My recent post about The Wrestler featuring Springsteen’s lyrics, the interview with Max Ryan – Chains of Flashing Images and my ticket to tomorrow night’s Neil Young Concert at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre have got me thinking about song lyrics as poetry.
I like many others feel that songs are the first exposure we get to the use of poetic language, but take the lyric from many of the songs that you love and slap them on a page sans the music and they are often found wanting. Some even develop a contrivedness and lose the tone with which they are delivered by the author. In short, without the music, most lyrics lose their explosive nature.
That said, there are exceptions to the rule. Bob Dylan is the obvious example. Take the opening lyrics to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes,
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last,
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Here, the imagery and power of the words remain true to the authors vision. None of the magic is lost.
Other songwriters who have been called poets include Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young & Tom Petty. All rightlfully so. I would certainly love to lay claim to any of these lines:
Even before my fathers fathers
They called us all rebels
Burned our cornfields
And left our cities leveled
I can still see the eyes
Of those blue bellied devils
When Im walking round tonight
Through the concrete and metal
(Tom Petty, Rebels)
The ragamuffin gunner is returnin’ home like a hungry runaway
He walks through town all alone
He must be from the fort he hears the high school girls say
His countryside’s burnin’ with wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide
The hit and run, plead sanctuary, `neath a holy stone they hide
They’re breakin’ beams and crosses with a spastic’s reelin’ perfection
nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception
And everybody’s wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood
Sticker smiles sweet as gunner breathes deep, his ankles caked in mud
And I said “Hey, gunner man, that’s quicksand, that’s quicksand that ain’t mud
Have you thrown your senses to the war or did you lose them in the flood?”
(Bruce Springsteen, Lost in the Flood)
And then there are the many Australian artists including Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, Nick Cave, Steve Kilbey and David McComb to whom the label poet has been assigned.
The lyrics to Wide Open Road lose none of the fire and yearning with which McComb delivers them:
I lost track of my friends, I lost my kin
I cut them off as limbs
I drove out over the flatlands
hunting down you and him
The sky was big and empty
My chest filled to explode
I yelled my insides out at the sun
At the wide open road
(The Triffids, Wide Open Road)
And Kilbey’s opening lines from Aura continue to damn and probe:
We all came back from the war
I wish somebody would tell me the score
(The Church, Aura)
So just what is it that elevates a lyric to poetry?
For me a lyric establishes itself as a poem when the words on the page create their own music. When they have the intensity and distance that Wordsworth so beautifully described as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. When they make my head spin and my body sigh.
So what are some of your favourite lyrics? What makes a lyric really sing?
Love to hear from you…
The thing about writing to music is that there’s always a pay off, there’s always a phonetic concern, so when the language is poetic to match the music it’s truly a fine thing. The great thing about Dylan, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen is that they’ve broken a few so-called musical rules/conventions along the way and still sound good. It’s no small coincidence that the songwriters who’ve paid careful attention to the song lyric, all seem to have achieved longevity.
When the words and music dance together it is intoxicating. I think it was Ginsberg who described Dylan’s Sad Eyed Lady as the pinnacle of words and music. The ability to pair poetic language with powerful music is certainly one of, if not the common ingredient in the longevity of artists.
It would take years to explore the lyrics that have appealed to me so I offer three. Two from contemporary Austalian artists and one from the eighties.
The latter first. Ferry and Roxy Music – “To turn you on”
I could show in a word
If I wanted to
A window on a world
With a lovely view
From close up inside a single room
with an open book inside
like you read in school
I’e always wondered what that word would be and how powerful it must be.
Local lad Chris Pickering’s last offering included this gem (at least to me) in the song of the same name of the first line. On one hand a wondering of a person who had never been there but on another the lament of someone who had.
If I came back from a war
Would I be any different to before
Would people stare at me until they
just couldn’t
look anymore?
If I came back from a war
Lastly Lisa Miller in her 2007 album which spoke of her mother’s death. The song “Lucky Dip Roses”
Sometimes I come here just to water
all of those little sons and daughters
you left in your orphanage
Sometimes I take them home with me
to see if they can recover
Oh how we boxed it all up and swept it away
Forty years of memories in just five days.
Lance Me Good Knight Errant is correct about the pay off when mixing words and music. The thing about the true masters is they don’t necessarily need personal experience to evoke the emotion and picture they wish to paint in the words they pen.
Thanks SS. Those last two lines by Lisa Miller are particularly outstanding:
‘Oh how we boxed it all up and swept it away
Forty years of memories in just five days.’
This captures the loss and ephemeral nature of life so well. Again, I would be happy to put my name to those words and call them poetry.
David McComb was a poet. Wide Open Road is such a great song.
My favourites come from your side of the island.. Grant McLennan & Robbie Forster.. and my fave of faves would have to be
“I’m ten feet under water
Standing in a sunken canoe
Looking up at the waterlillies
They’re green and violet blue
Still the sun it finds
A place to light me
Still the sun it finds
That it’s warm beside me.
Green and violet blue
No matter what you say no matter what
you do
I want to be the one and
Love is a Sign.”
and Cattle and Cane…. is poetry.
What I love about being a songwriter, is the way the words need to come as a response to the chords. There is a release there I dont find as much in writing… and its always a hoot to rhyme
For utterly exquisite lyrics I think anything by Ricki Lee Jones could be called poetry.. in particular from We Belong Together~
“Once Johnny the King made a spit ring
And all the skid kids saw a very, very proud man
And he entwine her in his finger
And she lay there like a baby in his hand
And climb upon the rooftop docks lookin’ out on the crosstown seas
And he wraps his jacket across her shoulders
And he falls and hugs and holds her on his knees
But a sailor just takes a broad down to the dark end of the fair
To turn her into a tattoo
That will whisper
Into the back of Johnny’s black hair..”
A.Joy
Yeah McComb was such an incredible writer… I wish I was seeing Leonard Cohen in Victoria as The Triffids are supporting and Steve Kilbey is doing some of the vox. That is a dream pairing for me… and if David can’t be there, then I can’t think of anyone better than Steve to take the lead. And GW McLennan, well I still miss him dearly. The lyric to Core of the Flame still knocks me over every time I hear it.
Love the Ricki Lee Jones lyric as well… so many good songwriter/poets out there. After all, the title of this blog was inspired by the poetry of The National.