Life + lyrics
This post has been a few weeks in the making, but two train journeys today have helped to crystallise it. As often on a solo train journey, I set about into a wistful and thoughtful frame of mind. Not quite melancholy, but lots of gazing out of the window in a wondering kind of way, and indulging in my favourite pasttime of examining my own thoughts. And, as usual, I decided that the perfect accompaniment to my wistful mood was some suitably down-tempo, mood-matching music.
The power of music to elevate, counter, enhance, chime in with, create and deflate our emotions is what I’m thinking about. But more specifically, for me, the role of lyrics within that.
I know plenty of people who love music and, at the same time, who don’t pay more than the slightest bit of heed to the lyrics of a track. They might notice some vague words going on in the background, but their attention is always focused up-front, to the beat or the chords. They might hear the lyrics but without really ‘hearing’ them. To them the lyrics aren’t an integral part to their emotional response to the track - they’re moved by the pure sounds themselves.
I can also be moved by an arrangement of sounds and obviously frequently am. I’m not one of those people who asserts that dance music is somehow not ‘proper’ music because it has no lyrics or (heaven forbid) no guitars. An instrumental or lyric-light track can reduce me to tears or happiness in just the same way. But to me there’s something so special about that feeling that the words someone has written somehow chime in so well with your own thoughts at that specific moment. Or the way they can transport you away to somewhere…
And they don’t have to mean anything to anyone else for that to happen. I know I’m a sentimental old fool but sometimes I can extract such poignant meaning from even the mundane-est of words or lines….somehow. It says something to me about the sheer poetry of everyday life, the fact that the chancest of events and the smallest of details can be charged with such significance. Here I think of Benjamin with his poetic-philosophic-mystical way of looking at the world - that every second in history has the potential to be ‘charged with “jetzeit”’ - the time of now. That the most inconsequential of things can be rendered strange if looked at in a new way.
Here I want to give some examples of lyrics that mean so much to me but I’m really embarrassed to do it. I can deduct personal meaning from sometimes the schmalzy-est or cheesiest of pop songs, as well as the obscure ones written by ‘proper’ musicians.
One example I can give is actually for almost the opposite reasons I have given above, and that is some of the lyrics of Joanna Newsom on ‘Ys’. For me, her lyrics take me away into completely, other, different worlds from the one I inhabit. They do have sentiments that I can tune into, but interestingly they are, in the completest sense, unique worlds in their own right. Of any songs I have heard I think they are the most truly ‘poetic’ in the sense of being so carefully chosen, every word, phrase and line perfectly weighted and perfectly in place - at the same time with the most startling and complex imagery.
Here are a few lines from ‘Only Skin’:
“and there was a booming above you
that night, black airplanes flew over the sea
and they were lowing and shifting like
beached whales
shelled snails
as you strained and you squinted to see
the retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry
you froze in your sand shoal
prayed for your poor soul
sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl
and when the bread broke, fell in bricks of wet smoke
my sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke”
And that’s just how it starts, straight into it like that with no warning. I love to spend time thinking about what it means. And this is a 15 minute song so it just goes on, weaving its own intricate world, moving through so many emotions…and never gets tiring or contrived. Whereas originally I thought it was to do with rural life in America, kind of like a Cold Mountain scenario, I think I have since ‘cracked’ it that it’s more to do with war. It’s from the perspective of the woman a soldier comes back to, who I sometimes think is his mother and sometimes his girlfriend/wife. It’s about the unspeakable traumas he has endured and how she tries to help him live with them. Just beautiful.
Of course this has nothing to do with my own life experience, but there are definitely things I take from it - mainly the idea of the helplessness of love.
That’s it for now. I’m off to write some poetry or something.
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