Date: 2007-12-19 11:43 Subject: Some great lyrics Security: Public

For those who appreciate good writing, 2007 has been a great year for lyrics in pop music. Here are a few of my favorites.

First, from The National's Boxer is the chorus from "Mistaken For Strangers":

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends
when you pass them at night under the silvery, silvery Citibank lights
arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under
oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over
surprise, surprise they wouldn’t wanna watch
another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults

And the entirety of "Apartment Story":

Be still for a second while I try and try to pin your flowers on la la la la
Can you carry my drink, I have everything else
I can tie my tie all by myself
I’m getting tied, I’m forgetting why

Oh we’re so disarming darling, everything we did believe
is diving diving diving diving off the balcony
Tired and wired we ruin too easy
sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave

Hold ourselves together with our arms around the stereo for hours, la la la la
While it sings to itself or whatever it does
when it sings to itself of its long lost loves
I’m getting tied, I’m forgetting why

Tired and wired we ruin too easy
sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave
but I’ll be with you behind the couch when they come
on a different day just like this one

We’ll stay inside til somebody finds us
do whatever the TV tells us
stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz for days
We’ll stay inside til somebody finds us
do whatever the TV tells us
stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz

so worry not
all things are well
we’ll be alright
we have our looks and perfume

There are plenty of bands who sing about alienation and the fact that coping with life sometimes feels impossible, but no one raises it to an art form quite like Matt Beringer of The National. Some of the more poetic phrases are just stunning: "eyes glazing under," "the unmagnificent lives of adults," "tired and wired we ruin too easy". But Beringer's trademark is the lyric that captures the contradictory jumble of overheard conversation: "Can you carry my drink, I have everything else / I can tie my tie all by myself". Boxer is shot through with these kinds of commonplace juxtapositions, as was their brilliant previous album, Alligator. I can't recommend them highly enough.

Okkervil River's The Stage Names is a more hit-or-miss affair as an album, but they also have a couple of lyrical stunners, including "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe", where lead singer and songwriter Will Sheff neatly deflates the sense of melodrama we attach to our own romantic crises:

It’s just a bad movie, where there’s no crying
handing the key to me in this Red Lion,
where the lock that you locked in the suite says there’s no prying.
When the breath that you breathed in the street screams there’s no science.
When you look how you looked then to me, then I cease lying and fall into silence.

It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax.
No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX.
In the slot that you sliced through the scene there was no shyness.
In the plot that you passed through your teeth there was no pity.
No fade in: film begins on a kid in the big city.
And no cut to a costly parade (that’s for him only!).
No dissolve to a sliver of grey (that’s his new lady!)
where she glows just like grain on the flickering pane of some great movie (hey, I'm watching!)

It’s just a house burning, but it’s not haunted.
It was your heart hurting, but not for long, kid.
In the socket you spin from with ease, there is no sticking.
From the speakers, your fake masterpiece is serenely dribbling.
When the air around your chair fills with heat, that’s the flames licking
beneath the clock on the clean mantelpiece. It’s got a calm clicking,
like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching up some bad movie.

The extended metaphor of the "bad movie" is more clever than it is brilliant, but Sheff makes the most of it. The video, by the way, seems to me one of those rare cases that actually amplifies and deepens the meaning of the song.

Iron & Wine's Sam Beam used to write songs that sounded like hushed hymns. Now that he's got a full band, he's incorporating elements from Southern boogie, Indian and West African music, and his songs have gotten both more gritty and more apocalyptic in tone. On his latest album, The Shepherd's Dog, Beam describes a burned-out world filled with detritus, both material and human, a place that God has left to the "pagan angels" (the first song of the album is called "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car"). It's all very Flannery O'Connor-ish, which is appropriate, because both O'Connor and Beam are from Georgia. I especially like the first verse of "Boy With a Coin", where the world is left to chance by an absent God, as typified by the "car that flipped" like a coin:

A boy with a coin he found in the weeds
With bullets and pages of trade magazines
Close to a car that flipped on the turn
When God left the ground to circle the world

Later in the song, the coin becomes something to wish upon, but there's nothing much left to wish for:

A boy with a coin he crammed in his jeans
Then making a wish he tossed in the sea
Walked to a town that all of us burned
When God left the ground to circle the world

Another sort of apocalyptic vision comes from the genius M.I.A., whose Kala has rightfully made it to the top of just about every music critic's best-of list for 2007. The album can be accurately described as the soundtrack of the triumph of the Third World over the First. The riotous, thrilling "Bird Flu" concludes with a characteristic promise of retribution from the far-flung places of the world:

The village got on the phone
said the street is comin’ to town
they wanna check my papers
see what I carry around
credentials are boring
I burnt them at the burial ground
don’t order me about
I’m an outlaw from the badland

put away shots for later
so I’m stable
live in trees, chew on feet
watch "lost" on cable
bird flu gonna get you
made it in my stable
from the crap you drop
on my crop when they pay you

M.I.A.'s world, like Sam Beam's, is torn by war--there are guns and bullets everywhere--but on The Shepherd's Dog the war is over, while on Kala it's at its raging peak; in "World Town", over the looped sound of a bullet sliding into the chamber of a rifle, she chants, "Hands up! / Guns out! / Represent the World Town!" Like punk at its best, the music is a direct challenge to its audience, both assaultive and exhilirating. Like all the great music I've mentioned here, it demands to be heard.

Finally, on a more lighthearted note, there's Jens Lekman, whom Jen has taken to calling my "friend" because I've taken to mentioning him so much. His latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, is a dozen little nuggets of Burt Bacharach-style rock candy. "The Opposite of Hallelujah", which to begin with is just a great title, humorously skewers the narrator's morose efforts to puncture his sister's unrelenting cheeriness:

I took my sister down to the ocean
But the ocean made me feel stupid
Those words of wisdom I had prepared
All seemed to vanish into thin air
Into the waves I stared

I picked up a seashell
To illustrate my homelessness
But a crab crawled out of it
Making it useless

And all my metaphors fell flat
Down on the rocks where we sat
She asked where are you at?

But sister, it's the opposite of hallelujah
It's the opposite of being you
You don't know 'cause it just passes right through you
You don't know what I'm going through

You don't know what I'm going through
You don't know what I'm going through
You don't know what I'm going through

We made our way home on the bikes we had borrowed
I still never told you about unstoppable sorrow
You still think I'm someone to look up to
I still don't know anything about you
Is it in you too?

You've got so much to live for, little sister
You've got so much to live for

But sister, it's the opposite of hallelujah
It's the opposite of being you
You don't know cause it just passes right through you
You don't know what I'm going through

After the likes of The National, Okkervil River, Iron & Wine, and M.I.A., it's nice to have something to listen to that just makes you smile.

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