TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "lyrics"
Nick Cave shows his work
The deluxe edition of Push The Sky Away comes “with a facsimile of the notebook Cave worked out the album’s lyrics in.”
“Some of it’s dreadful and painful to read, but I just thought – what the fuck,” he says, before getting the actual notebook out and offering me a brief precis of his working methods. “Pages and pages of absolute shit,” he sighs, turning them over. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. And just every now and then something, little tiny ideas start to come out.”
And how refreshing to note that he, too, suffers from imposter syndrome (something I write about in chapter two of Steal Like An Artist):
After 30 years of live performance, the prospect of getting onstage still fills him with “fucking dread”. Whenever he releases a record, he says, he finds himself gripped by the fear that he is “going to be exposed, people are going to realise I was never really that good anyway, someone’s going to come round and find out I was supposed to be a different person or something like that”.
Filed under: show your work (via)
Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here,” off Wish You Were Here (1975)
1973’s Dark Side Of The Moon made Pink Floyd rich. When they came off the tour, they were emotionally and physically exhausted, but they went into the studio in 1975 to record their next album anyways. It wasn’t going well. Here’s David Gilmour:
It was a very difficult period I have to say. All your childhood dreams had been sort of realized and we had the biggest selling records in the world and all the things you got into it for. The girls and the money and the fame and all that stuff it was all … everything had sort of come our way and you had to reassess what you were in it for thereafter, and it was a pretty confusing and sort of empty time for a while.
Eventually, Roger Waters started coming up with a new concept — they’d take this song called “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” split it in half, and make a sandwich of it with three other songs: “Welcome To The Machine,” “Have a Cigar,” and “Wish You Were Here.”
Much is made of Wish You Were Here as being a tribute to former bandmate Syd Barrett (there’s a sad, sad story of how Barrett showed up at the studio during mixing and nobody recognized him), but it’s also an album about the music business, made just over the hump of Floyd’s success.
I’ve probably heard “Wish You Were Here” hundreds of times over the years on FM radio and never given it a second thought. (“Oh, a sad song about missing someone.”) But now, when I listen to it (“the ears that are listening…”), it sounds less like a man missing a friend or a lover, and more about a man who’s gained the whole world, but is missing something in himself.
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts
Hot ashes for trees
Hot air for a cool breeze
Cold comfort for change
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
It really sounds to me like a song about success — something that is utterly useless when it comes to making art, because no matter what happens, you’re back in the studio, with “the same old fears.”
How I wish
How I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here
A beautiful, beautiful song. Sneak out into your garage some night and sit in your car and listen to it really loud. Then go hug somebody.
Smog, “To Be Of Use,” off Red Apple Falls, 1997
To be of use
To be of some hard
Simple
Undeniable useLike a spindle
Like a candle
Like a horseshoe
Like a corkscrewTo be of use
To be of use
cf. Charles Portis: “The trick is to make yourself first useful and then necessary.” (“We had both known the despair of trying to sell things that nobody wanted.”)
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy “I See A Darkness”
I love this re-recording of one my favorite songs for the EP Now Here’s My Plan. (Here’s the original.)
well I hope that someday, buddy
we have peace in our lives
together or apart
alone or with our wives
that we can stop our whoring and pull the smiles inside
and light it up forever
and never go to sleep…
(Source: youtube.com)
The song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” was written by Hugh Martin for Meet Me in St. Louis. Now a holiday favorite, the “initial set of lyrics… were almost comically depressing.”
Among the never-recorded couplets — which he now describes as ”hysterically lugubrious” — were lines like: ”Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last…. Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us no more.”
About a week before they shot the scene in the movie, Judy Garland said, “Don’t you think these are awfully dark?” So Martin made some changes.
Then, in 1957, Frank Sinatra — who’d already cut a lovely version with the movie’s bittersweet lyrics in 1947 — came to Martin with a request for yet another pick-me-up. ”He called to ask if I would rewrite the ‘muddle through somehow’ line,” says the songwriter. ”He said, ‘The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?”’ Not about to give the Chairman any lip, Martin made several cheerier alterations, shifting the happiness into the present tense and changing that ”muddle through” line to ”Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”
Superchunk, “Cool,” off Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91)
Warren Craghead suggested this as an anthem for Steal:
we’re just putting pieces together
i feel like a thief
i feel like a fool
i will rearrange this forever
cause i think it’s lame
but i think it’s cooli heard this song on the radio once
i stole a bar
i stole a drink
i used the last straw for my ink
sometimes i fear i neglect to think
sometimes i fearwe’re just pulling pieces apart
a piece of this is yours
i’m calling it art
i know it’s lame
and it breaks my heart
it breaks my
it breaks my heartthere’s nothing new
there’s nothing new
everything’s borrowed
everything’s used
there’s nothing new
there’s nothing new
everything’s borrowed
everything’s used
there’s nothing new
but we know it’s cool
(Source: youtube.com)
