Stresses in words and music
 

In another thread we've been discussing song lyrics as a type of poetry. I hope that and the idea that one way of understanding mastery is to look at its lack might make this an appropriate thread for this forum.

Both a lyric (like any collection of syllables) and a melody can be viewed as patterns of stresses. Artfully combining the two patterns (usually by matching them) seems to me a big part of songwriting. When the two patterns don't match, it often feels to me that the songwriter has goofed. One glaring example is from Stevie Nicks's "Dreams." In this and my other example, I won't put in all the stresses, only the ones I want to focus on.


Among the problems with this awkward stress is that it makes the words difficult to understand. I wondered for years what the hell Nicks was singing before I finally looked up the lyric online.

Mismatched stresses don't always seem big errors. I'm discovering a lot of Harry Chapin's songs, and his frequent failure to match stresses hasn't prevented them from impressing me. Here's an example from a song I've known for a longer time, "Cat's in the Cradle," lyric by Sandy Chapin:


Among the reasons this bothers me less than the Nicks example is that it doesn't make the words hard to understand. It may also be that the Chapins' straightforward, artless-feeling style helps what might feel like a failure of art not to matter as much.

I'd be interested in others' thoughts about this, and other examples of successful songwriters not matching stresses. I hope that there are examples in which the mismatches somehow enhance the songs. I haven't been able to think of any.

"Cat's in the Cradle" is Harry Chapin? Great song! So I guess I know some of his work.
"Guitar Man", as sung by Elvis, stresses the first syllable and confused or perturbed me for a long time. I wonder whether that stress, which shows up in other songs, is purely for the beat, to have both options.

Cheers,
John

Elvis Presley - Guitar Man - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV1z4NPoIoI

It nagged at me for a while: Bob Dylan, in "Senor", sings "Can't stand the SUSpense anymore." Which is arguably pretty egregious.

Cheers,
John

Bob Dylan-Senor (Original) - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FodE0yEaK0

Thanks for contributing these, John.

Merriam-Webster associates the stress of the first syllable of "guitar" with the southern and midland U.S. The Dylan pronunciation has a similar feel to me, sort of from a dialect, but it might just be sloppiness.

It's GUI-tar in "Mama Don't Allow No Guitar Playin' 'Round Here."

Arlo Guthrie says "GUI-tar" several times in "Alice's Restaurant," too.

Definitely a regional variant, rather than a metrical infelicity.

Putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble happens occasionally in stuff I sing in church, but now I can't remember any examples.

(Hymns with wrenched, rhyme-driven syntax are more common, and annoy me far more. I'll forgive the narrators of the carol "We Three Kings" for their tendency to speak like Yoda, because they're supposed to be foreign and exotic, but I usually sigh at the rest.)

Thanks, Max and Julie, for those thoughts on GUI-tar. You also get it in The Lovin' Spoonful's "Nashville Cats" - "There's 1346 guitar players in Nashville" - and I have a hunch it may be the standard pronunciation in country music. You won't hear it from UK bands except as an affectation or conceivably for the beat.
Dylan's SUS-pense, though he's almost always folksy, feels to me like a cheat. Not common for him, but I'll grant him one. He wrote a lot of songs. There's a Rolling Stones one I can't recall yet.
Hymns also do things like rhyme behind with wind. They take a lot of liberties to my mind, again it used to bug me as a kid. Though I always liked "There is a green hill far away without a city wall..."

Cheers,
John

I may have found an example of intentionally misplaced stress adding something to a song. "The Sounds of Silence" by Paul Simon was one of the first pop songs I ever heard, and it struck young me as immeasurably strange and otherworldly. It's hard to revive that impression, because the song's familiarity makes it feel unstrange and also because my familiarity with a wider variety of other melodies makes what this one does feel less unusual. But I wonder whether that initial strangeness might be intended, and whether it is enhanced by Simon's misplacing stresses. For example:

because a vision soft-LY creep-ING
left its seeds while i WAS sleep-ING

The misplaced stresses are frequent but not consistent, and I have no idea whether others experience the otherworldliness that I did when I first heard the song.

Doesn't he say "soft-lee-EE" and "wa-UZ"? I hear it as a use of melisma, a musical tool that often allows "unnatural" stresses to feel right in the lyrics.

Thanks, RogerBob. It absolutely is melisma (a new word for me--thanks). (On "softly" and "was," though not "creeping" or "sleeping.") But doesn't that strengthen the mismatch of the two patterns? That those syllables get multiple notes each is among the reasons (along with the specific notes and their lengths and maybe other factors I'm too musically unsophisticated to note) that they get more stress than the syllables around them, contradicting the stress pattern of the words.

Or are you saying that to your ear the melisma makes the stress pattern of the music match that of the words?

I suppose the melisma makes the mismatch less noticeable, arguing against the likelihood that Simon wanted the song to sound strange. And I take it that for there isn't much strangeness to the sound.

Those moments in the S & G song always sounded odd to me, and effective. Giving a syllable several beats is a powerful tool in song: Springsteen in "Wreck on the Highway" opens "Last night, I *was* out driving", with a couple of beats for was, which also sounds weird, almost archaic, and fits the mood. "Love" is a word singers often give multiple beats to, Van Morrison for instance. Harmony vocals - the gospel/soul tradition - have a lot of room to vary beat counts between lead and backing vocalists. Aretha in "Don't Play That Song" sings "It fills my heart with pain" and her echo goes "It hurts!"
Jackson Frank does a whole cadenza on "same" to close his song "Blues Run the Game", produced and later covered by S & G. It's quite lovely.

Cheers,
John

So, I often use Tom Waits' "San Diego Serenade" to teach stress meter--I hear it as a kind of non-alliterated strong stress meter, two strong beats, caesura, two strong beats per line. Note that I always have to apologize to my students for line four, where he stresses MEL-o-dy as "mel-O-dy."


San Diego Serenade

I never saw the mornin' 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song

I never saw the white line 'til I was leavin' you behind
I never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind
I never spoke "I love you" 'til I cursed you in vain
I never felt my heart strings until I nearly went insane

I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west
I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast
I never saw your heart until someone tried to steal it, tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears until they rolled down your face

I never saw the mornin' 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out your love light babe
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song

I like to teach it alongside Tichborne's elegy, written in iambic pentameter, because if you SING the elegy, perhaps to the tune of "San Diego Serenade," the five iambs turn into four strong stresses with a caesura in the middle. It illustrates nicely the difference between poetic meter and song rhythm.

Tychbornes Elegie, written with his owne hand in the Tower before his execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of paine,
My Crop of corne is but a field of tares,
And al my good is but vaine hope of gaine.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told,
My fruite is falne, & yet my leaves are greene:
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seene.
My thred is cut, and yet it is not spunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my wombe,
I lookt for life, and saw it was a shade:
I trod the earth, and knew it was my Tombe,
And now I die, and now I was but made.
My glasse is full, and now my glasse is runne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Enjoy!

Tony

Thanks for chiming in, Tony.

Yes, the stresses of both melodies and poems have relative strengths, complicating analyis. Waits's lyrics and melody seem to match pretty closely; the content of each line is in the first and last two feet, the melody's caesura carrying only the "til/until" connective stuff.

(FWIW, Nanci Griffith's cover doesn't stress the middle syllable of "melody.")

GUI-tar is to some extent a class variation, not just geographic. That's important to note in Dylan & Guthrie.

I work alongside musicians every day, lots of them guitarists, and they almost always say GUI-tar even though the rest of their vernacular is not geographically or class congruent with that.

My hunch is that most rap lyrics are dependent on misappropriation of stressed syllables. I say hunch because I have an aversion to rap and can barely listen to it's rhyme-driven cliche-ridden babble.

Jim, your "hunch" is incorrect. I present some evidence; I do hope you'll consider it:

Eric B & Rakim - Follow the Leader
Slick Rick - Children's Story
Nas - NY State of Mind
GZA - Gold
OutKast - ATLiens
Organized Konfusion - Bring It On
The Roots - Here I Come
Clipse - Mr. Me Too
Kendrick Lamar - Swimming Pools (Drank)

As you will see from these samples, good rappers are in touch with natural rhythms and stress patterns and are able to wrap them around the beat. Undoubtedly, lesser rappers will stretch words to fit a recalcitrant context. I wonder who else does that...

Mea culpa, Aaron.
It’s not the first time I’ve revealed my ugly prejudice towards rap music. My issue with the genre is that by-in-large it's focused on the dysfunctional, broken parts of our society. The parts that I know relatively little about nor do I have the inclination to want to find out more (beyond staying abreast in the news/current events). It's like those "Cops" reality tv shows. It leaves me with an uneasy, queasy feeling in my stomach. To me, life and meaning transcends current events and time. --But I stand corrected.

Thanks for the examples. They are cream of the crop. Any genre has it's dregs and peaks.

Aaron: I wonder who else does that...

Now you have me wondering... We all do? Except for Robert Frost : )
x

Oh, I just meant lesser poets also strain language in the same way—there’s no difference between rap and poetry there.

I'm always impressed with the sonic effects of good rap music. The internal rhyme and slant rhymes are often ingenious and surprising in ways I don't find in even some very good poets. In listening to someone like Andre 3000, you never hear "creep" and nearly nod off expecting "sleep." It's something we can learn from, as poets. Certainly it's had a powerful, though I suspect largely unconscious, effect on what rhyme is pleasing to me, and therefore how I write it when I use it.