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.

Poking at Albums with "Pokey Midsections"

I am a major cheapskate who buys a lot of music, and still buys it in album form. (I attribute the album-buying primarily to the presence of good used CD stores near home, but inertia and creeping curmudgeonliness probably have something to do with it, too.) The listening habit I've developed to square that circle is to listen to every album I buy at least 10 to 12 times, usually concentrated over the course of a week or so before I move on to the next album.

The habit is partly a means to ensure I feel that I'm getting my money's worth out of my purchases, but I think it's stuck because it's also paid off musically. A number of my favorite albums- Talk Talk's "Laughing Stock" and "Spirit of Eden," The Flaming Lips' "Embryonic," Panda Bear's "Person Pitch," the Mountain Goats' earliest albums- I found either unremarkable or off-putting on the first listen; it was the concentrated, repeated listening that revealed their qualities.

I by no means consider this the "right" way to listen to music, just the way that's worked for me. But I'm sure it has had a significant effect on the fact those favorite albums are what they are. For one thing, it probably ties in to how I define terms like "craftsmanship" and "good songwriting". I'm probably going to be more impressed by musical decisions that don't fully pay off until the seventh listen than someone whose listening habits are less intensive or systematic, and emphasize them more heavily in my personal definition of those general terms. (There's probably a lot of writing to be done on that topic; I'll save it for future posts.)

I've also found that I tend to disagree with the common album-review complaint that an album has a "slow midsection" or starts strong before declining in quality, and I suspect I can define that difference very specifically in terms of listening habits. I can't speak authoritatively for any given reviewer, but I think it's fair to say that they're listening to music with some different parameters than mine. Most clearly, they're facing deadline pressures to finish reviews by release dates, while I take as much time as I please- and this may place fairly strict limits on the time they listen to the album, depending on how soon in advance they can get review copies. While I'm devoting my leisure time to these albums in as deliberate a fashion as I like, I assume most reviewers are trying to juggle one review among various other work tasks. And while I can ramble on as long as I like on this here blog, many reviewers are probably facing some degree of restraint on their word counts, creating the imperative to highlight their most concise criticisms (or praise).

The result I frequently see is that I agree with reviewer criticisms of weak sections of albums on roughly my third or fourth listen- and disagree after several more of my listens. Pitchfork hung much of its criticism of Elbow's most recent album, "Build a Rocket Boys!," on the criticism of a "pokey midsection" that "abates melodically." As far as I can infer, this has to be the two tracks between "Neat Little Rows," which the review itself highlights as "stomping," and "High Ideals," which has arguably the most complex arrangement on the album. Those two tracks didn't register with me much, either, for a while. But listened to on its own terms, it sounds to me like "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" has just as much melody as anything else on the album- it just took a while to come through in the album context because it's so much quieter than its surroundings. I'll still grant that "The Night Will Always Win" may be one of the weaker songs of the album, but it can't bear the weight of a "pokey midsection" all by itself.

Pitchfork similarly criticizes the songwriting on the Title Tracks' "In Blank" for "petering out a little" after a strong first four songs. (Not intending to pick on Pitchfork here- I see this in reviews from plenty of sources, these are just the examples that are coming to mind.) Which, again, is consistent with my experience on early listens; the first four songs were so immediate and consistent to dominate my experience. But that eventually smoothed out a few listens later- the chorus of "All Tricks" has just as much melodic snap as anything on the album, it just took a few more listens to sink in.

I'll admit I don't have authoritative knowledge of the process by which the reviewers listened to these albums. But this is a pattern I see often enough to make this a reasonable hypothesis: reviewers can tend to have less immersive listening experiences to an album than I will, and that are more likely to diverge in opinions on album pacing as a result. To be clear, I don't find anything wrong with this. Reviewers may be less immersed for reasons outside their control, and there may be plenty of other listeners who listen to music differently than I do anyhow.

I should note that I also believe my system may bring its own biases to the table. I may have a tendency to underrate albums that are oriented towards immediacy and don't gain as much value-added on the tenth listen. This may drive me away from, say, even the best of simple punk-pop, as much as I might enjoy the first-listen experience. I also may have a tendency to dismiss albums that don't vary much in tempo, tone, or melody for the entire duration, even if I might enjoy any given song on the album if it came up in an iPod shuffle. At some point in the future I'll have to revisit some music that could fit either description and put these guesses to the test.

Saying Something Nice: Miley Cyrus

See the previous post on Train for an explanation of this series.

Tempting Snarky Dismissal: We're talking about a revenue stream on a Disney executive's ledger more than we are music.

Hey, Say Something Nice: I'm guessing it wasn't Miley herself, but someone made a clever musical decision at the end of "Party in the USA."

The final minute of the song (starting right at 2:30) repeats the chorus twice. The standard approach in radio pop with this structure is to modulate the key a half-step (or maybe a whole-step) upward on the second chorus, which makes everything sound just a little bit higher and, as the link notes, "very uplifting." I'm sure you've heard what I'm talking about even if that description wasn't helpful- for an example, start at 2:36 below, then listen to the change at 2:55.

Thing is, this modulation is such a cliché that Marshall Crenshaw was ironically calling it out thirty years ago (at about 1:20 below- he does it at the bridge rather than the final chorus, but it's the same modulation for the same musical purpose). For me, any unironic use of the modulation at this point is a pretty blatant violation of the Saturation Principle. It's the audio equivalent of tired lyrical clichés like flying away into the sky- it's so obvious it just sounds lazy.

Whomever arranged "Party in the USA" found an impressively simple way to get the musical power and momentum the modulation (is supposed to) provide without succumbing to the cliché. The first ending chorus sounds just like it did earlier in the song. But instead of modulating that same arrangement for the second chorus (at about 2:55), the arrangement adds two tones on top of the existing instrumentation: a low, piano-type sound close to pitch to the existing bass line, and a higher-pitched bell sound.

What these two additions do is thicken the chord used in the original chorus. Stated another way, it takes the harmonies established by the instrumental track and makes them sound fuller and richer. Which, at least to my ears, adds a lot to the arrangement in a way I haven't heard much before. As far as I'm concerned, pop arrangers should start raiding this good idea. It could become saturated itself at some point, but for me, at least, there's a long way to go to reach that point.

Why That Isn't Enough: I still think there's more than a grain of truth in that snarky dismissal, and her vocal tracks are the clearest proof.

Miley has a nasal honk of a voice. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; I like a number of singers with similarly nasal voices, chief among them Freedy Johnston and John Darnielle. Part of their appeal is that both are strong lyricists. I'm willing to forgive more in the way of vocal shortcomings to someone who has a lot to say. But both also find musical ways to make their vocals fit well within their songs, despite their lack of a traditionally "good" voice.

Freedy Johnston, for example, commonly uses two strategies. The first is to write songs that rely on minor, dissonant, or otherwise "different"-sounding chords and tones. The guitar riffs in "On the Way Out" all sound a bit sharp and abrasive, and that makes his voice sound like a fairly natural fit. This is the reason I think "Party in the USA" works better than the most of the other Cyrus songs I've heard- her voice doesn't seem out of place with the gnarled chords of the guitar riff.

Second, Johnston successfully performs slow, spare, traditionally "pretty" songs through careful vocal control. He sings low in his range throughout the verses of "The Mortician's Daughter," so that the nasal inflection doesn't overwhelm the sometimes-minimal guitar accompaniment. He also undersings the more dramatic runs of the chorus; listen to the way he gets vocal power out of cracking and softening his singing (for example, around the 1:00 mark) under the swelling instrumentation. I suspect that if Johnston tried to keep up by singing louder, it would sound to most listeners like an exposure of his vocal shortcomings.

But keeping up is exactly what Miley does on many of her slow songs. She's trying to sing it the same way a more "traditional" singer would, and it just makes her nasality sound more obvious. Listen to the build at about 2:40 of "The Climb." She starts by undersinging the quiet first lines, but her vocal dynamics proceed to follow the music, and sound reedy and thin for the comparison.

That doesn't appear to be an exception either, based on pretty much the whole of this song:

Both songs have arrangements and structures that sound pretty standard for female pop singers, and it's clear that someone like Kelly Clarkson would sound more natural singing them. It's possible they're just honestly trying and failing, but it seems more likely that this indicates her handlers are often just giving her the same songs and arrangements they'd be giving any pop starlet, rather than trying to tailor her work to her strengths (and weaknesses). To me that's a pretty strong suggestion that her career's being managed more as a revenue stream than an effort at musical accomplishment.