If someone picked up your lyric booklet, would it be a good read even if they’ve never heard your album?
Does it matter?
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Yes, and that’s what keeps me from writing lyrics. I want them to be as profound and as readable out-of-context as Neutral Milk Hotel or Mountain Goats lyrics, and I want them to be that way immediately!
I haven’t heard Mountain Goats. Can you recommend an album of theirs that I can check out, Eric?
The Mountain Goats have a lot of albums. It’s hard to pick one, but I guess I’d say Tallahassee because it has their signature song, “No Children”, on it.
P.S. Sounds to me like you really want to be a poet whose words also happen to be set to music.
Just to comment more on the topic at hand… I know it’s not required to have lyrics read well on paper to have a “good” song. Sometimes brevity is enough. A lot of times just having swagger or musical talent is enough. It’s just my personal goal to have song lyrics that teenagers might scrawl in their high school notebooks, or that people might find profound enough to quote out of context in their Facebook profiles. It’s one thing to have people hum your catchy tunes as they go about their day, and it’s another thing completely to have people read your lyrics as holy text and reproduce them all over the Internet like graffiti.
I’m with you there, Eric. I identify more as a writer than a composer–when I do focus on music, usually it’s because I’m excited to explore the ways that words change when set to music.
i heard the lady gaga song “speechless” the other day for the first time. i don’t really listen to lady gaga, but i loved the song. the lyrics are fucking awful, but it didn’t matter – it demonstrated the power of a solid band and singer.
that said, to me, lyrics are almost always ugly written down. i try really hard to de-emphasize the lyrics when i write songs, even if there’s singing throughout. kind of a mcluhan thing, or, quoting david byrne: “singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily”
Byrne also said in a video interview that he worked really hard on lyrics, but he was perfectly aware that many people don’t pay much attention to them. And I know Zappa has said before that people pay more attention to music when there’s a human voice plopped on top.
Are you talking about Marshall McLuhan?! I just got /Understanding Media /in the mail. Haven’t started reading yet–I can’t wait.//