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  1. #1

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    Some replies to the 'lyrics that bug me' thread have revealed an informed interest in the craft of lyric writing by several members.

    I thought a thread on great lyrics---focusing on sterling examples of the craft and whatever sound advice about the craft one wishes to pass along---was in order.

    Please note that we are thinking here of lyrics written for such tunes as jazz musicians are apt to perform or at least appreciate. The reason for this is that part of the craft of lyric writing in the tradition of the Great American Songbook lies in making it singable. (For example, some vowel sounds are easier to sustain than others, and thus are called for when pairing a word to a note that needs to be held a long time; anyone writing lyrics for the stage should know this.) As Alexander Pope put it, "The sound must seem an echo of the sense."

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  3. #2

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    Hhmmm, perhaps this was an idea whose time has not yet come.

  4. #3

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Hhmmm, perhaps this was an idea whose time has not yet come.
    I have to admit that my sole purpose here, as a guy who writes lyrics, is to snoop on your conversations and learn more stuff to help me write better.

    It's not the wrong time so much as the wrong place.

    I like the culture here very much, a hip fellowship of committed musicians with open hearts - 'scuse me while I wipe away a tear - while, on the other hand, every local jerk and their mum and dad can write words. There are many places out there where such non dues-paying folk engage in their chatter already. I would not encourage their like to congregate here, personally. They know nothing. NOTHING!! The joint is better off without 'em

    JazzGuitar - Don't Lower the Tone

    But if anyone wants to talk about "Lush Life", then I'm up for that, too.
    Last edited by Lazz; 08-08-2015 at 11:07 PM. Reason: vitriol

  5. #4
    See, if I had to choose a lyrical genius, I don't know if I'd be able to pick someone who works in the Great American Songbook style of things.

  6. #5
    destinytot Guest
    Thanks for starting this great thread.

    Movies - I prefer that word to 'film' - help. I love great dialogue, but that's not what I find helpful.

    Nowadays, when I find myself 'engaged'/'engrossed' or caught up in a movie, I take a kind of snapshot of my feelings. This can set me off on a kind of Hansel-and-Gretel trail of reflection. Novels probably provide greater opportunities for this, but the depth is not what counts for my purposes here.

    Besides, I don't think 'movie' means 'instant gratification' or 'cold medium' - enter Marshall McLuhen, as in Annie Hall, to set me straight... I don't profess to know.

    But I do think that, when it's 'right' (which, I'm beginning to believe, is perhaps to say 'in the right hands'), the convenient blend of images and - more importantly, because (for me) it not only supports but actually sets the emotional tone - music grabs and forcibly shakes me. 'Empathy' is putting it mildly, but that's my point.

    Movies give me quick insight into a character's dilemma; from their perspective - and from a safe distance. For me, the rest is just nuts and bolts - of course it's a craft - and to do with communicative style.

    'Narrative voice' applies to lyrics, too.

    Having checked - again - last night, I stand by the idea of music being a language. Not even the musicians I know get the lyrics of standards - not even native speakers or singers - unless they're the sort of thing that can be taken literally. (Like blockbuster movies, I don't really have time for that kind of stuff.) Melody and harmony are what really 'speak' to audiences, rhythm gets their attention. (Singing combines both - the notion of a 'good voice' is nonsense to me, btw.)

    I think lyrics need to be written to oneself, that writing needs to be approached with a 'can-do' attitude and a 'growth mindset' - and, above all, that confidence needs to be cultivated along with one's own character. (I think one needs to work alone, but that one needs others - and i see no contradiction in this.)

    And I think words and notes should both be treated with reverence. Each one belongs somewhere; not just a 'place', but a 'home' - and I say let that home be a... 'castle rising in Spain' (groan).
    Last edited by destinytot; 08-09-2015 at 09:00 AM. Reason: spelling

  7. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
    See, if I had to choose a lyrical genius, I don't know if I'd be able to pick someone who works in the Great American Songbook style of things.
    I am open to the suggestion that someone working outside that tradition might be a great lyricist; are you suggesting that no one working in that tradition was???

  8. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz
    I have to admit that my sole purpose here, as a guy who writes lyrics, is to snoop on your conversations and learn more stuff to help me write better.

    But if anyone wants to talk about "Lush Life", then I'm up for that, too.
    Snooping is fine. We all have more to learn. (We all have something to share too.)
    This is a good book on lyricists, aka 'the poets of Tin Pan Alley'. It's been years since I read it; a re-read might be in order.


    The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (Oxford Paperbacks): Philip Furia: 9780195074734: Amazon.com: Books

  9. #8

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    Speaking of "Lush Life," this is my favorite version.


  10. #9
    destinytot Guest
    Love* songs.

    *(v. & n.)

  11. #10
    I think it's interesting that, at the time, fans of the great American song book writers AND fans of the 60's singer songwriters each view the other as somewhat shallow.

    I like both very much. They're each their own thing.

  12. #11

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    Two books on great American song and lyrics

    Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950

    Will Friedwald, Stardust Melodies
    The stories behind about a dozen of the best songs. Includes a discussion of the jazz treatments of each selected song.

  13. #12

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    Quote Originally Posted by Stuart Elliott
    Two books on great American song and lyrics

    Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950

    Will Friedwald, Stardust Melodies
    The stories behind about a dozen of the best songs. Includes a discussion of the jazz treatments of each selected song.


    I read the Wilder book some years ago and have it on my re-read list as of this morning. That's not primarily about lyrics, but it's a very good book.
    I'll look for the Friedwald book at the library. Thanks for the suggestion.

  14. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
    I think it's interesting that, at the time, fans of the great American song book writers AND fans of the 60's singer songwriters each view the other as somewhat shallow.

    I like both very much. They're each their own thing.
    I think fans of '60s songwriters were too young to know any better! (I speak as someone born in the late '50s.) Of course, many of the musicians working in the '60s---who tended to be older than their audiences---had grown up hearing great American songbook material. (Nick Lowe once said in an interview on "Fresh Air" that bands then tended to start out as cover bands and they covered a wide array of material--"anything the traffic will allow" as Irving Berlin put it---and in so doing, learned how songs are put together. It gave them many tools to work with. The Beatles are a great example of this.)

  15. #14

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    Okay, since you are opening it up beyond the Great American Songbook... How about this for a first line of a song...

    "You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips".

  16. #15
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    (For example, some vowel sounds are easier to sustain than others, and thus are called for when pairing a word to a note that needs to be held a long time...
    I've been pondering this while (er - lying in semi-supine, practising intervals with my thumb and) "staring up at the ceiling"... and I thought of Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most. Personally, I tend to hold voiced consonants (ceiling).

  17. #16

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    My advice on songwriting craft is to learn it and get over it. You'll write some mediocre songs with lyrics that are well crafted. Then you'll be stuck knowing how to write a song, waiting for inspiration so you can apply your craft to a great song.

    See what I'm saying? Great craft only guarantees a mediocre song. Without craft, some songs would have nothing. And some great songs have been written without much attention to craft.

    One of the best lyricists that I know said he learned how to write songs primarily by studying the work of Bob Dylan and watching movies. Movies are just long songs that don't rhyme.

    The content of a lyric can only be compelling if one can relate to it. That's the part that's hard to teach. Dylan stepped into his role as speaker for his generation and found himself surrounded by plenty of material to work with and a ready-made audience. A niche was born. The inspiration has to be real.

    To pop writers just doing their day job, I say well-done. Jimmy Van Heusen was so good that he re-wrote his own name, Edward Chester Babcock. A writer needs that kind of confidence, to think that you could improve on your own name, to find a better way to say something.

  18. #17

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    He's not part of the great American Songbook, not part of the rock singer-songwritters, but I do think Mose Allison has written some great lyrics. Not to mention, he's a jazz man. Here is one of my favorites, "Your Mind Is On Vacation."

    You sittin here and yakkin right in my face
    You comin' on exactly like you own the place
    You know if silence was golden
    You couldn't raise a dime
    Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is workin' overtime

    You quotin' figures and droppin' names
    You tellin' stories and playing games
    You're overlaughin' when things ain't funny
    You tryin' to sound like the big money
    You know if talk was criminal
    You'd lead a life of crime
    Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is workin' overtime


    You know that life is short
    Talk is cheap
    Don't be makin' promises that you can't keep
    You don't like this little song I'm singin'
    Just grin and bear it
    All I can say is if the shoe fits wear it
    If you must keep talkin
    Please try to make it rhyme
    Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is workin' overtime

  19. #18

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    This quote from Michael Feinstein about Van Heusen is instructive:

    "He was a real partier, and yet the romance in his songs is something that came from another part of him, because I would not say that in life he was a romantic guy," Feinstein says. "I mean, he didn't get married until the age of 56 — that was the first time he got married! But then here he is, writing all these songs like 'Darn That Dream' and 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams' and 'Love and Marriage' and 'The Tender Trap' and 'All the Way.' And I don't think that he actually believed in those songs, you know? But he knew how to express what people wanted to believe in."

    You have to be a good liar, like Dylan was. Dylan didn't actually go to the rallies and throw in 100% behind the protesters (Joni Mitchell used to complain about that). But he would sing about it and write about it as if he really believed in it.

    The ability to see life the way your target demographic sees life--that's what it takes. You have to express what people want to believe in.

  20. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    I think fans of '60s songwriters were too young to know any better! (I speak as someone born in the late '50s.) Of course, many of the musicians working in the '60s---who tended to be older than their audiences---had grown up hearing great American songbook material. (Nick Lowe once said in an interview on "Fresh Air" that bands then tended to start out as cover bands and they covered a wide array of material--"anything the traffic will allow" as Irving Berlin put it---and in so doing, learned how songs are put together. It gave them many tools to work with. The Beatles are a great example of this.)
    I thought about this when watching that Joni Mitchell documentary several weeks ago after discussion here. She talked about wanting to have the lyric quality (something about honesty or directness etc.) of Dylan, with melodic sensibility of the great American songbook.

    The fact that the American songbook tune's lyrics are thought out , a little cerebral, clever - in rhyming and ideas , is kind of the POINT of them. At the same time, I can see the desire for something more "real". Again, I like both for what they are. I'll take Joni and the standards as well.

    I found it really interesting and enjoyed listening to her music more after hearing that comment, by the way. I think she achieves pretty well what she was talking about.

  21. #20

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    Two things crack me up about Lush Life.

    First is that Strayhorn was a schoolboy when he wrote the noir-ish nuanced evocation of a love-lorn life lived at the bottom of a cock-tail glass. He didn't know anything about that stuff at first hand. He knew about hard times and dreaming of better. But he had an imagination and went to a powerfully good school with a visionary and inspired music department. It's tragic to register how shamefully dysfunctional Westinghouse High has become over recent years. The local community of the catchment area of Homewood, Pittsburgh, used to call it just the "House. And it was a source of pride and leadership in its glory days, with a proud list of graduates who went on to further success in business, sports, civil rights, music, entertainment and the arts. On piano, for instance, the inspirational driving force of Carl Vickery helped enable and nurture not only Strayhorn but Mary Lou Williams, Ahmad Jamal, Dakota Staton, Errol Garner, and his elder brother and my late mate, Linton, now passed, but from whom I heard all about it. There was also bassist Wyatt Ruther, whom I got to know and sing with as well, and several Basie sidemen whose names have much less recognition. It was the crucible within which Billy Strayhorn constructed his portrait of sophisticated heartbreak.

    Second is a problem with the words - or rather the bent way people hear them and perpetuate the laughable mistake without ever stopping to think to themselves "Hey. This can't be right." You know the bit, I'm sure. It's in the first eight bars of the refrain, after the verse. Strayhorn has a pattern of rhyme and rhythm in the first four bar phrase (with "life is lonely again, and only last year everything seemed so sure") which he obliges himself to replicate neatly in the subsequent four bars. And in that four bars, I regularly and constantly find people articulating something very weird and misheard in the shape of "(now) life is awful again, a trough full of hearts could only be a bore". Say what?? They contemplate this gentle slight bespectacled fey and gay black young man settling for the ugly shock of such an image - "A trough full of hearts!!!" - in his search for adequate pattern-repetition. Do they think that he worked in a ferkin abattoir, for heaven's sake? The word he settled on to solve his puzzle was TROTH, my little deaf darlings. Considered maybe a little arcane by some, but Billy had a greedy vocabulary. He knew, as in "I pledge three my troth", that the word speaks of "truth" and "loyalty", and he adopts it as a far better metaphorical measure of hearts than a lowly trough. On those occasions I glance at those execrable lyric web-sites which exist out there, they all repeat this ill-considered and un-thought-about mistake. Where technology permits, I make my correction and add a small explanation. Don't you know that it always gets changed back to the incongruous "trough full of hearts" - which I picture slopping blood and offal onto the floor each time another torn heart is tossed into the mess.

    Is it me or is it them?

    I believe it to be the reason Strayhorn got so wound up by Nat Cole's version.
    And what does Johnny Hartman sing?
    (I think he says "trough".)

  22. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    My advice on songwriting craft is to learn it and get over it. You'll write some mediocre songs with lyrics that are well crafted. Then you'll be stuck knowing how to write a song, waiting for inspiration so you can apply your craft to a great song.
    I wrote well in school but was a terrible singer as a child. I wrote a lot of songs without knowing---or sensing intuitively--that some sounds are easier to sing than others. I didn't know that one 'sings on the vowel' or the difference between open and closed ones. For some rock songs, this may not make much difference, but it makes an enormous difference in songs written so that OTHER PEOPLE will also want to sing them. Looking back, I can see that many of my juvenile errors were rooted in ignorance of singing. I know a little better now and it's been a great boon to my songwriting. (It also enhances my appreciation of people who do it brilliantly.)

    Here's a short article about singing vowels and another about singing English successfully.

    http://singing.about.com/od/pronunciation/fl/

    Singing English Understandably

    (One need not be a singer to be a lyricist, but if one's lyrics are unsingable, it may be hard to find someone to sing them for you.)

  23. #22
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz
    Where technology permits, I make my correction and add a small explanation.
    Great comment - 'troth' (from 'truth') to 'promise/pledge' makes sense, but I'm curious to know how your correction reads - "a troth full of hearts"... "a trothful of hearts"?

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by destinytot
    Great comment - 'troth' (from 'truth') to 'promise/pledge' makes sense, but I'm curious to know how your correction reads - "a troth full of hearts"... "a trothful of hearts"?
    I wondered the same thing. (And I do think Johnny Hartman says "trough".) I appreciate the word "troth" but I don't know that that is how the original lyric goes. Further, it is not clear----at least to me----what, in context, a troth full ( or truthful) of hearts would refer to.

  25. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by destinytot
    curious to know how your correction reads - "a troth full of hearts"... "a trothful of hearts"?
    I always choose "troth-ful" as my stab at self-explanatory compromise.

    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    I don't know that that is how the original lyric goes. Further, it is not clear----at least to me----what, in context, a troth full ( or truthful) of hearts would refer to.
    It is interesting to read the dialogues between the estates of Ellington and Strayhorn in which they analyse voicings and stylistic devices to establish some signature of musical identity in order to divvy up the rights and royalties in something approaching fairness. And by similar and equal tokens and signs of aesthetic individuality, "troughful of hearts" simply don't float as Strayhorn, and I am not wearing it - the picture is just too smelly and ugly to be credible.

    In context:
    The first four bars says "you're on your own (again)".
    The second four bars is saying "it's so bleeding awful that even a large pile of tempting promises (from a slew of attractive beauties) won't get to seem more than tiresome intrusion".
    How's that?

    I think Hartman says "trough", too.
    I shudder.

  26. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    My advice on songwriting craft is to learn it and get over it. You'll write some mediocre songs with lyrics that are well crafted. Then you'll be stuck knowing how to write a song, waiting for inspiration so you can apply your craft to a great song.

    See what I'm saying? Great craft only guarantees a mediocre song.
    I can see it. I can read it.
    But I don't get what you mean.
    It makes no sense to me.

    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    Without craft, some songs would have nothing. And some great songs have been written without much attention to craft.
    Can you feed me some f'rinstances so I can follow what you mean, Ken?
    Are you including, say, "Louie, Louie" in your latter category?

    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    One of the best lyricists that I know said he learned how to write songs primarily by studying the work of Bob Dylan and watching movies. Movies are just long songs that don't rhyme.
    How can anyone learn to write songs by studying just one practitioner?
    When somebody wants to become a painter, they study art.
    When somebody wants to become an actor, they study theatre.
    When somebody wants to direct movies, they study film.
    But it is an article of faith and self-deception that anyone can write songs without regard for history and tradition.

    Your friend, for instance, wants to be a songwriter so he studies Bob Dylan, innocent and ignorant of Salvador Dali’s warning that anything NOT grown from tradition is plagiarism.

    Singer-songwriter syndrome is a dark and dismal corner for songwriting. Joni and Dylan are pretty much a genre each to themselves. But the subsequent hordes are largely musically impoverished, claim melody notes from their chords while sticking resolutely to triads. They own a guitar, have learned a few grips and shapes with no understanding, and believe their job is to strum a simple repeated progression and cram what they have to say in words inside however many bars and beats there happen to be passing by. That’s a very different style of working to the ones I consider more productively worthwhile to talk about and learn from. The guys ploughing that field neither need to know nor even care about those other elements of musical sound involved in language like cadence or rhythm or regard for prosody.

    Too bad. They can do like that if they want but it ain’t for me.
    I want to do the best work I can, and keep working with the best musicians I can.

    Lyricists need to develop musicianship, an ear, and be alive to melody and harmony if they are to work most effectively with the best composers. Most of the singer-songwriter pop-rock crowd don’t go for those values and fail to see their relevance.

    But if I’m working towards something with a top-notch musical collaborator, I need to be fairly conversationally fluent in the musical/structural concepts at play and confident of their emotional effects. It helps me do my bit, better. I have to be hip to nuance and tone. Unlike the relentless singer-songwriter fraternity, I am writing for someone else, other artists, so I can’t get away with any old crap like they can.

    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    The inspiration has to be real.
    And here’s a very loud "later!" for inspiration.
    Inspiration is a myth for the amateur to swallow.
    Others don't have the time to wait around.