The Essayist with a Plectrum
When it comes to writing songs, the lyrics that have always held me back. They really don’t come easily for me. I’ve know a lot of musicians who can just start making stuff up to sing while they are playing guitar. I am not one of them. Some can just come up with lyrics on the spot. Apparently Kurt Cobain would be making up lyrics while he was in the studio right before he started recording his vocals! And his lyrics are magnificently interesting and full of evocative imagery.
In my own case, it feels like the linguistic part of my brain is on the opposite side from the melodic/compositional part, and there is a narrow and winding path between them. Thus, songwriting for me is seldom spontaneous. It’s more an exercise in craftmanship.
It doesn’t help that I have a very high standard for my own lyrics. While I can happily sing text that seems meaningless if it is written by someone else (as long as I like the song), I feel embarrassed singing inane lyrics if I have written them myself. That makes them difficult to deliver in performance. I have to be able to imagine (a personal experience) that the text has some kind of worthwhile significance (a personal value judgement) to someone.
The Essayist with a Plectrum
Lyrical Essay
Being completely mental and analytical isn’t doing me any favors either. I think in concepts, not in images and emotions. This works well for essays – not so great for songs. So, for the first five years of songwriting my lyrics were generally terrible. It’s a particularly cruel fate to be passionately musical, but to experience the world and express oneself analytically.
There are precious few essayist-songwriters who successfully combine the modalities. By this I mean – create songs that first and foremost stand on their own musically, but with lyrics that offer clearly articulated commentary on something specific (for whoever is paying attention). Who manages to do that? Bob Dylan? John Lennon? Leonard Cohen? There are others, but they are typically musical titans.
More commonly, the message and the language used to express it are far too burdensome and the song wallows and sinks beneath their weight. A successful song requires lyrics that first and foremost evoke image, feeling, and mood. This isn’t the natural landscape of the analytical thinker.
Better Lyrics Through Chemistry
I didn’t “discover” marijuana until I was 21 years old. Before that I had a fierce, even religious objection to all forms of mind-altering drugs. But marijuana was a revelation (at least at first). It seemed to break some mental barriers. It opened up a part of my mind that could experience and express some of the wondrous exploration and imagery that I admired. My lyric-writing improved a lot after that. I even began to feel anger and frustration that I had been taught to hold weed in such contempt. Why hadn’t I been introduced to it earlier!? (I no longer feel that way – I am glad my mind was able to develop on its own for more than 20 years before I exposed it to drugs and alcohol).
Marijuana helped, but it didn’t solve my problems. I’m still too analytical. So of course I turned to books to further my development as an artist.
The Essayist with a Plectrum
Poetry and Lyric
One book I liked was The Poem as Process by David Swanger. My key takeaway from this was that a “good” poem (or poetic lyrical text) was one that furnished the audience with material sufficient to make their own meaning. I understood this to mean either –
- A personal meaning (synthesized by the individual recipient)
- Some kind of cohesive atmospheric tone that conjures an imaginary experience
(To this I would add lyrics that artfully express a message without capsizing the song also qualify as “successful.”)
I mention this because my voice lessons involve learning songs that I selected because I love them, so of course I am immersed in the lyrics. But as I dig in I’m kind of surprised by how little meaning I can make of them. There seems to be no explicit message from the author. And I struggle to synthesize a personal meaning or even a sense of atmosphere from them.
But these are songs I have personally selected because I love them! So, I must not consider the lyrics “bad.” In fact, they must express some other element that I appreciate somehow. But it is interesting that they haven’t fully exploited some of the additional dimension that poetry affords. So in some ways there is a lost opportunity in them.
I’ll provide some lyrical analysis of a specific popular song in my next post.
