HOW SWEET THE SOUNDS


in praise of pop song euphony.

I’ve been in one of those Ryan Adams moods again, spending a lot of time with my iPod and iTunes shuffling through his music, returning over and over to his two most recent CDs, Jacksonville City Nights and Cold Roses. And though lots of their lines and songs and melodies are running around in my head, the one passage that keeps coming back to me, bubbling up again and again when I’m singing in the shower or lying half asleep in bed or just daydreaming in my office, is a simple sequence from the last verse of Let it Ride, a string of words that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but sure does make a lovely, lilting rhythm, rocking and rolling and flowing one to the next with a great, sweet sequence of sounds and syllables:

I wanna see you tonight
Dancing in the endless moonlight
In the parking lot in the headlights of cars
Someplace on the moon
Where they moved the drive-in theater
Where I left the car that I can't find
But I still got the keys to
Let it ride.

They’re so great, so propulsive and compulsive, that they practically sing themselves.

As I’ve revelled in their rhythm the past few days, they’ve reminded me of perhaps my favorite bit of pop song euphony, a deft little sequence of consonance and assonance popping and snaking its way through the first verse of Crowded House’s Fingers of Love:

Can you imagine this
An itch to sensitive to scratch
A light that falls through the cracks
An insect to delicate to catch
I hear the endless thunder
Every blade of grass that shivers in the breeze
And the sound that comes to carry me
Across the land and over the seas.

It’s so great, so propulsive and compulsive, that it practically plays itself.

Good writing, one of my favorite writers once told me, is supposed to be music with letters. These lyrics nicely prove his point. Just as they prove that good lyric writing is when the letters don’t need the music.

Posted: Thu - October 6, 2005 at 10:38 PM          

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