Lyrics are interesting because I don’t really listen to them, and that’s always mildly surprising to me. I care about words, I think they’re important. I think poetry has great potential for beauty and I derive immense satisfaction from its potent combinations of words and phrases, its truths and its lies. I love words. And yet, when I’m listening to music, I often don’t care about the lyrics except to give them a cursory glance for the first couple listens, just to check to see if they’re bad. That’s surprising to me. It’s not that I don’t care at all about lyrics, because I do. Often the only real difference between a song I like and one I love, between a song I enjoy and a song I need, is the lyrics. And yet, I tend to ignore them. And yet.
I think there’s something for me to learn, here. If my two premises are that lyrics are (as a rule) important to me, and that I don’t (in practice) often care about them, the obvious conclusion is that I ought to learn how to care about lyrics, that I ought to invest that time and effort to better align my actions to my self. To that end, I need to understand first what lyrics do mean to me, why they matter, why I care- and then use that knowledge to develop strategies to nurture that care.
So, what do lyrics mean to me? I think that might not be… well, it’s not the wrong question, but it’s not the right question either. It’s not precise, it’s not really the core of what I’m asking. Because, really, I already know what lyrics can mean to me. They can mean everything. They can inspire me, they can make me feel things I don’t feel, they can soften my heart, they can change my mind, they can give me faith and fill me with hope, they can make me cry. They can get caught in my head and sit there, repeating themselves again and again, worming into my thoughts, becoming part of my vocabulary, becoming part of me. I know what lyrics can mean to me. No, what I really want to learn is when lyrics mean to me. What does it take for me to care about lyrics? What does it take for those meanings to take hold? Most songs that really mean something to me now, that have become deep and impactful and important, started as nothing. The power of the song wasn’t something I immediately identified as intrinsic or obvious, it was something that had to be found and nurtured and developed. What does that development process look like? What are its critical steps, what is its catalyst?
I propose three factors necessary to elevate a line from a base state of words and sounds to a superior state of verse and meaning. First and foremost is familiarity and repetition, followed by personal connection, and then beauty.
I believe that repetition is a fundamentally critical and potent force. Big changes, truly important changes- those are changes in process, changes in the countless little steps it takes to make something happen. Those changes don’t happen by the power of one immense act, they happen by the power of uncounted smaller acts, again and again and again. Repetition is the means by which processes occur and change, and this process (the process of elevating lyrics from mundane to meaningful) is not an exception to that. Words take on more meaning and more power the more you listen to them, hear them, read them, think about them, study them. You become familiar, and with that familiarity you start to see patterns, you become able to distill words into ideas, ideas that take on their own shape and flavor and value in your mind. That’s inevitable. It’s not necessarily immediate, but I do believe that it’s inevitable. And anecdotally, this has always been fairly consistently prompt for me. The lyrics that matter to me often did not matter on a first lesson, or even a second or third. But, eventually, the repeated exposure revealed the song to me. It’s hard not to love something that you know truly and deeply, I think.
My second proposed factor is the personal connection to the song. Perspective. The context of the song, the frame through which it’s observed, the subjective nature of meaning. This is perhaps so obvious as to not need mentioning, but I’m still mentioning. I know songs with lines that are the world to me, that are more than perfect descriptions of what I feel or fear or believe; these lines may mean nothing to others. More than that; they do mean nothing to others, there are others to whom these lines mean nothing. That’s a given. I’ve had many a song shared with me accompanied by a “this lyric is my favorite part, isn’t it so good?”, to which the best I can do is say, “yeah that seemed pretty good”. Sometimes I like the song and listen to it more and develop some of that appreciation of verse; sometimes I don’t. Words that matter to me are that way, in large part, because they matter to me.
My third proposed factor is beauty. This is kind of a nebulous concept, of course; it could be argued that all art is is a Sisyphean attempt at chipping away the definition of “beauty”. And yet. Beautiful verse stays with me, it calls to me like a- well, like a song. I want to snatch it up and hold it close, coo to it and tell it it’s wonderful, squeeze its little feet until I can figure out why I care about it so. I whisper it to myself as if to tease out the secrets it’s already told me that I haven’t heard. Some sets of words are just prettier than others, and people like pretty things.
That’s what lyrics mean to me. That’s what it takes for them matter, for me to care.
Now, this next bit is a little more specific to me, a little less generally applicable. Honestly, this whole thing is pretty specifically about me, even more than usual. But, at least what I’ve written above is abstract enough to be plausibly extended to most anybody. It’s a personal exploration of a general idea. What I’m doing now is extrapolating from that personal exploration a set of strategies and tools I, personally, could use to make lyrics more effective for me, to more efficiently understand what will be important to me. I’m figuring out how to skip to the good part.
The main thing I do to accelerate gaining familiarity is, once I start to suspect that I like the words of a song (which is an odd feeling for me, to have such an actionable hunch/intuition), I look up the words and read them. Sometimes as I listen to the song, sometimes not. I tend to kind of ignore lyrics when I’m just listening to them, so actually reading the words can make a huge difference, massively increasing my familiarity (my effective repetitions) with very little additional time invested.
Another strategy is focused on proactively increasing my personal connection to the text. The most repeatably effective way to do this for me is to write about it, though I know that for many others this kind of connection can be best developed by listening to the song during specific times or while experiencing specific moods. That strategy isn’t entirely ineffective for me; I most see it in songs that remind me of the night time. I dunno why that’s so powerful for me, but it is. However, that’s something of an outlier, for me. For me, the way this “proactive increase of personal connection to the text” is most strongly manifest is when I write about it. That forces me to read deliberately (again, repetition and familiarity is a must), and it also forces me to to analyze, to make connections, to think critically. Writing is a process that, by necessity (assuming you’re doing it right, I suppose), brings to awareness the personal connections you have to a subject. It lets you strengthen them and allows you a hand in their shape and their growth. I always find that writing about something allows me to better understand my own feelings about it. It injects clarity and order into my mind, and lyrics are no exception.
I don’t know that there is much you can do to better identify/generate beautiful lyrics. Part of the nature of beauty is that it’s somewhat intrinsic, it’s precious and it’s profound, and it’s kind of elusive. The beauty that is seen in the familiar and the personal is a beauty that can be created, manufactured. Those facets of meaning can generate value where there previously was none. The whole idea of beauty as its own distinct value is that it is independent, that it is somewhat objective. That makes it, in some ways, more powerful. It can be argued to be more actual, more legitimate. But it also makes it weaker. It feels less real, less true. And, most importantly, that makes it finite, it can be found but not generated. Maybe that increases its value per share, but it reduces its total potential impact, I think.
I know that none of this is universal (though believe I’ve touched on some pretty core elements). I know I’m slow to develop familiarity with things, I know I’m slow to develop personal connections with things, I know that I’m not always very receptive to what is likely beautiful. All of that with all things, but with lyrics in particular. A lot of this essay is probably only really useful in what it reveals about me; none of these steps or understandings are much needed if you’re quick to develop what I’m so slow to. But maybe it’s still a useful thing to be aware of; I know it is for me, and I’m not quite so egotistical as to think I might be the only one.
tunafruitsandwitch 