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.