koganbot | (Reply)

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Actually, I'm all over the place in how I use and think about lyrics, and it's shocking how often I don't pay attention to them. I've loved Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" for 35 years and I can even sing along with the lyrics when it's playing and I still have no idea what they are really, or what they're about. And maybe I'd learn something interesting if I tried to find out.

But one thing, when lyrics do "take" me, as it were, I don't say to myself, "These are song lyrics, so I will treat them in a special way; as opposed to if they were words on a shopping list or part of a monograph on social categories in high schools." That is, I don't have a "song-lyric" way of analyzing song lyrics. I just analyze them as I would any words, which is to say I find out what they're doing and how I relate to them and use them rather than have a set model in advance. Which isn't to say that I don't have expectations and that I don't take into account what previous similar songs (or shopping lists or monographs) have done, but that each song and I set up our own relationship, as it were.

That is, listening to Ashlee sing "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep/Nobody's really seen my million subtleties" is different from listening to Chad Mitchell go "Queen Elizabeth, she fell in love with me/We were married in Milwaukee secretly/But I got tired of sugar and ran off with General Hooker/To go shootin' skeeters down in Tennessee." But they're both boasting songs and make extravagant claims. But Ashlee's commits her to the claim, puts her on the line. But Chad's commits him to his style (I'm the sort of person who has fun making this sort of claim), and actually the way it worked on record was that the other two members of the Chad Mitchell Trio were making world historical claims ("I saw Adam and Eve driven from the door/I'm the guy that picked the figleaves that they wore/And from behind the bushes peepin' saw the apple they was eatin'/And I swear that I'm the one that et the core"), Chad finally came in with a verse that was laughingly and saucily irrelevant. (Not sure if he wrote the line himself; they were doing variations on the Woody Guthrie version, I think.)