes, please.

The only good song that is about a particular thing is “Ram Ranch”. Thank you, Canada.

weird - just before i read that post, about 2 minutes ago, i learned about the song ram ranch for the first time

I didn’t realize until today who “Karl Malone” is!

haha, really? you mean change of display name-wise?

I meant more “oh, this is who this is on Facebook”

I usually think in acting/literary terms: who is this person singing and what are their circumstances?

Was listening to "Deacon Blues" earlier this month (thanks to the Oldham/Callahan cover), and this approach definitely applies: the words aren't just floating out of the singer's mouth, but we're wondering who is telling us "This is the day of the expanding man" and why.

When Terrence Trent D'Arby subtitled "Wishing Well" with "(a tone poem)," that specific moment opened up the idea that lyrics can work based on their sound rather than a narrative (also "Champagne Supernova").

I haven't heard the new Big Thief but I absolutely must now

I sometimes think in acting/literary terms, but not always; I think it varies by artist. Like, take Springsteen and Dylan, for instance.

Springsteen always has a character, even if those characters always look and sound exactly like him. And he almost always has a story he's telling, often with a message to it; he may leave gaps in the narrative, but you get the sense that he's inviting you to put the puzzle together and find out what it's all about. Which I'm not always crazy about; sometimes I get the sense (especially in his later songs, and especially when he starts talking about them) that he's carefully pre-loaded the songs with the meaning he wants you to get out of them, and once you've extracted that meaning you're kind of done; it's like a mystery novel that's not as interesting once you know whodunit. That's why I tend to gravitate toward the songs of his that he seems conflicted about, or that seem to have conflicting narratives in them, or that seem really queer or genderqueer (because he never wants to talk about that stuff, which leaves more space for the listener to interpret it.)

But Bob Dylan doesn't really have distinct characters from song to song; it's more like he's...idk, a sort of medium? A voice that is always there but can channel different personalities, with fragments and interruptions, like a séance. You can make a Dylan song into a narrative, but not an entirely coherent one; there's always that ebb and flow of voices and images and borrowed lyrics and the occasional line that seems like pure filler. And that leaves you able to experience the song as a whole or as a collection of individual set-pieces. You can hear "Tangled Up in Blue" as the story of a life, or of a relationship, you can see it as a series of snapshots of the world seen at different ages, or you can focus in on a single line, like "some are mathematicians, some are carpenter's wives," and let the rest of the song recede from your vision.

One of the interesting things about how we listen to lyrics, I think, is the idea that not all of it has to convey meaning at once; that it's okay to focus on some lines and blur others out, or (if the words are buried or slurred) to draw meaning from the words you can understand, and let the ones you can't understand become a backdrop. And that means that we're always making little decisions about what is meaning and what is filler. A lyric that we mentally skip over, without even realizing we're doing it, may be the one that forms someone else's central impression of the song.

I agree with e.mily in that there is no "should" insofar as the original question is concerned

Generally there are a lot of things that lyrics "should" do and "should not" do, but it changes from purpose to purpose

My two biggest "should"s are 1. I think lyrics should be weighted correctly, so that the singer is never emphasizing syllables that they would not emphasize in speech, and 2. I think lyricists should never write with the intention that they are writing something personal about themselves, but that they are writing something personal about every member of their audience

So I've now had "slowly walking down the hall/faster than a cannonball" going through my head all day, and though I wouldn't defend it as a good lyric, I do see why people sing along drunk to it, and I do think it's possible to get meaning out of it. seems to me like a song that was written to be nostalgic, to be a looking-back song - "how many special people change," etc. - and the "slowly walking down the hall" bit, combined with "while we were getting high," sounds like high school to me, with the time and speed distortion of memory or drugs or just your own innate high-school sense of self-importance. So once enough time passes that it becomes a song you listened to long ago, of course it turns into something you would belt out with great emotion while drunk. Now, did Oasis deliberately put that meaning into it? Did I just pull that meaning out of a random jumble of words, like you might see a face in the cracks on your ceiling? How much does it matter? Does it matter that the meaning I pulled out of it is basic as hell?

There’s the whole category of story songs where the, ah, story is an essential part of the thing - Long Black Veil, Boy Named Sue, Maybellene, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, etc. With the good ones it doesn’t matter if you know the story, it is still worth hearing again and again. Or something like The Message where the lyrics are an integral part of the song.

One of us is a cigar stand / And one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine One of us is a Lady, one of us a Man? One of us is lovely, one of us ain't, and since the singer-writer brought it up, gets to be lovely if he wants to, or already is for birthing such a line (Pavement makes that college music, as Butthead would put it).

It's a flirtatious line, isn't it?

I find even less meaning in that line than the cigar line in “Summer Babe.” Honestly, brighten the corners is where Malkmus’s lyrics start to go downhill for me; although there are some good lines on the album (mainly in “Stereo”).

My own limited experience of songwriting is that 99% of the time I write the chords, then the topline melody, then some gobbledegook glossolalia which I eventually mush around into proper words without really thinking too hard about the meaning. It's kind of like doing a puzzle, like Wordle a lot of the time: "What word can I end this line on that has the right cadence and scans nicely and potentially rhymes?" - explicit meaning tends to be the last thing I think about.

See, this is the thing I think is incredibly cool about lyric writing specifically - getting to watch the way different songwriters respond to those constraints. There's something very satisfying, to me, about watching language emerge under pressure - watching writers trying to fit what they're saying into the limits of a pop song (or a sonnet, or a Hays code movie, or a 90s network TV show, or anything equally circumscribed.)

And sometimes I like watching that even when meaning doesn't emerge from it, just from the sheer beauty of watching things fall neatly into place. I wrote in the Between the Buttons thread about how much I like the easy, almost automatic feeling of the lyrics on that album, the way Jagger can just keep spinning out these snappy, snarky, perfectly-scanning, almost-meaningless lines forever, without ever having to engage his brain: "I missed/ the point of your doing it / your mind / has just jumped a track / I took / a bit different view of it/ you've sold me out and that's that."

But then - and sorry, this is going to be a long, long, post - take my recently discovered faves the Vulgar Boatmen. So many of the songs on You and Your Sister have this very short metrical line, very rigid, and the effect is to chop the language into fragments, long enough to convey a flash of meaning, too short to add up to a fully coherent whole. Take "Drive Somewhere," where every line is "da da DA da da."

And you know my name
and you take my hand
it's a compliment
every timewe leave
and the sky turned blue
on the eastern side

and so on. Each line is mundane enough that it seems like it must be part of an ordinary day, an ordinary story, and yet lines are so short, the fragments so small, that you can't quite put them together. The effect is of a vast blurriness with only a few words legible: the whole story is there somewhere but out of your field of vision, because you can only see what fits in a five-syllable line with the stress in the middle. Sometimes what you see is just the mundane details - "it's a business trip," "there's a station there." And sometimes those five syllables seem to capture some essential human emotion, a distilled moment of connection: "And I can hear your heart. And I can hear your heart. We're gonna drive somewhere. We're gonna drive somewhere."

And that's what I love about lyrics. One some level, presumably, Drive Somewhere is about driving somewhere. But it's the way the song is put together that made me respond to it so deeply during the pandemic: that sense of everyday reality fracturing into little pieces that refuse to hang together, the mundane becoming surreal because your mind can't hold onto it long enough to make it into a coherent narrative. And then the sound of the song, the guitar and the groove and the way it feels like an inexhaustible source of energy and affection, a sort of benevolent humanity, telling you that if life is both boring and surreal, it is also beautiful and of value.

Awesome post and doubly awesome for dissecting why a Vulgar Boatmen tune is so effective.

But what about That's why I tend to gravitate toward the songs of his that he seems conflicted about, or that seem to have conflicting narratives in them, or that seem really queer or genderqueer (because he never wants to talk about that stuff, which leaves more space for the listener to interpret it.) What are some of Springsteen's songs that seem really queer or genderqueer, also how is that distinction made? Prob commonly enough, but I didn't get memo.

See, this is the thing I think is incredibly cool about lyric writing specifically - getting to watch the way different songwriters respond to those constraints. There's something very satisfying, to me, about watching language emerge under pressure

heavily otm, or relatable

Awesome post and doubly awesome for dissecting why a Vulgar Boatmen tune is so effective.

Even if their lyrics are eschew being conventionally "deep and meaningful", it's hard to imagine certain artists managing to work without strong referents in their songs. Who would listen to, say, Sparks or Magnetic Fields if their words were just vague generalities? At the very least, it's essential for listeners trying to distinguish one of their songs from another.

I think most songs have multiple topics, almost unavoidably. If the OP concerns songwriters who begin their process by choosing a lyrical topic (and I've def known people who approach it that way), then Sparks seem to me to write the kind of "high concept" song lyrics you could pitch to a movie studio in under three sentences!

Anway, I agree with Lily Dale that song lyrics lend themselves to random access for a number of reasons. One has to do with vocal delivery- it's unusual for every word in a performace of a song to be equally intelligible. A misheard phrase with some greater allure than the actual lyric can serve as my access point to a song, actually. Another thing is that lyrics in sequence unfold fairly quickly but take a little longer to process, so there's a tendency to become tethered to a point in the song that has already passed and distracted from any new material as it's introduced.

I suppose mass-produced pop also conveys very little meaning to me, but in a different way; a lot of it seems to be built up of placeholder phrases that are as generic and meaningless as possible, so that the song stays lyrically empty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeQDRhidNnY

One thing I don't think came up much on this thread the first time was lyrics that are literally about things - objects, places, tangible details. I've thought about starting a thread about weaknesses we have for certain types of lyric, but I don't know if that's something everyone has or if it's just me. I am a sucker for detail, and there are a few specific details that will always get me: place names, directions, weather, radio stations, song titles, lists. If a lyric does several of these things at once, like Van Morrison's "On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row/ throwing pennies at the bridges down below/ in the rain, hail, sleet and snow," I am pretty much guaranteed to love it.

A few more Boatmen lyrics that work on me in the same way:

Get into my car, take the Germantown Road
WDIA, "Love Comes and Goes"
Where Collierville starts and you have to slow down
Turn the car lights off, turn the radio on

St. John's county
In the pouring rain
Tossed and turned out
Spun around again

I bet you're leaning
on a magazine
up on elbows
on a mezzanine
piles of paper
all around your knees
cigarette burning constantly

A final, shameful admission: such is my weakness for my favorite lyrical formula that even James Taylor can get me:

The first of December was covered in snow / so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston

i am also a sucker for geographical specificity. like in the band's "caledonia mission" when they mention "modoc, arkansas" they literally put the place on the map! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modoc,_Arkansas

I'm a graduate of the Bernard Sumner Academy of Advanced Lyric Writing, but I enjoyed Brad Paisley's songs about things for a while: "Toothbrush," "The Pants," "Water."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJWQgaNYf1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJWQgaNYf1o

Ahh

songs should be about kites

like Free Design

hey Lily Dale, you have probably already written about this elsewhere but one great example that always jumps out to me where specificity really makes a lyric come alive is "taking turns dancing with Maria, while the band played 'Night of the Johnstown Flood.'"

It really blew my mind when I found out there is not, in fact, an old standard by that title. But Bruce had a very clear vision of this scene and that was the song playing. So.

Another song that comes to mind is Simon & Garfunkel's "America" - loaded with details like the kind you mention. Paul Simon generally a good lyricist at this thing you're describing.

Finally, no shame in loving "Sweet Baby James"!

Does anyone ever feel that this songwriting device can be overdone? Can't think of any examples right now, but I know at points I've felt like an accumulation of lyrical detail (like given names, places, references to events) can be a contrivance.

neanderthal otm

in "i've been everywhere," i find that johnny cash has been to too many places

xp

I've thought about that device a lot. Canada and its placenames have a particular aura to them that I'd vaguely describe as "ashamed of itself", so even when Constantines sing "Your mayor is raising fences to keep bodies off the Don Valley Parkway", it doesn't ring my bell, even with a couple of family members who took that exact course of action. Pretty much the only Canadian place name that hits the mark for me is of course John K Samson: "I... hate... Winnipeg" because that's the best (only?) sentiment with which a Canadian place name can be deployed effectively. (Exception: Quebec, don't ask me to explain.)

So I've thought about this and a feeling that American songwriters are privileged with the place names at their disposal, that they feel more "a part of history" when they're cultural hubs like New York or Los Angeles or Miami, or that they evoke a kind of Gothic feeling when it's "Choctaw Ridge / Tallahatchie Bridge", or that they evoke a feeling of blue-collar camaraderie when it's New Jersey or something to do with the inner red states. (In contrast, Prince's Minneapolis references always felt dopey to me, just because I don't think the Midwest is particularly cool, it kind of has the same problem as there is in Canada.) You can tell songwriters either intuitively or knowingly are accessing the currency of those place names, when Bobbie Gentry is picking melodious place names to 'other' the setting, or when John Darnielle is coupling a distinctively Southern foodstuff (boiled peanuts for breakfast) with a distinctively Southern town (Cairo, Georgia).

I generally think place names in songs are weightier than songwriters may know, and they have to be deployed carefully. Songs that concern the Bay Area generally make me snicker for some reason, whether its "Do You Know The Way To San Jose" or "Are You Going To San Francisco" or "California Uber Alles". Other instances, the place name makes the song, like, without it the song would be worse... I think of the line "I am living in Gdansk" in Electrelane's "To The East" as an example, that lyric kinda needs the place name to survive (otherwise we might've thought she was singing about Ipswich or something)

yes i am tired of songs about love and fucking!

That's how cool Prince was, he could even *almost* make Minneapolis seem cool.

I don't know if it's just familiarity or internalized Midwestern self-hate, but I agree that Midwestern place names (except for Chicago) rarely sound cool or evocative to me.

we can count joni mitchell's successful evocation of emotion when singing about random canadian places to be yet another of her superpowers. just from "coyote" alone: "I looked a coyote right in the face on the road to Baljennie near my old home town"; "He's too far from the Bay of Fundy/From appaloosas and eagles and tides"

oh hi Neanderthal, so good to see you back here again!

ILX was a lonelier and less fun place without you

xps

i really love on "song for sharon" how joni draws connections between densely packed new york city and the wide open spaces where she grew up, and still obviously has an affinity for.

Little Indian kids on a bridge up in Canada
They can balance and they can climb
Like their fathers before them
They'll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline

her old friend sharon is home–with a husband and kids in a small town–while joni in all of her big city adventures feels like she's a vagabond, wandering without a destination. though she seems to prefer it that way.

But you still have your music
And I've still got my eyes on the land and the sky
You sing for your friends and your family
I'll walk green pastures by and by

Joni Mitchell is kind of an exception maybe heh. Also idk I can't forget "Bobcaygeon" he literally sings the unholy name of Toronto and makes it sound great

The best appearance of "Minneapolis" as a lyric is of course in "Escapade", but Janet might as well be shouting "Prince Rogers Nelson"

craig finn couldn't exactly make twin cities landmarks seem "cool," but he did inject a bit of character into places like edina and lowertown

and the banks of the mississippi riverrr

So I've thought about this and a feeling that American songwriters are privileged with the place names at their disposal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO_CT3mcKrM

I like that Steely Dan have a song called 'The Boston Rag' about how difficult it is to get weed in New York.

You were late at Bayside,
There was nothing that I could do
So i pointed my car down 7th Avenue

The title probably refers to the Herald, or maybe to a rosier past in a city where grass is procurable. But in my imagination it's something like the Camberwell Carrot.

I always thought it was “lady bayside”

My Steely Dan songbook has "Lady Bayside". Though that's an example of an evocative name used as shorthand, sometimes I find Fagen and Becker use made-up names in a facile way to denote familiarity with some sort of clique or demimonde. Like in "Two Against Nature", they're clearly having fun with all these sketchily-drawn characters, but it can seem like a way of getting around saying something more substantive.

Kind of a trad. folk thing this, is it not?

Lady Bayside sounds like a Son of Sam era disco near the intersection of Boulevards Northern and Bell.

Xpost songs with place names, weather and lists. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald has it covered - even a whole verse naming all the Great Lakes.