Song Lyrics

As a little side project during the school year, I've used my newly acquired talent for playing basic chords on the guitar to write some songs. For the first one I used lyrics I'd already written a while back, maybe a year ago, when I was trying to write poetry. For the other three, I had to write new lyrics, so I've been thinking a lot lately about what I can write about, what inspires me, what make good lyrics, etc.

Music lyrics are a funny thing because they're the only real exposure to poetry that most people (myself included) ever get. And yet they seem to deviate so much from 'actual' poetry (that is, poetry that's written down in books, and not sung). Obviously lyrics are a kind of poetry, but they have a unique style to them, and good lyrics do not usually make good poetry when written down (and vice versa? I'm not sure. Something tells me, though, that the work of someone like e. e. cummings wouldn't quite translate into song form).

The reason for this is that lyrics, as opposed to poetry, are only a part and not the whole of the art form. The quality of a song depends not only on the words that are sung, but how they are sung, and also the quality of the music itself. So it's no surprise that many lyrics seem jumbled, or without order when looked at on a page, since they're not meant to fit together alone, but have to fit in the context of the song. Much of the meaning in song lyrics is given in the way they are sung. In the same way as it's impossible to convey sarcasm while texting, compared to in a phone call, the emotion of song lyrics often just doesn't translate onto paper.  I mean, a song's lyrical content can be entirely meaningless or ambiguous in a highly emotional song; just think of lyrics from Pavement or At The Drive-In (dancing on the corpses ashes...). Unfortunately, inflection isn't something that poets have the luxury of using, which isn't necessarily bad, it just means that lyrics and poetry are different.

But this brings me to a little bit of a crossroad with my own song writing. Now, when I sit down to write a song, I force myself to think 'I'm not writing poetry, I'm writing song lyrics.' Ideally this mentality would let me punch out lyrics at a rapid pace, since it should be easy to write words when you don't care about having profound meaning behind them. But the problem is that, at least for me, I can't write song lyrics unless they're about something. It could be anything, but I need a topic, if I try to write random words on a page I end up feeling like a phony. So I try to think of random things to write about. I wrote one song about a man who fell asleep in his apartment with his cigarette lit and started a fire that burnt the whole building down. Another song I wrote was about a man stranded in the middle of the ocean on a raft, with nothing but his guitar.

The problem is that even though these ideas are supposed to be arbitrary and random, just something to get me writing emotional sounding stuff, I inevitably care about having interesting meaning behind the song. The songs that I think have dumb meanings I never want to sing. For example, another song I wrote was about that classic hypothetical scenario where a man controls a train that is moving towards five people, but can change it to a different track, to kill one. Basically, I wrote it from the perspective of a person actually in that position. Now, to me, this seems like a really dumb song, so I just never play it. But this is so frustrating, because I'm only writing lyrics so I can play music. The whole purpose is defeated. And then I start trying to write lyrics that are meaningful, but dammit that's hard. I don't want to care, I just wish I could spit them out, and not even consider their quality.

Plus, this tactic has lead me to write some embarrassingly bad stuff. Like these lyrics I recently wrote, in a fit of frustration and writers block. To help myself out of the rut I tried to write a song based on the dumbest premise I could think of. This is what I came up with:

a man is half conscious, operating a mech of some sort in a brutal war where he's killing many people. He's not sure who he is, or why he's doing the things he does. In a moment of clarity, he ponders if maybe he's on a crazy drug trip and none of this is actually happening, or maybe some government/organization is using mind control to make him do the things he does.

And here's the poem that I wrote for it:

crying mouths crash earthward
I push myself to move
but what pushes me to push myself
I don't know

I feel through thoughts for a time
when things were greener
my head's a mess of spinning heat
finding freedom

I grin because I'm
too confused
to have a sense of guilt
I laugh because
my mind's too strange
not to be insane

I might've done this to myself
body far away
somewhere sunny, with real friends
forgotten

maybe it's been done to me
revulsing in revolt
So, far away, in my past
was clarity

I grin because I'm
too confused
to have a sense of guilt
I laugh because
my mind's too strange
not to be insane

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I decided against making this one into a song.