April is National Poetry Month. The state of modern poetry seems sad, with most practitioners of the art focused upon small, insignificant episodes of self-revelation with no attempt to find universal meaning. While I cannot pretend to have read the works of everyone now writing poetry, I know that far too many think that their recent trip to the woods is the stuff of intense interest for the rest of us. Their poems die with the first reading for their failure to extrapolate meaning to a larger world. They lack the genius of a Dylan Thomas or a William Carlos Williams, poets that derived huge meaning from pictures of small, intimate things.
The same is not true of some modern songwriters, many of whom focus on larger themes drawn from practical experience. Poets tend to decry lyrics as not poetry and propound many technical reasons why this is so, but the rest of us understand that some lyrics are poetry. Frankly, I don’t wish to enter into this debate since it seems a waste of a good half hour. It is the art of saying something simple while evoking much larger themes that interests me, and whether the telling is in lyrics or poetry is irrelevant.
I start an examination of modern lyrics with Kevin Welch, a favorite American roots musician who takes chances with his lyrics, sometimes failing and sometimes enchanting. Perhaps my favorite lyric is from “Too Old To Die Young”, a song written with John Hadley and Scott Dooley:
If life is like a candle bright
Then death must be the wind
You know you can close your window tight
And it still comes blowing in
Linda Ronstadt’s version of this song on her album with Anne Savoy (“Adieu False Heart”) is, perhaps, the best I have heard. The version by The Trishas (a group including Welch’s daughter, Savannah) is also excellent.
“Anna Lise Please” is a song of Welch’s that I especially like, both for the opening stanza and the sparkling truism in the chorus that ”nobody sees except by their own lights.” The opening chorus is:
Everybody’s saying I’ve been sinking
Like I’ve got some kind of damned old curse
They keep talking about my drinking
They don’t care nothing about my thirst
There is no greater danger than trying to find yourself
Because there is no stranger stranger than a man is to himself
I have only ever heard Welch’s version of this song, sung in his own whiskey-voiced baritone. It is hard to imagine anyone else singing the song and I suspect it would hard to improve upon Welch’s version. It is perhaps this intimate tie with the music and the voice that is the poets’ best argument for lyrics not equalling poetry. To this argument, I simply respond: “Who cares?”
Welch’s paean to holding death at bay brings to mind Beth Nielsen Chapman’s “Sand and Water,” a song of acceptance written after the death of her husband. The song is haunting and the lyrics eternal:
All alone I heal this heart of sorrow
All alone I raise this child
Flesh and bone, he’s just bursting towards tomorrow
And his laughter fills my world and wears your smile
All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water and a million years gone by
After Elton John’s decision to no longer publicly sing “Candle in the Wind” following his performance of its revised version at the funeral of Princess Diana, he replaced it in his song list with “Sand and Water,” and Chapman wrote a special verse for him to replace the first one quoted above.
Nanci Griffith celebrates life in all of its aspects, big and small, and when she writes about something small she always is speaking of something much bigger in scope. You can listen to her songs at either level, for they work well either way. Consider the closing stanza and chorus to “Gulf Coast Highway,” a song she has sung as a duet with many male companions:
We kept our garden, we set the sun
This is the only place on Earth blue bonnets grow
And once a year they come and go
At this old house here by the road
And when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away to heaven
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring
Yes when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away together
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring
Amy Speace is a young singer-songwriter with a timbre in her voice similar to that of a younger Joan Baez. In her song “Ghosts” she says:
Some people move through our lives and then they’re gone like the morning rain.
Some stand with the stillness of a soldier at their post and never change.
Some dance along the waterline like waves against the coast.
Some forever haunt you like a ghost.
This song is new to me, as is Speace. The economy of her words contrasts nicely with the breadth of her message. She is someone I will listen to for a good long while.
And then there is a particular favorite of mine, Danny Schmidt’s “Company of Friends” which deserves a special place here since it can only be understood by being quoted in its entirety:
When I die, let them judge me by my company of friends
Let them know me as the footprints that I left upon the sand
Let them laugh for all the laughter
Let them cry for laughter’s end
But when I die, let them judge me by my company of friends
When I die, let them toast to all the things that I believe
Let them raise a glass to consciousness
And not spill a drop for grief
Let the bubbles rise at midnight
Let their tongues get light as thieves
And when I die, let them toast to all the things that I believe
I believe in restless hunger
I believe in red balloons
I believe in private thunder
In the end I do believe
I believe in inspiration
I believe in lightning bugs
I believe in slow creation
In the end I do believe
I believe in ink on paper
I believe in lips on ears
I believe what’s shared is savored
In the end I do believe
I believe in work on Sundays
I believe in raising barns
I believe in wasting Mondays
In the end I do believe
I believe in intuition
I believe in being wrong
I believe in contradiction
In the end I do believe
I believe in living smitten
I believe all hearts will mend
I believe our book is written
By our company of friends
Schmidt is also relatively new to me, although I have three of his albums. The lyrics of all three sparkle, even when sung in his weary voice. If you want a treat, listen carefully to the two songs which appear back-to-back on his new album “Man of Many Moons,” songs which tell the story of a parrot, an elephant and a pig and the world’s reaction to them. You will not find a better investigation of the labyrinthine murk of the human mind than that told sequentially in “Guilty by Association Blues” and “Almost Round the World.”
Finally, I leave it to Guy Clark to summarize what many modern songwriters are attempting with their lyrics and music. After all, Clark has been at it for a long time and is admired by everyone else I have quoted here. This is from “Step Inside This House” (Lyle Lovett’s version of this song is haunting):
Step inside my house Babe
I’ll sing for you a song
I’ll tell you ’bout where I’ve been
It shouldn’t take too long
I’ll show you all the things I own
My treasures you might say
Couldn’t be more’n ten dollars worth
But they brighten up my day
The essence of excellent poetry truly is all about inviting someone else into your home where the visitor can discover the meaning and experience of things that transcend its walls. Who could have said it better in so few words than Mr. Clark’s lyric?
