Abstract Lyricism and Failing at it: a rant

In a recent episode of my favorite podcast Why I Hate This Album about the Wallflowers’ Bringing Down The Horse (link here), Tim says something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now, about Jakob Dylan’s attempts at abstract and deep lyrics compared to that of his father Bob: “With Bob Dylan lyrics, even if you don’t really get what he’s talking about, even if you don’t get the references  (sometimes they’re not references, they’re just weird poetry that he’s writing), there’s the sense that Dylan knows what it is, right? It feels like a complete thought, and he’s singing about something very specific that maybe you just aren’t privy to. He’s writing completely normally about something strange, and here this comes off as faking that and doing it in reverse. He’s trying to have these inscrutable lyrics, and you can just feel the fucking effort.” This puts into words something that I love about some of my favorite lyricists, and something I hate about other lyricists. One example that comes to mind: the Flaming Lips. On the surface, much of Wayne Coyne’s writing can come across as silly or just gratuitously nonsensical, such as “She Don’t Use Jelly” or “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” but even if it does come across as strange, it’s still very sincere, and clearly about something. Even if you don’t understand why Wayne is singing about scientists racing to cure viruses or meeting his future self, you get the sense that this is something he cares about, something that he feels is worth singing about. When he sings about the softest bullet ever shot and feeling himself disintegrate and pink robots coming to kill everyone, you feel the weight of these seemingly absurd ideas. Similarly you have Beck, (who doesn’t always write like this but has in the past), who sings about pistols pointed at poor man’s pockets and pixelated doctors moaning, but even though those images are silly, they clearly communicate the tone of the music, that tone being “There’s some weird shit happening here.” On the other side of this, you have the aforementioned Wallflowers, in which Jakob sings something like, “Once upon a time they called me the bleeder, I’m swimmin’ up this river with a sentimental fever,” which feels like the homeopathic version of blues lyrics. Another example is “Everything Zen” by Bush, where Gavin Rossdale repeats “there’s no sex in your violence” several times before randomly blurting out, “I don’t believe that Elvis is dead” more than once. I roll my eyes at this because it feels like a 14-year-old’s idea of cool dark lyrics with a nonsensical twist. These don’t feel like they mean anything, they just feel like attempts to sound more intelligent than they are.

I’m thinking about this partially because it’s really funny, but also because I’m also writing my own songs and I’m not sure if I’m good at it yet. I wonder if the following verse from my song “Voices” sounds more like a combination of cool ideas and imagery or a collection of non-sequiturs: “Waking up never was that easy/It’s just not what it used to be/I want to make sure I’m speaking clearly/So they don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Those lines, to me, capture this idea that life has never been easy but has, in fact, become more difficult, and that when I sing I subconsciously try to hide all of my weird speech patterns in an attempt to sound more professional. But I worry that to someone else, it might sound irritatingly vague. These lyrics came about through relentlessly attempting to cram words together while coming up with a melody, and it took many drafts for it to come close to meaning anything. I’ve also written a song where the chorus is “Ask me why I’m bleeding from the eyes/and my answer will leave you unsatisfied,” which came to me in a fit of sleep deprivation, as if you couldn’t tell. I worry that this might make the previous paragraph sound a bit hypocritical, but I see it more as a case study, an attempt to understand what makes good abstract lyricism. I don’t want to sound like the Wallflowers, or Bush, or (heaven forbid) the Fray, I want to sound like the Flaming Lips, and They Might Be Giants, and Sea Power, and Beck (lyrically, not musically, I’m nowhere near as good as them). 

This also contrasts with the fact that my favorite songwriter of all time is Ben Folds, who does the exact opposite of this and writes hyper-specific character studies about people he knows. 

This barely has a point, but this has just been on my mind lately.