Robert Hunter's work for the Grateful Dead lays down as well or better on paper than most of the poems in his book published by Penguin, <u>The Sentinel and Other Poems</u>.
http://arts.ucsc.edu/Gdead/AGDL/

Sarah, you're totally right! I had forgotten about that song--which is a shame, considering how the only thing I listened to for about two years of high school was Simon & Garfunkel.

Paul also worked in some elements of Housman's "When I Was One-and-Twenty" into "Leaves That Are Green."

--CS

Glancing over this thread for the first time in... oh, ages. Thought I'd jot down the titles of a few more songs whose lyrics make no sense or come across a little stupid when just recited, but somehow work really well when set to music. I don't really feel up to googling them at the moment--but hey, you can!

"Our Mother the Mountain" by Townes Van Zandt. This one just comes across insane when read. (Townes wasn't entirely well.) When set to music, though, it's suitably creepy.

"In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson. If anyone posted the lyrics to one of the boards--they'd be booed off for sucking (as well as for plagiarizing), probably with some picquant advice to lay off the psychotropics. But it works with a haunting mellotron line.

"Bodies" by the Sex Pistols. Idiotic, misogynistic nihilism, completely vile. Again, though, works well in its musical context.

I'll leave it there for the moment.

Quincy

Janet,

I detect bitterness in your recent post here. I certainly esteem the art song and did allude to Richard Strauss. In his lush art the texts seem, to me, almost beside the point. It is enough when listening to Vier letzte Lieder to remember the soprano is singing about "aging", "the soul" and other such abstractions. Give me early, I do say early, Fleming or give me Janowitz in these over the hyper-intelligent, nearly Sprechstimme Schwartzkopf. Perhaps Della Casa is the ideal mid-way between these approaches. (I'm oversimplifying everything for rhetoric of course.)
There are great composers who set great poems, and interpret those poems in their settings. Schubert, Schumann, Grieg, Britten, and many, many others. These give great artists endless opportunities for discovery. Lehmann, Schwartzkopf, de los Angeles, Fischer-Diskau, Hotter, Pears, etc., etc. Most of these texts existed as poems before they were set to music however.
There are truly great opera librettists, daPonte, Boito, Wagner, Hofmannsthal, Berg, Auden/Kallman and others.
Most posters concentrated on popular song because, I suspect, that is how they read the term "song lyrics".

Very best,
Michael Slipp

Quincy, add one more: "Debora" by T-Rex.

Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da

Oh Debora
Always look like a zeb-o-ra
Your sunken face is like a galleon
Hoarding mysteries of the Spanish Main

Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da

Ya da da ya ya
La de dum (etc.)

Oh Debora
Always dress like a conjurer
It's fine to your young face hiding
'Neath the stallion that I'm riding

Nah nah nah nah
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Ya da da ya ya
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah
Shhhhhhhhh

Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Debor-ee-dum, Debor-ee-duh-re-da
Ah-tch-tch-tch

Oh Debora
You look like a stallion
You look like a stallion
Your sunken face is like a galleon
Hoarding mysteries of the Spanish Main

{insert melisma}

* * *

I assure you it's all quite righteous once you hear it with the bongos intact.

--CS

Michael,
Thank you. Actually it was more grief than bitterness.
Of course "song lyrics" has that association. Where do the little Wilbur gems in "Candide" belong?
Market forces have squeezed the classical repertory right out of popular consciouness. Even the memory of it is almost dead. When poets here discuss poetry they still have a respect for the history of poetry but music seems to be entirely what market forces feed them. (Not you Carol ;) It is not just because their interest is words. It is the result of social engineering. Of course people will demand Coca Cola if they have never had a chance to develop a taste for fine wine.
Don't mistake me, I love and esteem Cole Porter and many other fine, accessible composers. But there is a black hole where music and poetry used to be. By that I mean the continuum of music and poetry.

I too love those Strauss songs. I have just been discussing Boito on Alan Sullivan's blog. In that case his libretti for Verdi. I know that the people in this thread would love and respect all of that just as much as I do. The record industry is the chief villain. It has narrowed and vulgarised performance and availability into the ground. Gone are the days when one could spend a day browsing in a record store.

I read a touching and honest article by Renée Fleming in which she spoke of her increasingly impossible struggle to sing with integrity because of inescapable commercial pressures.

I deeply appreciate your observations.
Janet




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 13, 2006).]

Janet,

Thank you so much for your response. I read this morning that the great Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti has died at 83. We poets all could learn from his exuberance and sense of play, and also his attention to texture and his ultimate seriousness. I think he was a genius of the front-rank, though I am prejudiced in favor of all things Magyar. Still I think that is a consensus view. If I were half a poet I'd write him an elegy, in several numbered parts, metrically intricate, in various forms, employing the folk-derived elements and the nonsense syllables he loved exploiting. It would have to allude gracefully to the enormities and political upheavals he witnessed and how nobly he survived them.

To pick up on your theme, Janet, without self-congratulation. What small elite must I belong to, attending concerts and buying recordings of contemporary "serious" music? Many of my friends, and they are diverse, have been fascinated by Ligeti, have laughed out loud upon hearing recordings. And Ligeti was lucky to be recorded so extensively and well. Imagine what we're missing and what we'll lose. We must value and we must educate. I have no answers.

Best,
Slipp

Clay,

One of the great virtues of T-Rex is how the completely nonsensical lyrics are delivered as if they are crucially and urgently important.

How about the following:

"Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen

A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird
B-b-b-bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a...

A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird
Bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know about the bird?
Well, everybody's talking about the bird!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird...

Surfin' bird
Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb... [retching noises]... aaah!

Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow

Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Oom-oom-oom-oom-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-oom-oom-oom
Oom-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-a-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, ooma-mow-mow
Papa-oom-oom-oom-oom-ooma-mow-mow
Oom-oom-oom-oom-ooma-mow-mow
Ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, ooma-mow-mow
Well don't you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word

Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
[repeat to fade]


The Trashmen, by the way, are the only significant surf-rock band to come out of Minnesota, which, as the geographically fluent will note, is over a thousand miles from any coast.

Michael,
May I encourage you to write a poem for Ligeti? I don't know his work as well as I should but I am deeply impressed by the little I know. Who better to write the poem than you?

I was speaking of the recording catalogues. I am in no position where I now live to attend concerts and even before in Sydney the prices were astronomical. In my mindless London heyday I used to walk out of performances I didn't like. Now I should be so lucky ;)
Janet

One of my favorites from way back:

The Great Compromise

by John Prine

I knew a girl who was almost a lady
She had a way with all the men in her life
Every inch of her blossomed in beauty
And she was born on the fourth of July
Well she lived in an aluminum house trailer
And she worked in a juke box saloon
And she spent all the money I give her
Just to see the old man in the moon

Chorus:
I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory
And awake in the dawn's early light
But much to my surprise
When I opened my eyes
I was a victim of the great compromise

Well we'd go out on Saturday evenings
To the drive-in on Route 41
And it was there that I first suspected
That she was doin' what she'd already done
She said "Johnny won't you get me some popcorn"
And she knew I had to walk pretty far
And as soon as I passed through the moonlight
She hopped into a foreign sports car

(Repeat chorus)

Well you know I could have beat up that fellow
But it was her that had hopped into his car
Many times I'd fought to protect her
But this time she was goin' too far
Now some folks they call me a coward
'Cause I left her at the drive-in that night
But I'd druther have names thrown at me
Than to fight for a thing that ain't right

(Repeat chorus)

Now she writes all the fellows love letters
Saying "Greetings, come and see me real soon"
And they go and line up in the barroom
And spend the night in that sick woman's room
But sometimes I get awful lonesome
And I wish she was my girl instead
But she won't let me live with her
And she makes me live in my head

(Repeat chorus)