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Column: Lyrical Communique
Townes Van Zandt’s “To Live Is to Fly”
Townes Van Zandt was born and bred in Texas and didn’t find much commercial success in his lifetime, despite the fact that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard named their 1983 album of duets, Pancho and Lefty, after one of Van Zandt’s famously enigmatic songs. The duo’s single of “Pancho and Lefty” went to number one that year and should have helped Van Zandt land better gigs and a record deal, but it was not to be.
Van Zandt was born rich, a fact he did his best to conceal. Seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show got him interested in playing guitar, and he started playing folk songs in Houston coffee houses in his early 20s. In 1965, meeting Mickey Newbury and Guy Clark, both young struggling songwriters at the time, inspired Van Zandt to stop playing traditional blues and folk songs and start writing his own material. Even his first efforts, like “Waitin’ Around to Die”, impressed people with their strong melodies and grim poetry. Despite his genius (certified by IQ tests when he was in grammar school) and his poetic gifts, Van Zandt was a difficult person. He tried to kill himself when he was in college by falling out a window: “I wanted to see what it would feel like to fall two stories,” he said later. After the fall, he was hospitalized, diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and given insulin shock therapy, which destroyed his long-term memories. For the rest of his life, he refused to take the medication that would have stabilized him and instead self-medicated with the drugs and alcohol that destroyed his body and eventually killed him.
When Van Zandt was low, he was very low, but when he was high, he turned out some amazing songs. He wasn’t prolific, but left behind 10 studio albums that continue to fuel his legend. In a scene from the Margaret Brown directed biopic, Be Here to Love Me, someone asks Van Zandt why his songs are so sad. He pauses, then quips, “They’re not all sad. Some of ’em are hopeless.” In that same film, he says, “My goal is to write songs so mysterious, nobody will ever know what they mean, not even me.” In his best songs, he did address the great mystery, capturing those wild, unfathomable moments of heartache and bliss that confound reason and lead us to truths we may understand intuitively, but seldom express in words.
“To Live Is to Fly” is included in the first edition of For the Sake of the Song, Van Zandt’s first songbook. In a short note provided in that book, he writes, “It’s impossible to have a favorite song, but if I were forced at knifepoint to choose one it would be ‘To Live Is to Fly.’” The song’s haunting, minor-key melody is one of his best, and the lyrics could be the story of his life, told in cryptic couplets of aching beauty.
The lyric features lines that could be from a typical love song:
Won’t say I love you, babe.
Won’t say I need you, babe.
But I’m gonna get you, babe,
and I will not do you wrong.
Then, in a sudden turn, he waxes existential. “Living’s mostly wasting time,” he sings. The first time I heard the line, it stopped me in my tracks. It continues to resonate, making it harder to believe the lies I tell myself when things get hard and I tune out reality. He follows up with a wry plea: “And I waste my share of mine / But it never feels too good / So let’s don’t take too long.” This leads to a chorus with a baffling line: “Well, you’re soft as glass and I’m a gentle man.” The first few dozen times I heard the song, I was sure he was singing, “you’re soft as grass,” but it slowly sunk in. What the hell does “soft as glass” mean? Your psyche is so brittle you might shatter at any moment? Is he singing to a bottle of booze? It’s one of the oddest images in any Van Zandt song, and then he closes with another near cliché: “We got the sky to talk about / And the world to lie upon.”
The second verse opens with one of his most quoted lines: “Days up and down they come / Like rain on a conga drum / Forget most, remember some / But don’t turn none away.” When he sings, “forget most, remember some,” it adds resonance to the “living’s mostly wasting time” line, underscoring the fickle way our neural pathways capture and process memory. If we did recall everything, our brains would be swamped by useless information, but the stories that we do remember become the narrative of our lives. And no matter how hard or easy the experience, it’s impossible to turn them away, as much as we’d sometimes like to. Van Zandt gets to that quandary with the next four lines:
Everything is not enough,
And nothing is too much to bear.
Where you’ve been is good and gone,
All you keep’s the getting there.
“Everything is not enough” is the credo of the hedonist and the junkie. William Blake once wrote: “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” but more often it leads to madness and an early grave. Van Zandt sings the line in his usual detached way, half ironic and half deadly serious. When I first heard the line, “nothing is too much to bear,” I took it as an expression of strength and fortitude, a determination to see whatever life has to offer, no matter how harsh. Recently, I realized that it could also be read as “nothing IS TOO MUCH TO BEAR,” an expression of the moments in life when the seeming meaninglessness of existence becomes overwhelming.
Then to the second chorus: “Well, to live’s to fly, ahh, low and high / So shake the dust off of your wings / And the sleep out of your eyes.” I have heard that line as “all alone and high,” as well as “low and high.” No matter how close I listen, I can’t be sure what he’s saying, but “shake the dust off of your wings, and the sleep out of your eyes,” is a beautiful benediction.
The third verse isn’t as heavy as the first two; it’s a straightforward rendition of the life of a traveling musician. “It’s goodbye to all my friends / It’s time to leave again” (the gig’s over and I gotta go). “Here’s to all the poetry / And the pickin’ down the line” (when I play this dump again). “I’ll miss the system here / The bottom’s low and the treble’s clear / But it don’t pay to think too much / On things you leave behind.” Another existential zinger, and one wonders why he chooses to say “the things you leave behind,” rather than “the folks you leave behind.”
The last verse is another painful cry:
We all got holes to fill,
And them holes are all that’s real.
Some fall on you like a storm,
Sometimes you dig your own.
The image of holes falling like a hard rain is wonderfully surrealistic and chilling, but the kicker is “sometimes you dig your own.” We all know we create most of our own problems, but it’s something we’d like to forget. Van Zandt won’t let us, and then closes with another telling insight that keeps us from wiggling off the hook. “The choice is yours to make / And time is yours to take / Some dive into the sea / Some toil upon the stone.” Diving into the sea doesn’t really imply swimming as much as drowning, and toiling upon the stone suggests Matthew 13:5, the parable of seed falling on stony ground and withering. But unlike many Van Zandt songs, “To Live Is to Fly” closes on a reassuring note, repeating the song’s heartfelt blessing: “So shake the dust off of your wings / And the tears out of your eye.” I don’t know where Townes is right now, he passed on New Year’s Day 1997, but I hope he’s sailing through space, flying low and high, his wings spotless and his eyes full of stars.
Listen: “To Live Is to Fly” [at youtube.com]
The Hold Steady: “Constructive Summer”
Summertime and the living is easy, or so the song goes. Relax, kick back, and watch the catfish bite—unless, that is, you’re Craig Finn, the singer and lyricist extraordinaire of the Hold Steady. The spastic frontman embraced summer’s ripe possibilities in “Constructive Summer”, the leadoff cut from 2008’s Stay Positive, with last chance ache and gusto, and delivered an anthem for the ages.
Echoing the nostalgic glories of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” and any one of Springsteen’s myriad summer epics of road burn, romance, and ruin, “Constructive Summer” jets out of the gate with Tad Kubler’s punk-turbo onslaught of stun guitar. The Hold Steady embody that classic rock vibe, cherry-picking thunder riffs from 1970’s best practitioners and tweaking them with their brawny Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis style. This is the kind of exultant music you want smoking out of your radio with the sun burning down on your back, bad times be damned.
If it’s the Hold Steady’s music that first mugs you, though, it’s Finn’s rant of a voice that delivers the goods: Lyrics that bristle with bravado and the desperate romanticism of faded youth. Finn is a word man, a street poet, a Bukowski-meets-Springsteen-in-the-parking-lot-of-your-dreams kind of writer.
Most Baffling Lyrics of 2009
We picked three lyrics from various songs that really baffled us this year. Feel free to add some of yours in the comments section. We’d love to be confused some more!
The Flaming Lips, “Gemini Syringes”
“Gemini psalms and the syringes / Gemini psalms / Gemini psalms they are singing / Gemini psalms.”
Listen: Flaming Lips, “Gemini Syringes” [at youtube.com]
Mount Eerie, “Wind’s Dark Poem”
“Wind’s dark poem describes / Calligraphy of branches writes / Stone constellation alive / The house is built on a boulder / Soil returns to the wind / Bones will blow in pink light / The distant sound is saying my name / The wind is taking pieces.”
Watch: Mount Eerie, “Wind’s Dark Poem” [at youtube.com]
MV & EE with the Golden Road, “The Hungry Stones”
“On the surface of the hungry stones / Full of running waters in the rising tides / Emotional lasers, new phases and stages / There’s so many things that are left undone”
Watch: MV & EE with the Canada Goose Band, “The Hungry Stones” [at youtube.com]
Paul McCartney: “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”
There are certainly exceptions to the rule. But in more cases than not, attempting a deep meaningful analysis of pop music lyrics is a mistake. A mistake somewhat on the order of assuming your parrot is ready to take the SATs because it’s mastered “hello” and “pretty girl.”
Most pop music lyrics are drivel. No, I don’t have any stats to back that assertion, only decades of patient observation. Not that this is even a bad thing, mind you. One could make the argument that the magnificence of such an immensely brilliant work as “Louie Louie” would have been considerably demagnificentized if the lyrics had meant something—or, if you could understand them.
Same for such dim-watt exercises in retarded minimalism as the Ramones‘ “Beat on the Brat” or a host of others. Like Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher”, for example, or Gary Glitter’s supremely moronic “Rock and Roll Part 2”, which is actually more like an instrumental that’s been spiced up with a few strategically placed grunts.
On the other hand are those forays into pop songwriting that manage to marry a catchy tune with a lyric that actually says something. This isn’t the time or place to expound at much length upon this notion, but obviously you could look to the works of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Lou Reed for starters.
Jens Lekman: “If You Ever Need a Stranger…”
Jens Lekman believes in more than the power of love. He believes in the power of love songs. On his plaintive ballad, “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)”, he eagerly professes to knowing “every song, you name it, by Bacharach and David / Every stupid love song that’s ever touched your heart” and trusts in the shimmering promise that permeates pop music eternity; in other words, the ever-looming narrative of boy meeting girl to be wed forever in Brill Building marital bliss.
Sure, such notions are beyond quaint, naïve, and rigidly heteronormative. The ’60s weren’t all happy-go-lucky, “Going to the Chapel”, wedding bell-laden sha-la-las. Anyone who watches Mad Men knows this. But, that’s no matter to Jens. He probably knows the falsity of his ideals. He does call such love songs stupid after all. The notion of finding one true love, one lone person to satisfy all needs—emotional, intellectual, and physical—through all life’s crazy transitions from now to eternity is ever the unrealistic one. And, as heard later on, he doesn’t deny their danger in making one feel entirely isolated and painfully alone (we’ll get to that in a bit).
Art Brut: “Emily Kane” and Adolescent Yearning
A fleshy, floppy-haired, occasionally peach-fuzzed goofball singing about DC Comics and chocolate milkshakes, Art Brut’s Eddie Argos looks like nothing so much as a towel-clad pudgeball lip-synching into a hairbrush while the school bus honks outside. The band’s first single was contagious in its giddy sense of possibility: You can actually become the people you grew up listening to. All you have to do is… form a band. It was a mission statement, and the band made a joyful noise as if to prove their point, but to really understand why being in a band gives Art Brut such a rush, you should listen to “Emily Kane.”
“I was your boyfriend when we were 15 / It’s the happiest that I’ve ever been.” The first words immediately locate the speaker in a position of adulthood, looking back; even more than most pop songs, “Emily Kane”—a serenade to the eponymous long-lost love—is immediately an ode to adolescent yearning.
Argos self-deprecatingly plays up his childishness (“Even though we didn’t understand / How to do much more than just hold hands”) while supporting his account with specific, familiar observational detail (“If memory serves, we’re still on a break”). His longing is plaintive—“I don’t even know where she lives”—and then parodic: “I’ve not seen her in 10 years… nine months… three weeks… four days… six hours… 13 minutes… five seconds.”
All of which reveals Argos, despite his shambling persona and goofy perspective (“There’s a beast in my soul that can’t be tamed / I’m still in love with Emily Kane”), as a master wordsmith. But despite his facility with form, he’s guileless as a teenager when it comes to content. It’s apparently quite autobiographical. Live, Argos used to relate anecdotes about the current status of his relationship with the song’s muse. And the ironic distance seems to stab at him: “I can’t get over my old flame.”
I think this aching nostalgia explains, perhaps paradoxically, quite a bit of Art Brut’s excitement over pop music.
Even three albums into Art Brut’s career, Argos is still writing songs proclaiming “Those… are… the records I like!” (on third album Art Brut vs. Satan’s “Slap Dash for No Cash”) and screaming about his newfound love of the Replacements. To date, Art Brut has recorded songs called “The Passenger” (not an Iggy Pop cover), “Twist and Shout” (not an Isley Brothers cover), “Pump Up the Volume” (not a MARRS cover), “People in Love” (not a 10cc cover), “I Will Survive” (not a Gloria Gaynor cover), “Jealous Guy” (not a John Lennon cover), and “Blame It on the Trains” (not a Milli Vanilli cover).
The guys in Art Brut are fans, is the point. And that’s why the key lyric and most poignant moment in “Emily Kane” sees Argos telling his long-lost teen love: “I hope this song finds you fame / I want school kids on buses singing your name.” Immortality, as he can conceive it, is to become exactly like the subjects of the songs—other people’s songs—he sang along to when they were together. Crossing over from fan to artist is a fan’s idea of immortality; Argos maintains a fan’s perspective on the other side of the divide. As happy as he is to have formed a band, he misses looking up to them too, like he did when he and Emily Kane were a couple of 15-year-olds—and this nostalgia is only appropriate for a guy who, after all, makes songs that we’ll sing along to in our youth, and remember fondly forever after, as perfect three-minute time machines.
Watch: Art Brut, “Emily Kane” [at youtube.com]
Gin Blossoms: “Hey Jealousy”
The Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy” is a bona fide have-a-kick-ass-summer jam. It’s four minutes of late nights, joy rides, and low-speed police chases. The song’s protagonist is a charming wreck. He’s in no shape for driving with no place to go, looking for permission to reminisce and reconcile with an old flame. Threads of regret are sewn throughout, as is a glimmering optimism: “The past is gone but something might be found to take its place,” he declares to her immediately before reiterating the song’s title. He can’t change the past. There is hope in the future. First, he must crash on her futon.
Songs written in first-person rely on the vocalist’s delivery to portray the emotion of the lyrics; they become the “me” and “I” of the song. Whereas Neil Young or Chris Martin would milk the drama from a line like, “If I hadn’t blown the whole thing years ago, I might not be alone,” Gin Blossoms’ frontman Robin Wilson sings it with emotionless nonchalance—in the music video, his hands are appropriately/inappropriately in his jacket pocket at that moment in the tune. If the song’s author, the band’s original guitarist Doug Hopkins had sung the song, it certainly would have felt different.
Hopkins was the most hopeless brand of addict, consistently self-medicating in the face of depression. He penned “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You”, but never was able to appreciate the spoils of his labor. Hopkins drank so often during recording sessions for the Gin Blossoms’ debut that he was unable to stand up in the studio. He was kicked out of the band before the record was released. There is no irony in the album title New Miserable Experience.
Handsome Family: “After We Shot the Grizzly”
The nice thing about shocking people is that it’s very capitalist these days. It’s still possible, but you have to be clever in the business and you’re on your own. Since Eminem (“I know you’re probably tired of hearing about my mom”) and Marilyn Manson (“Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon”) records aren’t winning any respect for their tired attempts to make the public consciousness blink like they used to, I bring up the Handsome Family. Playfully spiky spouses Brett and Rennie Sparks play country-gothic paeans to everything gruesome or, at the very least, depressing.
Between Rennie (author of short story collection Evil, which features, among other things, abortion attempts via falling down stairs and a tenant serving the homeless woman on her porch a glass of milk with ground-up glass in it) and her husband (who’s allegedly spent time in the psych ward), they’ve nailed an old-fashioned, on-the-surface sound and look fit for the Grand Ole Opry, with peasant dresses and thick Buddy Holly rim glasses respectively. But the underneath is far from Music Row, Nashville: Tales of drug dependency, cannibalism, arson, and Nikola Tesla starving himself to death in a hotel room… oh, and good old murder.
“After We Shot the Grizzly”, off the duo’s high-watermark Last Days of Wonder, is a beaming example of their grotesque, vaudevillian music. The tune begins with an increasingly dire list of bummers from the narrator’s expedition: Crashed airship, lost compass, dead radio (and grizzly). The humorously overblown story comes off like the Swiss Family Robinson—what limestone cave are they vacationing by that has both horses and bears?—before settling into a fantastical parody of Survivor. Check out the chilling cruelty of this lyric: “The captain caught a fever / We tied him to a tree / We stared into the fire / And tried not to hear his screams.”
Emily Haines: “The Maid Needs a Maid”
Neil Young’s song “A Man Needs a Maid” portrays a man reeling from a love that went south while adjusting to the solo life. Working through days that are now cold and strange, he’s plagued by unrest and distrust, and thinks instead of another relationship he might be better off getting a maid to keep his house clean, fix his meals, and go away—the “go away” a rather dismissive statement to a woman who is merely a maid, but it does hint at the disgust he presently harbors towards all women. And yet, Young keeps it all fairly ambiguous, as shown by his usage of the double meaning for “maid” and the longing line, “When will I see you again?” The man is mostly just sad and confused.
Around the time Harvest was released in 1972, this song got Young into trouble with some feminists. It’s difficult to deny the implications the song places on women, but it also cuts right to the broken heart of the matter. It is, specifically, a man’s struggle with love and the fear of being hurt again. But, whether man or woman, anyone who’s been wrecked by a breakup knows that eating and keeping a tidy house are rather difficult. Even if, in the context of Young’s song, it is rather sexist, it’s a scenario both genders can identify with. Then again, a man does have arms and hands and opposable thumbs, and should be capable of doing his own dishes, so…
Thirty-four years after Young’s song, Emily Haines puts “A Maid Needs a Maid” on her debut solo album Knives Don’t Have Your Back. Obviously, the title is a direct riposte to Young’s song. Similar lyrics like “Sewing up the fold ’cause I’ve been laid up / Would you put on the fire for me, draw the bath, and remind me to eat?” prove the correlation between the two songs. Set to a sparse piano that begets a cinematic, detached mood, the song is a nod to modern times (the usage of “bros before hos”) with an underscored desperate housewives theme—a place where, regardless of the strides made towards gender equality, men still dominate women, and women are still victims of themselves as well as men.
Lyrical Communique: Kiss, “Strutter”
by: James Greene Jr.
So much has been written of Kiss in the annals of modern rock history that it is almost not worth wasting another drop of precious Far East ink on their wild and uninhibited 1970s guitar-centric stylings. Why, Chuck Klosterman alone has penned enough Kiss analysis to stretch from here to the moon and back over a hundred times. If our alien overlords descend upon us tomorrow and vaporize the entire human race in a fit of blind rage for worshipping false idols (“The sloths were in charge, not Jesus! The sloths!”), we can take solace in the fact surviving roaches will have volumes to read about Ace Frehley’s fret board technique as they feast upon our meaty, delicious entrails.
Despite the overkill of Kiss analysis (or “Kissnalysis,” as Gene Simmons might say), I can recall not one essay or symposium ever dedicated to an in-depth examination of the group’s finest piece of work (both lyrically and musically), 1974’s “Strutter.” How are we as a global society supposed to move forward without first looking back and seriously picking apart the sinewy tale that accompanies the most heartfelt chord progression these four Kabuki Jews from New Amsterdam put together? More honest than “Detroit Rock City”, more powerful than “God Gave Rock ‘n’ Roll to You II”, “Strutter” stands as the most awesome and butt-kickin’-est thing Kiss contributed to worldwide culture. Let us now gingerly dissect this wondrous song line by line and make the whole thing about as fun as a lecture on the pasteurization process.
“I know a thing or two about her.”
Singer/guitarist Paul Stanley begins his tale of angsty adoration sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi, a quirky but wise-beyond-his-years hermit willing to share his advice with any horny teenage boy willing to listen. I’m sure Paul knows “a thing or two” about many women. Does he know Hillary Clinton’s shoe size? Probably. Does he know the biggest regret in Debra Winger’s life? Of course. Paul could probably even tell you where Fiona Apple was coming from when she named that one album an entire poem. If there’s one solid, indisputable fact in all of Kisstory, it’s that Paul Stanley is familiar with the life story of every woman on the planet.
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by: James Greene Jr.
published: February 24, 2010
in column: Lyrical Communique
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