Why Are You Singing? No, really – why TF are you up there singing?
What are lyrics good for? Part I, feat. Louise Glück & ML Buch
Create a four-minute-movie with no soundtrack and no dialogue. This was the assignment given to my housemate, a filmmaker studying at Tisch, for his final last semester. Why these particular constraints? The professor wanted her students to explore how they might generate affect, meaning, tension, and resolution with visuals alone. Music is often placed in a movie to direct us how to feel. Similarly, dialogue quickly allows a narrative arc to emerge. Without these devices to fall back on, the students’ filmmaking skills were foregrounded – use of light, shadow, shading, and setting. The assignment’s parameters ensured that the students could not hide behind the acrobatics of sound and conversation – that they could not fool the audience into thinking they had made something deep because of a well-timed cinematic swell from the studio orchestra’s MIDI tracks. The professor was not “against” soundtracks or dialogue, but proceeded from the idea that her students will be much better at their craft if they are able to create a meaningful experience by exploring and manipulating the visual dimensions of a film first.
Songwriters and lyricists face a different sort of dilemma. If the filmmaker must negotiate between the visual and the sonic, the songwriter is tasked with negotiating between the connotative and the denotative – and, pointedly, threading the denotative within the parameters of the connotative. On the connotative side, we have melody, harmony, rhythm, form, production, timbre – all of those musical elements that conjure powerful, and often indescribable, feeling-states. They can be intellectualized and denoted, yes – “this is a Phrygian scale; this is a Sonata form” – but they do not necessarily point to some clear meaning outside of the world of music. On the denotative side, we have words and sentences – the “literal meaning” imparted by the words the vocalist is singing. Yes, meaning is culturally contingent; nonetheless, uttering “Hanging your jeans with a clothespin” will direct listeners towards a certain shared set of images, while simply playing a C Major scale will not. And, finally, we also have the “music of the words” – the way the sounds of the words being sung create a logic and (potential) pleasure all of their own. The way a composer balances these poles – the weight they give to any one dimension – will vary depending on the context in which the music will be heard and the intention of the composition.
While there are a wide variety of lyrical stylings that can work, I’ve found myself in the audience at shows asking this question a lot lately: Why are you singing? I don’t mean this rhetorically or flippantly. It’s a genuine inquiry, borne out of a desire to better understand what, exactly, songs – particularly songs with words – are good for.
My musical “education” – though I never understood it in those terms at the time – began in earnest when I was five and began to attend weekly Sunday services with my family at our town’s Episcopal church. I didn’t have a choice in the matter and surely didn’t attend on my own volition; my Mom had to drag my brothers and me there, kicking and screaming, on more than one occasion. While I was no doubt exceedingly bored and restless during many of those services, I developed a fondness for the choir that sang each Sunday. Some of the music was quite beautiful, and looking back on it now, there was an earnestness and selflessness to the choir’s pursuit that is appealing. Many of the songs they performed have stuck with me to this day.
While sitting in the pews – or singing, when I joined the choir in middle school – I certainly never asked this question: why are we singing? What’s going on here? What exactly is the point of the lyrics? What exactly is the point of this?
It was clear: the music was meant to give it up to G**. It was ode, incantation, celebration, homage. It was surrender, atonement, forgiveness. Some of the music was incredibly banal, of course. None of it was especially complex. But there was an utter clarity to the project, on both a song-by-song and larger programmatic level – regardless of one’s take on the epistemology and ontology of the project of religion as a whole. I certainly wasn’t imbibing the rhetoric uncritically (I was likely thinking about when I could go home and watch sports), nor did I necessarily “believe” the words the choir were singing. But I very clearly understood what the point of the song was – what it meant to the composer and, possibly, to those singing it.
Contrast this clarity of intention and understanding with some questions that routinely come up for me at live performances – perhaps best thought of as “sub-questions” to the larger inquiry of “why are you singing?” :
Does anyone understand what the vocalist is singing – on a word-for-word basis, on the level of phrases, and sweeping out to the largest narrative arc they may be trying to communicate?
Does anyone care about what the vocalist is singing – i.e., is what they are singing relevant to their enjoyment of the song? Or are we vibing regardless?
What is this song gaining from having a lyric involved? Does knowing what this lyric is saying take away from our enjoyment of the song? Does it add to our enjoyment?
What does this setting, image, narrative, or feeling-state gain from being put in a musical form? Could these lyrics stand on their own as a poem? Could another medium work?
These questions reveal two distinct, but related, challenges for the songwriter who cares about the lyrics they are writing. For one, the pitch and timbre of singing – as contrasted with those of speaking – is often not conducive to clearly delivering a set of words to a listener. Of course, the acoustics of many music venues all but ensure that the vocals will be drowned out by the other instruments on stage anyways. But even if the acoustics of a space are pristine and the vocalist’s articulation crystalline, the fact remains that it is often more difficult to process information aurally than visually. In this searching conversation, poet Louise Glück states her feelings plainly:
“Oh, I hate listening. I really do. I don’t hear well when I listen, and I think the poets who write for the spoken word, I think, qualities get emphasized at the expense of what only the page can deliver. On a page, if a word has multiple meanings, you can see them, you feel the whole range of meanings of a particular word will be present to you. In a reading the reader has to decide among the various options that that prism of the word affords. The poet has to decide on one way to do it, emphasizing one particular quality. And the reading is…it can sound beautiful, it can sound more beautiful than it actually is. It masks defects in the poem that the writer should be aware of because the writer could take some perhaps, but it also simplifies the poem. It may dramatize it, but it simplifies it. And that makes me angry. And I don’t want the reader’s personality substituted for the poem. I don’t like that intersession. I want the experience of the poem. And whatever the voice of the poem is, I want to hear it, and I hear better reading.”
Glück’s complaints bring us to the second conundrum of lyric writing: when overwhelmed by the currents of rhythm, harmony, and melody – the connotative – listeners can often not help but relegate lyrics – the denotative – to an ornamental afterthought. The words will be noticed and potentially valued, but they are often rendered ancillary to the main “point” or message of the song. As, I would argue, should be the case, because otherwise the question of this essay might be why are you playing music? We play music because it activates a sense of affective, attitudinal, cognitive, and relational capacities that are not accessible via speech – or other artistic mediums – alone. In contrast to Glück, we live for the dramatization, the expansion, the situatedness of a lyric within a larger sonic ecosystem.
Imagine driving in a car and having this dialogue:
Friend – “hey, have you heard ‘anything’ by Adrienne Lenker?
You – Ah, I’ve been wanting to listen to that! Can you put it on?
Friend – Sure, one second ….*pulls up lyrics.com sheet and begins to speak the lyrics aloud*
We return time and again to our favorite songs, not the lyric sheets of songs, because how the lyrics are incorporated into the musical environment is precisely what makes them so meaningful and feeling-ful. Indeed, part of my skepticism with the project of lyric writing is that I believe songs need not have a “point” at all – oftentimes the pleasure of the sounds of the words and instruments do the most important affective weightlifting all by themselves, and a lyric can even detract from these crucial elements.
Last summer, I expressed this ambivalence in an email to
– a songwriter I really admire – in response to his own essay on lyric-writing:“As someone who also obsesses about lyrics, I wanted to share an idea that has been unnerving + preoccupying me lately: if the vibe is good, the lyrics don't really matter that much. I realize that's a bit of an overshoot, and I don't totally believe it – but I do think there are a lot of songs where I don't really know what's being said, but I find the ‘associative machinery’ that the sound and timing of the lyrics evoke to be quite pleasurable. Of course, that may be difficult to achieve without the track having an intensely produced quality of some sort, which disperses one's attention – i.e. it's easier to hide lyrics amidst a washy synthscape than a chord plucked on a grand piano...for instance, on ML Buch's stunning new album, Suntub, the sounds are so good that I'm immediately drawn in, and in a way, after hearing them, she's already ‘won’ – the lyrics that follow would have to be utterly disastrous to move me out of the trance-like state the sound worlds inspire.”
I stand by that conviction, six months after first articulating it. However, examining Buch’s words alone reveals just how much a great lyric can elevate – whether subconsciously or consciously – the feeling-ful experience of listening to a song. When I was writing to Kahane, I had Buch’s fabulous “Well Bucket” – the quintessence of what I mean by a vibe-first experience, in which I’m immediately swept in by the chorused-out guitar – on repeat. I was intuitively drawn to the last stanza of the song, but I had absolutely no idea what was being sung on a larger, narrative level throughout the text. It wasn’t important to my enjoyment of the song. As I looked up the lyrics, however, I learned Buch penned a piercing, visceral, brilliantly articulated examination of family lineage and intergenerational continuities:
Spit in this well bucket
Of ancestors drool
Look down and look up their noses
Into their eye pools
Wipe off your tears
With this flesh rag
Wrench it in
This flesh bag
Scatter scurf and freckles
From scalp and chin
On stretched stone skin
Existing in
Folds and overlaps
Hollows and gaps
Folds and overlaps (folds and overlaps)
Hollows and gaps (hollows and gaps)
The last stanza is particularly effective and affective for me. Its lines are vocalically consonant and thus pleasurable to the ear – a perfect example of the “music” of poetry that Glück speaks about. “Ohs” predominate, as we hear that vowel four times (folds, over, twice on holl-”ows”) within the four words. The simple rhyme of “laps” and “gaps” adds a brief landing point, as we plant our feet and then fly away again with the “ohs” of folds, overlaps, and hollows. Second, its lines are repeated a number of times, which allows them to take on incantatory quality – to begin to generate their own meaning, potentially separate from the rest of the lyrics in the song. It’s through these repetitions that the listener is “let in” and allowed to (mentally) articulate their own associations with these words – with moments, people, loves of their lives that have come in and out, passed away, moved abroad, etc. These more abstract verbs and images are all the more effective and expansive given that they follow a number of “harder images” – nouns such as “scalp,” “scurf,” and “freckles,” which operate at a more specific, granular level.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Buch enacts the semantic meaning of the stanzas in her performance. She doesn’t simply repeat these lines in the same character/register over and over again – she begins to overlap the lines themselves in the recording as she experiments with delay, panning, placement, register, and vocal doubling. This is certainly where we might find a correlation in poetry – while each lyric is placed one after another in online lyric sheets for this song, a writer could certainly experiment with lineation, spatial placement, and pagination to represent this type of vertiginous dialogue more faithfully on the page. This is a perfect example of a song that doesn’t need a lyric to be meaningful and feelingful, but whose impact is enhanced by the way its lyricist gracefully situates her words, sound, narrative, and performance within the larger sonic dimensions of the song.
I’m preparing to formalize/communalize/institutionalize these inquiries this spring, when I’ll be teaching a five-week seminar at Brooklyn Poets entitled “The Poetics of Songs.” The main goal of the course is to explore the relationship between lyric-writing and poetry – to study examples in each medium and use them as signposts to help us produce new work. In preparation, I want to use this newsletter over the coming few weeks to think through some preliminary ideas on the topic, drawing on my own thoughts and by engaging with lyricists and writers in the community here in New York. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Chase this is really really excellent