I just saw THE SOUND OF MY VOICE, the new documentary about Linda Ronstadt’s career, which was pretty good if you’re a Linda Ronstadt fan (and who else would wander into the theater? "I hate Ronstadt’s voice, but I’ll give this a shot, maybe it’ll surprise me." Nah.) I’ve been a fan of her singing since her mid-1960s Stone Poney days, and I still find her, purely as a singer, one of the most riveting performers around. I can’t really specify what it is that I like about her voice—I just think she’s got a fabulous set of pipes.

As you may know, she’s retired from singing because around ten years ago she came down with Parkinson’s Disease, and found that she could no longer sing professionally. The final segment of the film shows her with two musical members of her family singing recently in a private setting (looked like her living room to me) and it was true—the lady can’t sing any more. She still carried a tune, and she was audible, but the voice was no longer Linda Ronstadt’s voice. She was just another lady in her seventies trying to harmonize with her nephew’s and her brother’s voices and guitars. It was sad, which was the point of the segment. She couldn’t bring it anymore.

More than anything else, I was reminded of a great athlete losing his skill, and I thought about how universal that was, how the ability to throw or field or bat a ball or to sing with power and conviction and perfect control is a kind of miracle that exists only for a short time, even for those most blessed by that miracle, and how suddenly it can just up and leave.

Parkinson’s is a kind of injury, not one we see much of on the baseball diamond, and I was going to expand on this similarity of musical and athletic skills, but as long as I’ve got you (if I still do), I’d like to riff for a bit on my reaction to THE SOUND OF MY VOICE.

Pop music lyrics kinda suck.

I say this as someone who has written several songs over the past fifty years, none of which I’m very happy with and all of which I’ll take the full blame for, but part of the general problem with song lyrics is the low standards. Is there another line of work in which "almost competent" is the standard of excellence? Lyrics are mediocre because mediocrity is all that’s required. With Ronstadt, the schlocky lyrics really stand out because she wrote virtually none of her own lyrics (and none of her own music for that matter), so we can distinguish easily between the extremely high quality of her singing and the abysmal quality of the words she was singing.

The Stone Poneys song that first made my ears wiggle was her first hit, "Different Drum," written in 1965 by Monkee-in-waiting Mike Nesmith, and it played throughout this movie as a kind of refrain. In a way, it’s an appropriate theme song for Ronstadt, who never married and who lived out the philosophy of the song, which is basically "I’m breaking up with you, baby, not because of anything personal but I just don’t see myself as part of a couple, sorry, have a nice life."

An odd theme for a pop song, most of which extol the virtues of attachment, not of separation, so no complaints there, but the more I listened to the lyrics, the more I came to realize their sappiness, their clumsiness, their sheer incompetence at conveying what should have been an intriguing philosophical point: monogamy isn’t for everyone, and this is the rare song that says so. In other words, Nesmith came up with an original idea, and wrote a pretty catchy melody to make that idea into a hit song (#12 on the pop charts) but his versifying stinks. Ronstadt’s superb singing delayed this observation for the past five decades or so, which is a great testament to her talent.

Let me explain "stinks":  the first dictum of Ezra Pound (an uneven poet, but a great thinker about poetry) is "Make it new." In other words, a writer in every genre is almost certainly re-hashing material that someone, probably a million someones, has expressed previously, but everyone has the potential to express it in so fresh a way that it appears to be totally original. The counter-side to "Make it new" is "Avoid clichés like the plague." That clichéd expression, "like the plague," was once a fresh image, conjuring up panicked villagers running at top speed the very second that they discovered the place they were in was plague-ridden, and it was a forceful, direct and immediate metaphor that created a vivid image in your mind. But no more. Now, it’s just a cliché-- you don’t really think about plagues or terror or fleeing when you see it. It no longer conveys any image at all, and that’s the first big knock against the lyrics of "Different Drum." They’re cliché-ridden.

Some examples, you ask? Here’s just a few: the speaker sums up his (more about pronouns later) chief complaint as "You can’t see the forest for the trees," which doesn’t seem to tie in with the actual complaint, that he doesn’t want to settle down with one woman. I suppose you could make the case that "not seeing the forest for the trees" means that the woman who is the object of the song, keeps bringing up petty reasons the couple should stay together while the speaker insists those reasons miss the big idea, that he just flat-out doesn’t want to, despite all her reasons, but it’s a stretch to get there, and the image is clichéd besides. There are a lot of original ways to express the concept of "misunderstanding the larger problem"—Nesmith just went with the first one that came to mind.

Another quick example of the clichéd lyrics ( found in toto at https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/lindaronstadt/differentdrum.html) is

"I'm not ready
For any person place or thing
To try and pull the reins in on me"

Well, a lot of problems here. The image of "pulling the reins in on me" is where I was going to start—it’s just been done to death, another easy cliché—but the ineptness of "any person, place, or thing" is kind of a howler. It’s the grammar-school definition of a "noun," of course, which pulls you out of the song and the emotion and sends you back to the third grade momentarily, but it’s also kind of stupid in itself. How can a place "try to pull the reins in on me"? Or a thing, for that matter?  I suppose you could conceivably say something like "New York City is pulling the reins in on me" but can a place be trying to restrict the speaker in any way? To have volition, by definition, a place or a thing must have consciousness. No, this is just padding out the line "I’m not ready for anyone to try and pull the reins in on me" with a few awkwardly funny inappropriate extra syllables inserted to make the line scan correctly. For that matter, the volition is irrelevant: the speaker is complaining about the song’s object "pulling the reins" in on him, not complaining that she’s trying to do that. If she were doing that accidentally, somehow, he would still have just as valid a complaint. Just more line-padding, far as I can tell. 

Last example of a cliché:

"Oh don't get me wrong
It's not that I knock it
It's just that I am not in the market
For a boy who wants to love only me."

Gliding right past the tortured rhyme of "knock it" and "market" (they rhyme perfectly but only in Boston), the key cliché here is "not in the market." In other words, "not interested in." It’s a cliché, and one that Nesmith might be able to get away with using if he’d been writing a song whose general imagery was commercial in nature, "I’m not buying your appeal," "Don’t try to sell yourself to me," "I can’t afford to love you," etc. (without the clichéd words, of course. I’m just supplying hasty examples of commercial images, not re-writing Nesmith’s lyrics.) Again, it’s just a clichéd expression of a lack of interest—there are other trite images throughout the song, which has only three verses. It’s actually hard to squeeze that many chestnuts into such a small bag.

But the "for a boy" line gets us into the gender/pronoun problem: it’s not unusual for a male songwriter to find his song being sung by a female singer, with attendant gender/pronoun issues. Some female singers resolve this problem by singing the song to a female object, i.e., as a lesbian love-song (or in this case, as a lesbian breakup song), some interpret the lyrics as not being romantic in nature at all but rather being about a friendship between women, some try to exchange the female pronouns for their male counterparts (which works sometimes but not always, especially when the pronoun is a rhyme-word, "him" rather than "her," etc. Gender-specific songs like "My Girl" or "The Girl from Ipanema" would make that simple switcheroo impossible.) Ronstadt switches the genders here, but there’s still a problem, one that doesn’t relate to the pronoun, but rather to the adjective "pretty."

It’s simply not a word that applies to males, not without some eyebrows being raised. Speaking of being raised, I was raised to take the word "pretty" as an outright insult when applied to me, as in Newman’s definitive putdown of Keith Hernandez: "Nice catch, pretty-boy," so when Ronstadt sings "I’m not saying you ain’t pretty,"  I’d imagine her male object responding, "No, that’s fine, go ahead and say I’m not pretty, that’s really OK with me, please." The word "pretty" raises questions that the songwriter really doesn’t want to be raised in this song, but he’s trapped by his own gendered construction. (Or Ronstadt is, here; the change is hers, I suppose, not Nesmith’s, but there are additional problems with the adjective anyway.)

Another issue with the word "pretty" is that it only sorta-kinda rhymes with the word "ready." It’s not an awful rhyme (in spoken English, we don’t really distinguish the pronunciation of medial "d"s and medial "t"s most of the time) but it is a lazy rhyme. The entire pretty/ready verse is lazy—for one thing, it introduces the concept of "prettiness" as the basis for a relationship: there must be another basis or two for a monogamous relationship ("compatibility" or "shared interests" or "liking each other" come to mind) but the speaker reduces the range of reasons down to one, "prettiness," and all for the sake of an off-rhyme. If he’d given it a few more minutes’ thought, he might have come up with "steady" as a rhyme for "ready" (as in "You keep saying you want to go steady") or better yet, just come up with a better pair of rhymes altogether—the point of the song is not that he isn’t ready for monogamy yet, but rather that he doesn’t see it in his future, ever. Instead, he makes the weaker point for the sake of the rhyme.

I could go on and on in this vein, because there’s more to  rag on here than there is to praise. (Even the song’s title is bit of a literary cliché: it derives from Henry David Thoreau’s observation in Walden that if "a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer," and for all I know Thoreau swiped it from someone else.)  But I love the song, especially in Ronstadt’s rendition, and my love is all for the singing and the tune. The lyrics smell a little off to me, but they’re actually superior to most pop lyrics of that time or any other.

There’s a major grammar-and-logic error, though, in the title that clearly contradicts the theme of the song: "You and I march to the beat of a different drum," Nesmith begins, trying to make the point that he and she are incompatible, but unfortunately his words do NOT mean that the two are marching to different beats but rather to the same beat. If he wants to stress how different the beats are that he and she march to, he has to make clear that there are two drums beating, not one: "You and I march to the beats of different drums" would make that point, while "a different drum" implies that the two lovers are actually in synch with each other. The implication of "a different drum" is that there is one singular drum the lovers march to, while the rest of the world, or perhaps other lovers, march to another singular drumbeat that differs from the lovers’ drumbeat. He says, in other words, the opposite of what he intends to say—we don’t catch it because it’s a pop tune, and no one (well, almost no one) is paying that much attention to the words, but once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

One of the finer tropes in the song, especially in Ronstadt’s rendition of it, is the line "We’ll both live a lot longer, if you live without me"—what I like is the ambiguity of her immediately repeating the words "if you live, you live without me," which could mean that there’s a possibility that her object may well not live if they break up (and that she doesn’t much care). But the larger implication here is the threat that, if they don’t break up, one of them will murder the other one: "We’ll both live a lot longer, if you live without me" is kind of scary. The flip side is "If I have to stay with you, I’ll strangle you, or you might strangle me." It’s great, the way she sings that line, but it’s a pretty nutty idea, breaking up to prolong one’s own life and the life of one’s partner.

Rather than continue to prick logical holes in Nesmith’s song, I’d prefer to expand my theme and instead go on and on about the simple reason that pop lyrics are as mediocre as they are: because they’re written by musicians. Occasionally, you get skilled lyricists who collaborate with musicians—Robert Hunter or Bernie Taupin come to mind—and sometimes, you do get gifted lyric-writers who are primarily musicians—no one’s going to argue that Bob Dylan or John Lennon or Joni Mitchell or John Prine or Leonard Cohen aren’t prolific and inventive lyricists—but in the main, they’re artists who invent melodies or chord-structures or harmonies and then fit in the lyrics as best they can, which is often serviceable but not distinguished. (Cohen’s the only real poet I can think of who also writes decent music.)  Most lyrics become memorable because of the musical qualities, rather than being memorable themselves. It’s only on closer analysis that song lyrics reveal themselves to be clichéd, or convoluted, or illogical, or sentimental, or ungrammatical, or just downright dopey. But by that time, we’ve been humming the tune or singing it in the shower for so long that it seems more inspired than it really is.

When I was a kid, I remember jotting down snippets of popular songs in my notebooks for school, and admiring their brilliance, but looking back, I’m shall we say under-impressed by what I recorded as gnomic wisdom. "Not to touch the earth, not to see the sun/ nothing left to do but run, run, run" for example, impressed me no end when I was fourteen, but now it (like almost all of the Doors’ lyrics) just seems vapid and pretentious to me. But at the time, I took it for profound. (Or, as I might have phrased it, "Oh, wow, man. Heavy.") "I’m going to love you," speaking of the Doors’ lyrics, "’til the stars fall from the sky/ for you and I" is one of those grammatical goofs that never fails to land with a THUD! on my ears, not just because Jim Morrison (who considered himself a poet, and actually got some of his portentous and pretentious lyrics bound into a book, which makes him seem like one—NOT!) committed the case-error ("I" for "me") I catch in every other freshman essay. No, the part of this goof that sticks out to me is how easy it is to fix. If Morrison needs the line to end with "I" (and he does, to rhyme with "sky") he could use "for" in the only slightly archaic sense of the word (to mean "because," which my freshmen are also excessively fond of, for they are trying to impress me) and continue the line "for you and I/ Can never die" or some such. (He has a few beats left over in the line, as it happens, for the extra syllables). Or he might just use a different rhyme, allowing him to use the objective case he needs, perhaps "’til the stars fall to the sea/ for you and me." But I don’t think the problem ever occurred to him. I think "for you and I" sounded right to him. There is more bad grammar and pointless philosophizing in the Doors’ lyrics than in most other songwriters’, and as a teenager I gobbled it up with a spatula-sized spoon.

I wrote down pages of such quotes, and I’m sure some of them were more profound than others, but few of them stand up as models of brilliant writing anymore. (Oddly, I just moved house and packed up some of those old notebooks—I know precisely where they are, in a box on my kitchen table right now, but I lack the guts to peruse them. My fourteen-year-old self just makes me wince, which is true of most of us. If you can face the evidence of your wince-inducing stages, my hat is off to you, sir.) The standard that pop lyrics have to meet is just about as low as low can get: impressive to fourteen year olds. ("Different Drum," I just noticed, was released the summer I turned 14. I’m sure I was moved mightily by Nesmith’s verbal brilliance at the time.)

Roughly, I’d estimate that one-third of pop lyrics are technically flawed (squeeze too many syllables into too little metrical space, or vice-versa, awful rhymes, accent the wrong syllable, rotten grammar, etc.), another third are terminally vapid (silly, sentimental, clichéd, occasionally out-and-out nonsense), and a third third are passably original and competent. Because of overlap between the first third and the second third (many songs are both lyrically flawed and lyrically vapid), there’s room for a fourth third, brilliant, entertaining, insightful poetry that sometimes makes its way into song lyrics, not to mention that most of the time we ignore the lyrics entirely because we’re so hooked into the music.

Often, we don’t even know what lyrics say. With some singers, we’re reduced to guessing what they even are. We’ve all misheard or misunderstood or misremembered pop lyrics without appreciating the songs one tiny whit less, the Lady Mondegreen phenomenon.  We’re in it for the melody, the harmonies, the beat, which is what songwriters understand:  a song with a great musical hook can tolerate the dopiest of lyrics set to them. It doesn’t work like that the other way around.

For my own amazement, I’ll sometimes pick out a tune on a guitar and try to copy some of my favorite musicians’ riffs—lately, I’ve been playing some of George Harrison’s licks on classic Beatle songs, tight, restrained, musically inventive variations on the songs’ chords. I think Harrison’s contributions to the Beatles’ work has been massively understated, or at least massively misunderstood by me for decades before I tried duplicating some of them. As I understand the process (I might be wrong about some of this), in the early days, Lennon or McCartney would bring a new song into the studio, complete with lyrics and melody, and let Harrison (and Ringo Starr) work out their own parts to the song. Inevitably what they would work out, classified under "arrangements" and not "song-writing," would be the more memorable parts of the hits we remember—Harrison’s contributions include the fabulous "Day Tripper" riff, the lead break from "I Feel Fine," the poignant guitar part from "And I Love Her," and a zillion other five-second bits that got burned into our brains. (This contribution seems to me as important to the songs’ total effects as the original lyrics and melodies, but what do I know about song-writing credits? The more I listen to these parts, the more I think that Harrison and Starr "wrote" a goodly chunk of the work credited, and deserve the money paid, to "Lennon-McCartney." But what do I know?)  My point here is that Harrison had a kind of genius for creating inventive and memorable riffs.

He also had a kind of anti-genius for writing lyrics. Lyrics didn’t come to him readily, and I suspect that he viewed writing them as a necessary evil, an irritating chore that was essential for a pop song, so he did it but he would rather have written letters from the gulag. The chore of writing lyrics was, I think, what held him back for years from song-writing entirely, and lyrics never came to him easily or even competently for the most part. The dominant theme of his lyrics, over the course of his thirty-odd year songwriting career was complaining about other people—people are spiritually vacant ("Isn’t It a Pity?"), they want to date him but he’s not interested ("If I Needed Someone,") they screw him out of royalties ("Only a Northern Song,") they’re late to appointments ("Blue Jay Way,"), they let others starve to death ("Bangladesh,") they often drop dead on him ("Don’t Bother Me,") they take taxes out of his paycheck ("Taxman,"), they’re inherently selfish narcissists ("I Me Mine,") they lack self-awareness ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps,") and most of all, they’re insignificant bugs compared to the Lord God Krishna Jesus Cthulhu Yahweh Whomever ("My Sweet Lord," etc.) Bitch, bitch, bitch.

He was often irritated by people, but it worked for him. He’d turn those irritations into lyrics that fit into these riffs that came so readily to his brain and to his fingers. My favorite theory about a Harrison song-title stems from the simple misspelling in the title "Love You To." As the tale goes, he hated particularly coming up with titles to his songs—the hateful work of devising lyrics was done with and now he had to come up with a title? Ugh. According to Wikipedia, the working title to this song was "Granny Smith," invented by the Beatles’ recording engineer after the variety of tart apple, but when the time came to devise an actual title, I theorize that someone, perhaps that self-same recording engineer, told Harrison he had to come up with a real title now--when Harrison gave him a blank look in response, he offered, "Unless you’d like me to come up with a title for you?" and Harrison answered, "Love you to," which became the published title. Makes as much sense as any other theory.

Another tale, that has since been refuted, is the one about the Cream song "Badge," which he co-wrote with Eric Clapton—the way I first heard this story,  Clapton read the chords "B-A-D-G-E" that Harrison had scrawled on the song’s lyric sheet and mistook it for the song’s title, for which Harrison was grateful, but unfortunately the song’s chords don’t happen to be B, A, D, G, and E (though those chords do work together pretty well). The real story is almost as good, and just as explicative of Harrison’s distaste for inventing song titles: he had written "BRIDGE" on the lyric sheet, meaning that the musical bridge between the verse and the chorus belonged at that point in the song, and Clapton misread that upside-down as "Badge." (The song has nothing whatsoever to do with badges of any kind. Badges? We don’ need no steenkin’ badges.)  Harrison’s gift was essentially a non-verbal gift, but he had to work with words as a condition of being a song-writer—instrumentals don’t cut it-- so he’d excrete a few for every song. But he didn’t like writing lyrics, he didn’t do it naturally, and he didn’t do it very well. Luckily, that doesn’t make any difference—he was a great writer of music.

Harrison stands as my prime example of how someone can write wonderful songs without much talent for crafting lyrics, but I think the tendency I’m describing here is common to pop composers across the board. Understand where I’m coming from—this approach may seem elitist, condescending, even sneering, at Harrison’s verbal shortcomings, and it is elitist in a sense: during my long training in Creative Writing, I sat through many a seminar on the technical characteristics of poems, a fairly dry subject to most Ph. D. candidates and a colossal bore to anyone else, though I kind of enjoyed the subject. We would take apart centuries’ worth of world-class poetry, analyzing the precise techniques that came out of the minds of poets like Keats and Pope and Yeats and Byron and Sidney and Spencer, distinguishing between their technically-flawed early works and their eventual mastery of meter, lineation, diction, as well as imagery, and syntax, and allusion and a hundred other subjects that most folks just assume we’re talking bullshit about.

As I say, I kind of enjoyed doing "close readings" of poems more than your typical grad student, even though I was mostly studying the composition of prose, not verse—and after you’ve written a couple of dozen close-reading technical analyses of timeless poems by gifted poets, and have read hundreds more analyses by world-renown critics and scholars, you tend to be dismissive of pop lyricists. Tell you the truth, after grad school, I couldn’t listen to even my favorite pop song-writers without wincing once in a while. I still hear verbal clunkers in some of Dylan’s lyrics, awkwardness in Carole King’s, incompetence in Lennon’s, howlers in Paul Simon’s, ineptitudes in Joni Mitchell’s, illogic in Springsteen’s, and gaffes in Ray Davies’.  Not all the time, of course, and I do take pleasure in their crafting of clever lyrics throughout their thousands of great songs, but sadly my appreciation of even their talents has been tainted. Like a well-trained auto mechanic examining your car engine, I can find things wrong with it that you will never see or feel, and you’ll protest that (in order to justify my own profession)  I’m making up problems where none exist.

They do exist, though you’ll probably never notice them.  I can’t un-see the things that I’ve been trained to see, and to analyze, and to explain. They’re there (there, there) whether you’re aware of them or not. Think of this capacity as the verbal equivalent of sabermetric analysis, garnering the same kind of hostility and mockery that sabermetrics first received (and still does, to a much lesser degree) from the baseball world and from the average fan. It’s all BS, it’s not real, it’s pretentious nonsense that you can’t ever prove –and slowly the world came around to accepting some of it, and then most of it, and now (for some of us) all of it. I’m far from an expert "close reader" of lyrics, almost as far as I am from a true sabermetrist, but I’ve got enough experience in both fields to appreciate the observations of my betters, and to dabble in some of my own now and again.

OK, I’m done here without writing a word of the analogy between Linda Ronstadt’s career-ending injury and that of MLB players that I intended this article to be about, so I promise to get cracking on that topic exclusively in my next article.