The Value of Lyrics, Part 1: Music for Words

I got a request from a friendly reader for my take on songs with non-English lyrics. Gladly! But since I'm me, and this is the blog that it is, I'm going to start by trying to figure out my general theories on lyrical value, then pivot back to explain how non-English lyrics fit in. (Allison, you know me well enough to know you weren't about to get a direct answer.)

As I've started doing research for the blog, I've discovered that while most academic musicologists, (like my pal Leonard Meyer) focus on classical music, there's actually a fair number writing about popular music. One of them, Richard Middleton, has proposed that there are three different uses of lyrics within the context of a whole song:

1. "Story," which emphasizes narrative and tends to be performed in a manner close to the speaking voice;

2. "Affect," which emphasizes the expressive nature of the words and "tends to merge with melody;"

3. "Gesture," which emphasizes "words as sound" and effectively uses the voice as "an instrument."

This framework makes a lot of sense. The sources I've read seem to agree with my biggest initial reservation, which is that "story" is not a common usage compared to the other two. There are certainly examples out there (country story-songs, rap that emphasizes the words rather than the rhythm of the delivery, that Shawn Mullins song from back in the '90s), enough to merit their place in a general model, but they're not common enough in my musical experience to need much more discussion. I'll just post that Shawn Mullins song and leave it at that.

Middleton's other two categories, though, capture a useful distinction. The way I'd put it is that most songs with lyrics can be great in one of two ways: either the music can support strong, memorable lyrics ("affect"), or the sound and tone of the lyrics can support strong, memorable music ("gesture"). In short, a great song can either offer music for great words, or words for great music.

Underlying that statement is an assumption that the music and the lyrics both need to meet some minimal level of quality for a song to be successful. A great musical arrangement still isn't going to work that well as a song if it's accompanied with, say, lyrics as distractingly lazy as Train's. Nor will great lyrics work without an adequate- and appropriate- musical backing; sensitive love-song lyrics are going to lose some of their impact backed with death-metal music, and any example of good lyrics are going to lose some of their weight and enjoyment if I still don't want to listen to the musical backing.

Put another way, great songs have both great music and good lyrics- the distinction is that in many songs, one plays the lead role and one plays support. I have no way to quantify this, but I feel safe in saying that, more often than not, music is in the lead role; melodies run through my head more often than do lyrics that resonate on their own terms. (This probably also has something to do with the fact that talented musicians are invariably going to make music, while talented writers may well go into poetry or short stories or whatever instead of becoming lyricists.)

That said, there are songs where the lyrics carry the primary weight of quality for me. Within the confines of a standard-length pop song, that's typically not a matter of a complete thought- it's usually a matter of using just a few words to communicate something vivid. The lyrics of The Mountain Goats' "Broom People" are a total of 101 words, but line by line, it uses its economy to capture a gut-punch portrait of an abusive household, both visual (the "white carpet thick with pet hair") and experiential (a sighed reference to "well-meaning teachers"), and with clearly personal details like the abuser's old car in the garage. (John Darnielle has been upfront about saying that the whole album addresses his life with an abusive stepfather.) It's a bit like a great establishing shot in a movie, communicating worlds in brief images.

Iron and Wine's "Dead Man's Will" achieves much the same, in its slightly different, eponymous form. It's a very structured approach of finding four expressions of "buried" love, all well-drawn in a few words, and all the more powerful for being driven home as the narrator repeated chorus beg for his "love to reach you all."

Both of these are, even on paper, great writing. But part of what makes them stick as great LYRICS is because the musical accompaniment provides such effective support. It's not just that the music meets our basic expectations for the tone of the song- relatively slow tempos, sweeping high notes- though that obviously helps. Both lyrics stand out so powerfully because there are a range of subtle musical cues that support, reinforce, even expand upon their tones and connotations.

In both cases above, much of that subtle success is in the way the music introduces a note of hopefulness and grace into devastating subject matter. Dead Man's Will is, on first listen, appropriately funereal, with the slow tempo of a funeral march and a choral arrangement that evokes a hymn. Upon further listening, though, that choral arrangement contains even deeper resonance. The musical arrangement drops out on the final chorus at 2:20, an effective decision to make stark the lonely cry of the narrator. But it's followed by a wordless chorus that swells the harmonies we've already heard before, and it's easy to start imagining that the father, mother, brother, lover, are now the ones singing. In purely musical terms, it's a nice way to open up the strong melody for a final spin. But it's also a way to suggest that his love has reached them all.

Broom People seems like a bit of an odder case at first, with dramatic piano chords and a thrumming cello line that seem too energetic, too anthemic for a story of a child writing down "good reasons to freeze to death." Until Darnielle pivots at the end of the verse to talk about the arms of another (a girlfriend, most likely) that turn him into a "babbling brook." On paper, the structural choice to dwell on what's at home is effective for dramatizing the draw of his escape, yet the pivot lands with even more force by resolving the tension between music and lyric.

It remains true that for me the impact of both songs is lyrical, the near-physical impact of invoking an abused child's "friends who don't have a clue" or hearing the posthumous regret of a man too "scared and stupid" to find love. But they're great as songs because the music is pumping the lyrics full of life. It can work the other way, too, and I'll take up that topic in the next post.

The Beatles, Sloan, and the Evolution of Expectation

I started this blog with a quote from Leonard Meyer, calling out for the "some account of the meaning, content, and communication of music" better than the "special jargon" currently available. I've since tried to develop my own account stated in my own terms, based on my own experience. Now seems like a good time to circle back to Meyer, who offers his own interesting answers, and ones that I think fit within the concepts I've developed for myself.

Meyer's stated goal is to identify the sources of musical emotion and meaning, which isn't necessarily the same thing as my attempt to define perceived quality. I think we're on the same wavelength, though. I've described multiple ways in which I define quality based on the sort of points of craft and subtlety that also create emotional responses- minor chords on Justin Vernon's guitar, or the cracks in Freedy Johnston's voice. If we're not talking about the same thing, we're talking about close correlates.

Meyer's basic approach is to extrapolate a theory of musical emotion from a more general psychological theory of emotion, conflict theory. Meyer notes that divergent theoretical lines within the field still jointly accepted the basic premise of the theory, that emotions occur when a stimulus cannot be otherwise resolved physically or mentally. (At least he claimed this was a consensus at the time he wrote in the '60s; if there are any psychologists reading, please call me out if this is horribly outdated). He cites the basic example of smokers getting angry or depressed when they unable to meet satisfy their desire for the next cigarette; an opposite example could be feeling joyful when, say, the taste of food introduces a positive sensation that's not offset by a negative sensation.

In the musical context, Meyer suggests, the baseline- the equivalent to the point before the new stimulus is introduced- is musical "style": the instrumentation, rhythm, harmony and other basic musical characteristics we have learned and accepted as "normal." Those styles create "customary and expected progression[s]" of sounds that, upon being learned, lose some of their impact for the listener. At that point, it becomes the "deviations" from those styles that carry emotional impact by, in effect, serving as a new stimulus. Moreover, a given deviation can become part of a broader affective work because can "the listener will do his best to relate it to the style, to understand its meaning," and put it within the broader context of a whole musical work.

"In short," concludes Meyer, "embodied musical meaning...is a product of expectation," specifically the interplay of the expected and the unexpected. Which seems to fit with both of my criteria for identifying new music I like. My search for something "unique" within a still-familiar style has obvious parallels. And to the extent I've been able to define "good songwriting" or "craftsmanship" to date, it's also been in terms of adding something I perceive as "new" to the familiar- whether it's choices of instrumentation and arrangement that refresh so-called retro musical styles, or finding a way to do arrange something differently within a familiar pop song structure.

I'm therefore comfortable adopting the basic premises of Meyer's theory as a way to flesh out the vocabulary and the conceptual structure of what I'm already trying to do. And I think a good example that fits Meyer's particular emphases is my relationship with the Beatles and their musical followers.

Below is "Can't Buy Me Love," which to my ears, and I'm sure many others, sounds like a pretty clear and pure example of a familiar style. This is true in immediately identifiable ways: guitar-bass-drums instrumentation, verse-chorus-verse structure, guitar solo in the middle. But even though we may not process it as consciously, for me, and I suspect for many of you, the melodic and harmonic contours of the song sound familiar as well. The memorable musical components- the chord change under the chorus (first at about :06) the way the vocals change to a flatter, bluesier version of the melodic line in the second line the verse (i.e. at about 1:00), the structure of the three-part harmonies, and many more- are all, in Meyer's terms, "customary and expected progressions" for the pop-rock music we've been hearing for most of our lives.

The Beatles are legendary in large part because they had such a significant role in establishing those tropes as customary and expected- "Can't Buy Me Love" captures a style that didn't even exist 10 years before this song, but is still a big part of our shared musical experience 50 years later. And even though I was born long after they broke up, I maintain a lot of affection for them because they still played the same role in establishing foundations of my personal musical world; I listened to them a lot as a teenager, when my own musical expectations were still in the process of being formed.

Since the Beatles serve as such a core pillar of my musical taste, I'm still obviously interested in seeking out bands in the same vein. But those bands bear a different burden than the Beatles did in forming my taste. If the bulk of what they do is follow those same customary and expected progressions, the appeal is limited; it's probably just going to sound to me like something the Beatles did better (which may in part actually just mean that the Beatles, for me, did it first). It's the band that's able to consistently and effectively subvert some of those expectations that can continue to succeed.

In the world of specifically "Beatle-esque" music, I'm not the only one who thinks Sloan stands out as a band who's represented some of the best of the form for 20 years running. All the songs below are going to sound immediately familiar to you (and the album covers even look familiar, what with their penchant for the four-slightly-awkward-guys-looking-back-at-you picture.) But with Meyer's theory in mind, it becomes clear for me that Sloan's been able to build their deserved reputation in part on their ability to balance the pleasures of the familiar form with some subtle and clever subversions of the expectations that creates.

"Can't You Figure It Out," for example, shares some of the exact tropes of "Can't Buy Me Love;" listen to how the vocals repeat the melody line at :30 in bluesier fashion at :33, just like in the Beatles' verse. But the chorus sounds both memorable and fresh because they subvert the chord change the Beatles have also led you to expect. Stop the video at :41, right before the chorus hits, and see if you can envision how you think the musical aspect of the chorus is going to sound. If you've listened to enough of this sort of thing as much as I have, you may well be able to envision a harmonic chord that "resolves" the preceding chord progression in the way the Beatles have led you to expect. It's not what Sloan does, though- they move to a sharper, more dissonant chord that makes an impact in part because it manages to sound "correct" without being the answer we're (perhaps subconsciously) being led to expect.

"Coax Me" follows another familiar trope- perhaps less-used by the Beatles than fellow '60s-pop travelers like, say, the Byrds- of basing the song in large part on a winding, picked single-note guitar melody. Songs like that tend to be described as "jangly," in part because they tend to use light arrangements and pretty-sounding harmonies, as in "Mr. Tambourine Man":

In this case, Sloan subverts the expectations for such "jangly" songs by putting the melody in a particularly sad-sounding minor key. The rest of the arrangement is still very much in the Byrds' vein, but the harmonic choice achieves an air of melancholy that adds something "new" to the familiar form.

Sloan is also just as likely to subvert expectations through their song structures as their harmonic choices. Most Beatles songs, certainly from their "early" period up to 1966, follow a pretty tight verse-chorus-verse structure, with little variation. That repetitious structure can be incredibly effective for burrowing songs into the pleasure centers of your brain, especially when the melodies themselves are so strong, but it creates its own set of expectations- when the second verse ends, you know the second chorus is coming. "Another Way I Could Do It" has the sort of melody I'd probably still enjoy having repeated- but instead, Sloan cycles through numerous variations that find new, enjoyable angles on the underlying melody. After establishing the melody in the first minute, they repeat only the second half of the melodic phrase at 1:00; introduce a new guitar melody at 1:12; transition into an ascending bridge at 1:28; and repeat only the first half of the original verse phrase at 2:00 in order to transition to a new variation on the ascending bridge at 2:15; then they have a slow outro starting at 2:47 that inverts the arrangement that comes before by vocally harmonizing what used to be the guitar melody. That's five good spins on a strong melodic idea without a single full repetition, and that winding structure can still pleasurably subvert my structural expectations even after multiple listens.

Even much simpler structural variations can have impact. "Losing California" modulates the key upward on the final chorus, which I've already complained about as an overused trope. But while the standard pop songs does this by simply doing a chorus and then repeating it with the modulation, Sloan structures it in a different and clever way. After two verses and choruses, they plant the seed for the modulation through a short bridge at 1:17, which modulates upwards at 1:30 for just a second before dropping back to the original key. Then they follow through on the modulation at 2:20 by interposing the bridge between the final verse and the chorus- then following through on the modulation. It doesn't make the trope any less common- but I still find it quite enjoyable in this particular context because the song successfully subverts my expectations for when and how it's going to happen.

Now, I didn't even consciously notice most of these choices over a decade of listening to the band. I've just considered them good songwriters, good craftsmen, examples of Beatles-esque music still done well. But Meyer's vocabulary, integrated into my own more self-conscious criteria I've laid out in previous posts, provides a pretty persuasive way for me to better articulate what those general phrases mean.