It’s only words
True lyricists: Storytellers who evoke emotions via song
Some songwriters hate lyrics. You can feel their contempt. Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Miller. And you, Neil Diamond, raised in the rigors of Tin Pan Alley tunesmithery. What possessed you to write this:
I am … I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
That’s just disrespectful. But maybe it’s understandable; we all have our own skill sets and things that make us happy. There’s a guy I know who is something like a pocket Paul McCartney; he’s got all these ideas for melodies and harmonies and rhythms and counter-punctual bass lines, but when he writes a song he inevitably settles for the first easy rhyme that strikes his ear. He leans into cliché.
He knows he does this. He also knows that if he went back, gave it a little time and thought, he might come up with something better. But he doesn’t.
On some level he doesn’t believe it matters. On some level he’s right.
What matters about a song is how it sounds, whether it arrests a listener’s attention, whether it connects in the way real art always connects creators and consumers. Do this by any means necessary. No lyric is dumb if it services the art — if it fits in the context of the artist’s intention. Simple is best, if simple will suffice. Jesus wept.
But there are songwriters who write stunning lyrics. It’s part of their tool kit. In the context of rock ’n’ roll-derived pop music, there are probably fewer around today than there were in the ’70s and ’80s (for the purposes of this discussion we’re going to put hiphop lyricists off to the side and acknowledge that the form relies heavily on intricate wordplay), but there are still a few that crush — as when Bill Callahan writes about his lover eulogizing him at his funeral by remembering the sex they had in “the very graveyard where my body now rests” (“Dress Sexy at My Funeral” off Smog’s 2000 album “Dongs of Sevotion”) or the part in Paul Simon’s “Graceland” where:
She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.
Or the lines in Dan Bern’s “New York 9-11”:
People started jumping
To escape the howling flames
Two went down while holding hands
We didn’t know their names People who write about pop music focus too much on the lyrics, for the same reason that people who write about politics focus too much on poll numbers and horse race factors. Because it’s easy. Or easier for writers — who by definition are people with a borderline unhealthy obsession with words — to parse language than it is to describe the ways in which chord changes and shifts
in key and nuances in guitar tone can shape a listening experience. Lyrics can be quoted — you can’t reduce a riff to jots on paper.
But I like vocal music, and maybe that’s indicative of a certain stuntedness, if not a moral weakness. I have always gravitated to songs with words, and it was only later and with some conscious effort that I came to appreciate and eventually love Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.
And I like lyricists, especially ones who are able, in a conversational manner that fits in the informal modes of pop music, tell stories and evoke emotional responses from both the singers given to singing their lines and the audiences who (one hopes) hear them.
I wouldn’t put Bob Dylan, Joanna Newsome, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne or Elvis Costello in this class; they (mostly) work in a slightly elevated mode (their characters don’t talk like real people) and that’s fine; what matters is that if it catches me on the right night, “Fountain of Sorrow” simply destroys me. (Browne once characterized his job as writing “longform rambling songs in iambic pentameter with run-on philosophical attitude,” which is pretty good rock criticism.)
Merle Haggard is the sort of lyricist I’m talking about:
I remember mama praying
for a better way of life But I don’t recall a change of
any size
Just a little loss of courage as
their age began to show And more sadness in my mama’s hungry eyes. “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” is the perfect country song. A drawn-from (hard) life portrait of ordinary people (the singer-songwriter’s parents) bearing up despite never having a chance. There’s only three chords — D, G and A in the original.
Kris Kristofferson might be Haggard’s direct descendant, with Lucinda Williams in the mix. John Prine, Iris DeMent, Steve Earle and Randy Newman worked in this mode — often singing in the voices of invented characters. So do Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, albeit their characters tended to be more urbane and upwardly mobile, with enhanced vocabularies.
Post-“Bring the Family” John Hiatt fits in there, as do Rosanne Cash, Lori McKenna and Allison Moorer. Not exactly Haggard-esque, but not too far removed.
Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits? Yeah, sometimes — Springsteen outgrew his Dylan fixation (which may have been a calculated attempt to gain some traction in the marketplace) and started sounding more like himself with “Nebraska” (which does feel like a callback to Dylan’s chief model, Woody Guthrie) while Waits has always sounded like a lounge pianist version of Charles Bukowski. (In a good way.)
James McMurtry would probably rather be known as a hotshot guitar player, but without his lyrics (and let’s face it, his lineage) he’d just be the humble beer salesman he often professes to be, grinding it out in tonks and beer joints, pushing 60 in an Econoline van with the band’s gear pulled behind in a trailer.
Song lyrics aren’t poetry — only bad lyricists and poets make that mistake — but they can matter. To a lot of us, they do.
I told myself and probably a couple of other people, including some editors, that I probably wouldn’t write about ‘‘Weathervanes,’’ the new record from Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, this time around.
I thought that because I was undergoing Isbell fatigue; it’s been a decade since “Southeastern” came out, since Isbell got clean and sober, since he reinvented himself as the country’s best singer-songwriter. He’s one of my favorite artists — someone I might even consider spending my own money to see. (If I’m going to see live music, I’m inclined to see it in a smaller venue these days than the sort of places Isbell now commands.)
But “Reunions” is not as beloved around my house as his other recordings. It feels pristine and professional; it sounds big and wide and REO Speedwagon triumphant. I like it well enough, but it doesn’t haunt me like “Elephant” or “Live Oak” or “Speed Trap Town.” I figured I’d like the next one a little less.
And I saw the Sam Jones documentary on HBO, and wrote about it. Then we ran another story on it. And Isbell was in “Billions” and is going to be in a Martin Scorsese movie (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and I wasn’t sure that I could be fair to his new record.
I thought I might give it a rest.
Then I heard it. Actually the first single, “Death Wish,” was released a couple of months ago, about the time the documentary about the making of “Reunions,” “Running With Our Eyes Closed,” started playing on HBO. It’s a pretty great song, about the difficulties attendant with loving someone who has emotional issues. The chorus goes:
Did you ever love a woman with a death wish? Something in her eyes like flipping off a light switch Everybody dies but you gotta find a reason to carry on Oh, and did you ever catch her climbing on the rooftop Higher than a kite, dead of winter in a tank top? I don’t wanna fight with you, baby, but I won’t leave you alone
That’s not poetry. That’s a song lyric — rooted in the colloquial, evocative rather than prescriptive but designed to channel the emotive flow of the human voice. It sounds like something someone might say, it even carries a bit of the offhand clumsiness that comes with broaching a delicate subject with someone — a buddy, a guy on the next barstool — who knows you imperfectly.
(The editor in me, activated in part by a scene in “Running With Our Eyes Closed” where Isbell and his wife/collaborator Amanda Shires dive deep into the grammar of a proposed lyric, would like to offer a suggestion: change the “won’t” in the final line to “can’t,” at least in the ultimate chorus. It’s the difference between volition and compulsion, and more precise.)
Anyway, “Death Wish” is a remarkable pop song, a single that jumps out of the speakers, but it’s also a real work of art, a Raymond Carver short story flashing by in a few verses. And it’s singable (and re-interpretable; I might even like the quick and dirty cover version that Jack White worked up and released to the internet even more than Isbell’s original.)
Still, it is just a song — a couple more chords than Haggard might have used (five or six, depending on whether you want to get fancy) — with a great clear chorus and some wide spaces in which the 400 Unit might roam. It’s the best sort of rock song, desperate and minor-key and pulsing with urgency. Isbell, whose voice in a vacuum might seem a touch too pretty for his material, is a great vocal actor in the Levon Helm mode. You can feel his anxiety levels clipping as the band flies along.
Because it’s Isbell, and because he seems determined to be so frank and transparent about so much that goes on in his life, it’s fair to wonder why he chose to produce this album himself (with help from Matt Pence on a few tracks) rather than employ David Cobb, which whom he’s worked since “Southeastern.”
We might look to another scene in “Running With Our Eyes Closed” to fan-fiction up an answer: During the recording of melancholy (but happy-sounding) “Dreamsicle,” Isbell jokes that Cobb thinks the song is about ice cream. (It’s about a young teenager observing the breakup of his parents’ marriage.)
Cobb, we might surmise, is one of those music guys who doesn’t prioritize lyrics, and Isbell is a songwriter who is as careful about his words as anyone. He might write a dud line, but it’s not for lack of effort, and when he does lapse into the competently prosaic — as in straightforward, anyone-could-have-written it “Strawberry Woman” (or “Letting You Go” from 2019’s “Reunions”) — there’s always something redemptive in the arrangement or the performance. (On “Strawberry Woman,” it’s the contribution of Willie Nelson’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael.)
Like Paul Simon says, songwriting is not English lit. “Strawberry Woman” exists for the lilting sweetness it conjures, and that’s reason enough.
Still, it was the second single released, the acoustic “Cast Iron Skillet,” that all but convinced me to write about the record. Others have noted its family resemblance to “Outfit,” a stunning song Isbell wrote about (and probably for) his father while he was a member of the DriveBy Truckers. “Outfits” consisted of a father giving a son mostly sound advice about how to conduct his life, but a darker message bleeds in as Isbell off-handedly recounts a stabbing murder committed by a kid he knew who:
… was sweet and soft inside Shied away from inside fastballs
And died doing life without parole
Most of us, living where we live, like we live, know that kid. I can call his name — I can call three or four names.
And then comes the advice, the spurious wisdom of a thwarted culture:
Don’t wash the cast iron skillet
Don’t drink and drive, you’ll spill it
Don’t ask too many questions Or you’ll never get to sleep There’s a hole inside you, fill it
Of course, you should wash a cast-iron skillet. Wipe it down, the seasonings are not worth the salmonella. This town won’t get no better, will it?
Probably not.
Isbell probably doesn’t know the story, but his “Volunteer” tracks the path of a teenage killer I once knew, who after the cops botched the investigation and bought him some time, took to camping in KOA campgrounds and moving constantly, sometimes with runaway teenage girls who latched onto him because they sensed something dangerous and dire.
It took me a moment to understand the crushing heartbreak of “Middle of the Morning,” for the song presents as Van Morrison fronting the Allman Brothers.
But then the lyrics: But I’m tired of stepping on your shadow And feeling in the way Yes I’m tired and by the middle of the morning I’m out of s*** to say
“When We Were Close” salutes the late Justin Townes Earle, with a swampy southern rock that somehow avoids nostalgia:
Got a picture of us playing in a bar
And your shirt cost more than your guitar But you played so heavy and you always let me sing a couple
Even though you were the star
“Save the World” — which Isbell partisans are calling the “Uvalde” song — is as harrowing as anything Isbell has written to date. It feels like a snapshot of domestic life in the 2020s when parents have to worry about whether their kids will ever come home from school. “White Beretta” recounts a trip to an abortion clinic with a determined (ex?) girlfriend:
I thank God you weren’t brought up like me With all that shame and certainty
And I’m sorry you had to go In that room alone
It’s not “Southeastern.” It’s not my favorite of his.
But it is honest, maybe teetering into “I wouldn’t have told that” territory. Isbell has this thing about being authentic and open and maybe that has something to do with his sobriety and the way he has chosen to navigate his life. I only know what he discloses, which is a lot.
And I don’t really believe you can love somebody you don’t know, that you’ve never met. I don’t even know that you can truly love their work. But what Isbell has done for the past decade is sort of remarkable; he’s determined to make rock ’n’ roll (or alt-country, or whatever you call it) music for people who have seen and done things and had some options foreclosed by time.
Dylan made rock a reasonable pursuit for grownups, but even he eventually moved on to the music of his youth, to Sinatra. “See the pyramids along the Nile … ”
I expected to too. To one day listen to more Brubeck and Bach, to leave the pop music with its big chords and 4/4 time to the Swifties (God bless them). But artists like Isbell and McMurtry and octogenarian Simon keep pulling me back in.