My Music And Song's

Posts Tagged ‘great music’

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.