Sometimes there are parts of songs that blow me away. I love almost everything I've ever heard by Paul Simon but a few things stand out, this is one:

You Can Call Me AL

A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bone-digger, bone-digger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. Beerbelly, beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff
Amusing anymore

<FONT >If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al

A man walks down the street
He says why am I short of attention
Got a short little span of attention
And woe my nights are so long
Where’s my wife and family
What if I die here
Who’ll be my role model
Now that my role model is
Gone gone
He ducked back down the alley
With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
All along along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al
Call me Al</FONT c>

A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Of cattle in the marketplace of
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around around
He sees angels in the architecture they're
Spinning in infinity
And He says Amen Hallelujah

<FONT >If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al
Call me

Na na na na …

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al

Call me Al</FONT c>

I'm a big Paul Simon fan, too (though his new album leaves me cold). But I once saw him interviewed, and the sycophantic interviewer kept trying to compliment him by saying his songs were "really" poems set to music. Paul insisted, "No, they're songs," I felt a little impatatiently because he didn't like to have songwriting degraded as an art from by insisting that it wasn't "just" songwriting when done right, but was somehow also poetry, which is somehow superior.

Hundreds of Burns poems stand alone as great poetrry, as do the songs in Shakespeare's Plays, and Thomas Campions poems. The great choral odes in Greek theater are song lyrics. In my time I think the only lyrics that make it are by Sondheim, and two Canadians, Ian Tyson and Stan Rogers. Though I grant that a few lyrics by Dylan and Joni Mitchell are excellent.

And in a lighter vein, Wilbur in "Candide" (Bernstein) and Auden in "The Rake's Progress" (Stravinsky).

Michael S.,
You're probably right that a song can't be expected to be as dense as a poem, since most have hook-lines that must be repeated a few times, not to mention the choruses.

But take someone like Paul McCartney, whose songs have great tunes, and sometimes some good lyrics. But even on his good ones, there are a lot of filler lines that really don't say anything - usually they're just tossed in for rhymes. When I hear one of those lines, I always think, "I wish he had posted that on the Sphere", and been pushed to come up with a line that pulled some weight. It would serve him well to think more like a poet sometimes.

But Bugsy, some of the old McCartney songs from the Beatles days are tight as can be. Off the top of my head, I think Paul gave us "Hey, Jude," "Eleanor Rigby," and "When I'm Sixty Four," among others.

The Beatles give us great examples of song lyrics that definitely do not stand up without the music, but which become sublime in performance, e.g., the whole song consisting of "I want you, I want you so bad it's driving me mad it's driving me mad," or even the song whose lyrics consist of "Number nine, number nine, number nine."

These minimalist lyric songs show the power of music to animate and give depth to lyrics. I think what we're seeing in this thread is that some songs take advantage of that power more than others, but even songs whose lyrics stand up reasonably well on their own can be revved up to a whole new level by the power or music to shape our perception of the words and to lend them immediacy. When the lyrics are great, the performance of the lyrics with their music can be even greater. Dylan wrote a wonderful refrain in "tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door," but in performance, at least for me, the refrain is over-the-top wonderful and powerful.

Right you are, Roger. And yet don't a spiffy pair of paisley suspenders look better with an elegant alligator belt than with a plain leather one?

Clay--

Paul Simon set "Richard Cory" to music, with some tinkering.

Sarah

This thread is proof that "classical" song is dead. Worse, its history is dead.

I wonder when it will be thought beside the point to mention Shakespeare or Keats?

Marcie

Marcie, in a coat of flowers
stops inside a candy store.
Reds are sweet and greens are sour.
Still no letter at her door.
So she'll wash her flower curtains,
hang them in the wind to dry,
dust her tables with his shirt and
Wave another day goodbye.

Marcie's faucet needs a plumber.
Marcie's sorrow needs a man.
Red is autumn green is summer.
Greens are turning and the sand
all along the ocean beaches
stares up empty at the sky.
Marcie buys a bag of peaches
Stops a postman passing by.

And summer goes
falls to the sidewalk like string and brown paper.
Winter blows
up from the river there's no one to take her
to the sea.

Marcie dresses warm its snowing.
Takes a yellow cab uptown.
Red is stop and green's for going.
Sees a show and rides back down,
down along the Hudson River
Past the shipyards in the cold.
Still no letter's been delivered.
Still the winter days unfold

like magazines
faded in dusty grey attics and cellars.
Make a dream.
Dream back to summer and hear how he tells her
wait for me.

Marcie leaves and doesn't tell us
where or why she moved away.
Red is angry green is jealous.
That was all she had to say.
Someone thought they saw her Sunday
window shopping in the rain.
Someone heard she bought a one-way
ticket and went west again.

Joni MItchell


I've loved this song for over 25 years and I still notice new things about it.