My Music And Song's

Music is Such a Powerful Modifier of Meaning

This confusion of two quite distinct crafts often leads to a good deal of trouble for people in the early stages of writing songs. The answer is simple, though: do not confuse poetry and song lyrics.It is true that some lyrics read quite well away from their music, and some lyrics have a poetic quality in terms of their imagery or phrasing. But that alone does not turn a song lyric into a poem. The language of poetry is often too complex to be set to music. Poetry is intended to convey its meaning and emotion purely through words. True poetry has much less tolerance of clichè than lyrics. There are images you can get away with in a song lyric that you could never use in poetry.

Lyrics are words whose effect depends upon, and is symbiotic with, music. The music can supply whatever profundity is not there in the words. A banal phrase delivered by a great singer like Levi Stubbs or Aretha Franklin can sound fresh and full of meaning. In the same way, great music can excuse or even temporarily revive clichèd words and images.

Music is such a powerful modifier of meaning that a lyric that is essentially saying “I hate you’ could end up leaving the listener with the impression that although the singer says he hates her (or she hates him), really and truly he still loves her. Take 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’. In this song, the speaker is at pains to insist that he does not love the addressee, yet the poignant music is undermining all his denials and turning them into excuses. In the end, though, the speaker never comes clean and admits it. He is saying that he’s not in love to the very end. In Dylan’s ‘Just Like A Woman’ the music seems to be almost rebelling against the acid disdain of the lyric. Other songs with a marked tension between lyric and music include The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’, Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Oliver’s Army’. The respective themes of possessiveness, suicide and imperialism are deliberately presented in musical disguise, the bitter pill sugar-coated.And all three were big hits.

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Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music

One of the basic principles of making guitars work in a recording is part playing. If you have played a lot of rhythm guitar or sung your songs solo, you will be accustomed to strumming chords constantly to get a full sound. If you like jamming lead guitar, you will be accustomed to having the freedom to constantly whack out endless streams of notes. Neither of these approaches will do for arranging songs.

Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music once told me, ”We had a very good producer from the second album onwards, Chris Thomas, who had worked with The Beatles, had done Dark Side Of The Moon and subsequently worked with The Sex Pistols. I learned an incredible amount from him about part playing in recording. With Chris it was: ‘Look for the gap, don’t play over the vocal, less is more.’ You learned how to position things – just as all the great Motown stuff has incredible position and texture. All the parts add up to something greater. It all locks in.”

To understand part playing requires, first, the realization that the overall sound of a mix will generate the harmony, so you don’t have to strum chords all the time. Drums and bass create rhythm, so you don’t have to keep strumming for that reason either. Sometimes all that is needed from a lead guitar during the verses is three or four well-chosen notes to add a little melodic interest between gaps in the singing. If you find your multi-track recordings feature more fragmentary guitar parts, then you’re probably on to the right thing.