The lyrics to Scott Walker's Track Three

He's in the local branch of "Scope", and oh no a clothes rack has fallen over onto him. But he's taking it philosophically.

In a word, no. There seems to be a lot of fans of Scott Walker on these boards. Often I think it's reasonable not to focus too much on the lyrics of a song. Sometimes they're a bit of an afterthought to the music. But Scott Walker tells us that a) unlike most people he writes the lyrics first, and fits the music around the lyrics; b) he doesn't write in a cut-up style, ie everything that is there is there deliberately and not something just randomly slotted in, and c) he spends years getting the lyrics right. So I think it's legitimate to wonder what the hell he was doing and what other people make of his lyrics.

What I used to consider 'deep shit' I now merely consider 'shit'

Still like some of his earlier work before mental illness got the better of him (which it most clearly has)

If I want deep and profound I'll read William Blake...If I want Complex but ultimately rewarding I'll read/listen to Mark E-Smith, Nick Cave and a few others.

His stuff is just rambling, demented doggerel (and pretentious doggerel at that)

Rant over. He just annoys me, that is all.

Wha?

Well it's hardly doggerel, there's barely a straight rhythm or rhyme in there! It's a wash of abstracted imagery, a lot of it in straight contradiction ("resembled to breaking-point" vs "run out of recognise"), most of it hinting at some dark centre (prisoner, crime, murder etc). There's a fair amount of religious imagery too ("wounds in their sides", "the son", "miracle" etc). No, it doesn't resolve to a narrative, but why should it? I think this set of lyrics stands up pretty well.

http://www.chrisconnelly.com/interact/boards/viewtopic.php?t=161

No one questioned the imagery, although religious imagery is pretty standard for this type of work.

I don't use words I don't understand...Scott Walker's writing is doggerel in my eyes.

maybe you now want to give me a lecture on Skeltonics and how no part of his writing can be considered such? Maybe it's Hudibrastic verse in your eyes...in which case you might wish to tell us all why...there are definitely one or two octosyyabic couplets in there too, maybe you wanna discuss the meaning of that? There is ample evidence of double, triple and imperfect rhyme..or maybe its deliberately bad? done for comic, satiric or rollicking effect?

Think not though. Doggerel it is then.

I don't want to spend any more time thinking about this. I have tried really hard to appreciate and understand some of his later stuff and I have friends who adore it but to me it just reads like unfathomable nonsense. I know Blake faced the same accusations throughout his life and maybe one day, Scott Walker will be part of the literary canon too... It just reminds me so much of this

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Lucretia-My-Reflection-lyrics-The-Sisters-Of-Mercy/40A70D57AA85B74D48256C700021DF49

And a thousand other monstrosities from the 80's

"Nearly twenty years ago, in an attempt to break free from the straight jackets that limit the potential of all songwriters Scott began to experiment with form, discarding set stanza patterns, formal harmonic structures and end of line rhyme schemes. Like Schubert, Scott’s aim was to accord equal importance to words and music, to integrate both so completely that all dividing lines would disappear. At the time Scott also claimed he was writing “surrealist songs� and using “surrealist arrangements� – Gil Evans type things� with lyrics “as strange as the arrangements … very Kafka.� Ten years later, Scott’s vision obviously was sill intact as he explained to Melody Maker, “what I’d really like to do is try and combine New Poetry with some of that Schoenberg king of orchestration� and observed that “nobody’s yet found a successful way to put the kind of stuff that, say Synder (Gary Snyder, Beat Generation poet) but into a musical setting.� Well nearly a decade later, again, all these experimentations bear fruit. The synthesis is complete, the seams indivisible. New poetry/New Music is one. Even as a result of Scott’s singing which, on Climate of Hunter, finds him fragmenting that voice for which he has been so famous for years. But whether you enter this album as a long time admirer, like me, or via Walker advocates like Julian Cope, David Bowie, Brian Eno or Midge Ure, be prepared for surprises. And challenges. This, unless you listen to a lot of contemporary classical music or modern jazz, is music unlike you’ve ever heard before. Meaning, Engel really is doing what Schoenberg, or Miles Davis/Gil Evans did in other musical settings. All tired rules of syntax and harmony have broken down. The centre, as Yeats predicated, cannot hold. In what sense? You thought Sister Morphine was rock’s definitive evocation of the world of a junkie? Well, think again. Because Dealer captures even more precisely the fragmented world-view of an addict who can mumble only fragmented lines like ‘Gone always/alone/to all/you re never’. Just like the cobra coil of discordant chords, tied like barbed wire around the singer’s neck, conjures up much the same scenario.

Incidentally, all the chords and notes played on this album form a kind of mis-en-scene for Walker’s vocals and come from a disparate group of rock, pop, jazz and classical musicians Scott probably placed together just to see what kind of new musical dynamic they could create. And does the idea work? Absolutely. Just listen to Evan Parker’s sax solos. Or Roy Russel’s lead guitar on Track 3. Or Billy Ocean’s harmony line on the same recording. Lyrically, Track Three, probably also is, in part, an update of Scott’s Boy Child from his last album of self-penned songs, Scott 4, way back in 1969. Back then the child was told he ‘Mustn’t tremble/Because he came/Without a name’ but now Engel claims that ‘The shadow/Of the son/Made the son/A shadow.’ While also imploring ‘Rock of cast-offs/Bury me/Hide/My Soul/And pray us free.’

Though when, in the same song, Scott Engel sings a teasingly enigmatic verse like ‘From the host/Of late-comers/A miracle/Enters the street/Shining with rain/He is shaking/To wash/The murder/Away’ one can only wonder who was killed? And who did the killing – a question made all the more pertinent if you saw the video for this song, which was inspired by Tarkovsky and broadcast on the UK television pop programme “The Tube�. Even so, despite such themes, Climate of Hunter, bristles with an energy that does seem to want to try ‘pray us free’. Better still, as Scott sings Track Five, his voice rises in defiance like those “black horses� that “dances upon the graves of yesterday’s desires� to cull a concept from another of his songs from ’69, We Came Through.

You even feel he could, for one moment, halt the tide of time and maybe even top the Rawhide ride to Armegeddon.

Though for long-time Walker fans – who are no less obsessive, believe me, than the Dylan freaks! -–it will, perhaps be telling that Sleepwalker’s Woman harks back even further to an even older song Scott composition Such A Small Love, where the person being addressed is a man and the singer tells of how he has ‘Walked/The way/For him/Down to splintering/Bone ashes.’ Bowie will love it.

But this is not music to be lightly entered into. Or quickly judged on one or ten sittings. It is a musical mosaic with each note/syllable weighed and balanced as carefully as the subjects in the frame of a film by Bergman. And allowing for those “accidents� that can occur during the act of creativity, such as, say, the intensity of Knopfler’s solo on Blanket Roll Blues.

Yet the edges of this particular sound-film are torn. And open. And waiting for you. Engel offers only guidelines, a skeleton, hoping you will provide the flesh. In other words, as with the makers of most post-modern art and I’ve always believed this about Walker – he is asking you to be an active participant in this creative process rather than a dumb consumer. As Goddard does, Scott wants you to work a little for all he can give in return. But you can bet that this is one mine that will continue to yield its blackened diamonds years from now, throwing forth more the deeper you dig, the more you grow. Indeed, many artists claim that deep down, there is a unifying law that most of us, as yet, simply haven’t the ability to abstract from reality. But Scott Engel is, at least, reaching. As he has been since the late 60’s. Again, he’s asking us to journey down into the vortex, meet, face, duel and maybe even beat our demons so we can resurface not depressed but renewed. As he seems to have done by even recording this album. And you know what’s even more inspiring? The strength and seeming self-assurance in Scott Walker’s voice really does belie the negativity in most of these lyrics. Walker may have had to journey into some kind of subterranean under-world to excavate lines like “Hissing brains/boiling up/Press’t to/The bone� but now he is out here in the twilight singing loudly about we all can come through. ‘Try and hear/Your own way/Out’ he sings at the end of this song cycle but how many of us have the guts to enter?

Better still, Scott finally soars beyond his own songs on Climate of Hunter and ends the albums with what, to me, seems like a tribute to Tennessee Williams, who died recently – Williams’ song – Blanket Roll Blues. It comes from a movie called The Fugitive Kind, a type Tennessee once defined by contrasting “those who accept the prescribed answers that aren’t really answers at all� with those who “continue to ask the unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people.�

Williams may be gone but Scott Engel is till asking those questions. Of himself. And of us. Yet as he sings Williams; words “When I crossed/The river/With a heavy/Blanket roll/I took nobody/With me/Not a soul� I wonder is Scott throwing down the gauntlet, fearing no one will follow him? As most of us failed to six years ago when Scott, as part of the Walker Brothers, released the album Nite Flights? Here in Track Three he says ‘You sing/Like a stranger/And your failure/Fulfils/Your most secret/Defeat.’ But if we fail to follow, this time, surely the failure is ours. Not his. As Thoreau said “music is continuous, it is we who turn away�. And I really do believe that just as Scott’s solo albums from the 60’s are now regarded as rock classics so too, in another fifteen years, Climate of Hunter, might be regarded as one of the few truly innovative rock albums of the early ‘80’s. I know nearly twenty years later that last paragraph may seem a little OTT. Let’s just say that, as with most Scott Walker fans at the time, I simply was “high� on the fact that he was back. Though, the album flopped and Walker fans would have to wait further eleven years before Scott made another album."

http://www.mbdiscs.com/Scott-Walker-The-Fugitive-Kind-By-Joe-Jackson

Poetically, I can't claim to understand correctly what he's getting at, but the lyrics always conjure very vivid images for me. Also, there does always seem to be a thread. E.g., as someone pointed out in this one there is a lot of not just religious but I would specifically christian messianic imagery:

"After me I'm no man's son
run out of recognize."

the last line just means that after me you won't recognise anything.

"Rock of cast-offs
bury me
hide my soul
and sink us free."

It seems to be refering to the concept of the 'rock of ages'; also the idea of messiahs recruiting cast offs

"From the host of late-comers
a miracle enters the streets
shining with rain
he is shaking to wash
the murder away."

The miracle again is reminiscent of Jesus, and the late-comers could mean lots of things but makes me think of "the first shall come last and the last shall come first" and the parable of the garden, where all the workers got paid the same no matter what time they turned up.

"wash the murder away" could refer to a murder he has committed or his own murder on the cross

"The shadow of the son
made the son a shadow"

If he is the committer of the murder, then the new messiah is perhaps "the son of a shadow"

"it's never night when I die.
That desert clouds under
and so Lord lightens
sleepers wait there
with wounds in their sides."

This all seems to be crucifixion imagery.

"In the strength of the crime
you sing like a stranger
and your failure fulfills
your most secret defeat."

This looks like we're back to the murderer, so maybe what we have here is a melding of messianic images with criminal images, which could also contain ideas about how the murderer sees himself.

So, there does seem to be a thread here if you want it. But more importantly, why does it have to be about anything? People seem to find abstraction easy to accept in visual art, but not in words for some reason.