Songs: Deep Dives and Rabbit Holes

Soon I will have the pleasure of collaborating on a song with a new friend. I’m excited, and thinking about music, especially lyrics. I’ve always written songs, but I’ve written them alone (except for a band I started with my friend Susie in Grade 7, but that’s a very deep rabbit hole we wouldn’t climb out of for a long time, so onward!).

Do you remember the first song you ever loved? Mine was John Jacob Jinglerheimer Schmitd, a repetitive song I used to sing over and over again in the car, much to my parents’ likely frustration, although they said nothing. I was probably about 6 or 7.

What makes a good song? A song can be good because it is memorable, either its lyrics or melody. Sometimes lyrics aren’t always memorable in that I can’t remember them well enough to sing them, but yet when I hear the song, I am struck by its lyrics.

Another one of my favourite songs was one I learned in choir, In the Bleak Mid-Winter, a Christmas carol we sang whilst out carolling one winter afternoon with my junior high school choir. After we went door to door and sang carols, we went back to one of the choir members’ houses, and her mother made us hot chocolate and these really delicious concoctions of bacon and cheese warmed up in the oven on triscuits.

In the Bleak Midwinter was a poem by Christina Rosetti that was set to music. I remember falling in love with these lines: “In the bleak mid-winter/  Frosty wind made moan/Earth stood hard as iron,/  Water like a stone;/Snow had fallen, snow on snow,   Snow on snow,/In the bleak mid-winter/  Long ago.”

Many people have covered this song, including Allison Crowe.

Vic Chesnutt used to say something that I am badly paraphrasing, so forgive me from heaven, brilliant and gone too soon songwriter…lyrics don’t have to be a certain rhythm to work in a song, and you should be able to sing any word. I love his songs, especially the mind tricky, Flirted with You All My Life where it sounds like he’s singing about jealousy, but he’s actually singing about death, Death.

Vic Chesnutt is one of my favourite songwriters, and an example of lyrics that I don’t remember well enough to sing, but love when I hear them. I’d like to write a whole post on Vic Chesnutt’s songs alone. Here’s a playlist to introduce you to his music if you are unfamiliar, and want to hear it.

I’ve decided to spend the last night of August, which feels like the end of summer, listening to music on shuffle and writing about the lyrics of some of the songs I especially love. Why do I love them? [Let me count the ways?] I like the combination of melody and rhythm that the words manage to fit into, if that makes any sense. I like unusual turns of phrase that make me think; I like strong and compelling imagery. I like the articulation of experiences and things that I can’t articulate well for myself and when I hear the song, I can recognize a shared feeling or sentiment that I thought I was alone in. My ability to write coherent sentences is dreadful right now. Best to just sit back in my comfortable office chair and listen…

We Are Mean just came on from Vic Chestnutt’s Dark Developments, a collaboration with Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums. It is a song with very simply and repeated lyrics, and feels different in style to much of his other work. It makes its point well. This whole album is a gift and a rare treat. You can get it over on Bandcamp.

I can always listen to any song by the Mountain Goats and be thrilled by Darnielle’s lyrics. I love the song, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” for its rhythms, but also for the audacity of singing “Hail Satan,” in that song. I could easily imagine a PhD on Darnielle’s lyrics.

By the way, there was a podcast, I only listen to the Mountain Goats with great covers of their songs.

Ottawa’s own Lynn Miles has exceptionally memorable lyrics. Still Here, for example: “there must have been/ angels at our doors/flying carpets on the floors,/there must have been/something in the air/cause we’re still standing./there must have been/spirits in the halls/ghosts behind the walls/there must have been/something in the air/cause we’re still here.”

Another stellar Ottawa-based musician is Andrea Simms-Karp. Her former band Naviger did a great album called Barn Raising with this song, My Own Darling. The lyrics are simple but smart.

Bob Snider has exceptionally brilliant and hilarious lyrics, quite witty and sometimes sad. His album Words and Pictures is a favourite. Bob wrote a book on songwriting that was published by Gaspereau Press and is sadly out of print.

The Burning Hell is another band whose songs I love. Mathias Kom is an utterly brilliant lyricist. I suppose I inappropriately have given new parents a playlist with the song, Dance Dance Dance on it: “I was born much too early ' surely, surely prematurely|But I already knew that I wanted more by the time the placenta hit the floor||And it wasn't too much later, lying inside my incubator|Clenching my tiny newborn fists, trying to slit my little newborn wrists.”

I love the UK musician Ghostpoet, and his albums Dark Days and Canopies and Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam, especially the song Us Against Whatever, “Love's like a shooting star/Amazing like asteroids/And captured on Polaroids/Black and white

You always get my best side/I'm praying for the best sides/This you and I/And wear things like pork pies/And eat things like pork pies…” The absurdity of a good list in a song, as in a poem will always enthrall me. Plus I love the idea of us against whatever.

Half-Waif’s song Lavender Burning has a beautiful sense of rhyme and these gorgeous and haunting lyrics: “Staring out into the shifting darkness/Tryin' to give a name to the place where my heart is/A country of shadows, hard to tell where the start is/

I miss New York and that's the loneliest feeling/To be on a road and not know where it's leading/Fixated on a hole that once held my whole being.”

Have you ever missed a place and had it been the loneliest feeling? Yes!

Rabbit Hole: Have you read Anik See’s Saudade yet?

Ex:Re wrote a whole album of brilliant and poignant and bitter break up songs. I love the song “New York: I was drunk/"New York, New York"/I saw a small white rabbit climbing down the Empire State/I must have been hallucinating/I am seeing things I'm missing/They told me Stella from across the street is dead/

Painted fake bricks on the front because house sales are slow/

And Stella was kind to me even though/She didn't know the fantasies I made around her.”

I love “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have” for many reasons. I relate to that idea. But also these lyrics: “I've been tearing around in my fucking nightgown/24/7 Sylvia Plath”

Girlpool’s Before the World Was Big really captivates what it felt like to be a little kid: I just miss how it felt standing next to you/Wearing matching dresses before the world was big”

Bea Troxel’s The Way That It Feels with her mellifluous silky smooth and resounding tones, so powerful and clear, it’s gorgeous. And the lyrics: “It's the way that you see me that brings me here/As if the ice crumbling is all that sighs at night/As if nests in winter are all that’s exposed…” Pure poetry.

Demons by the National has started up. I love Matt Beringer’s voice. This song was written by Beringer and Aaron Dessner. I love this: “I am secretly in love with

Everyone that I grew up with/Do my crying underwater/I can't get down any farther” And the whole concept of staying down with my demons. This is a song for the autumn. Read this discussion of the song on Reddit.

Dear friend, writer and musician John Lavery (R.I.P.) continued his linguistic pyrotechnics in his music. His album, Dignity, was released posthumously. I wish we could write songs together. Here is the first verse to his song, The Saint John River:

I like my summer nights/hard with stars/I like when gawd pulls a perfect/10-watt moon/when the fences sleep/and the poplars spread their secrets /I like the skylight so/

low it murmurs/drive up the valley/in my car/roll down the windows/till I’m fairly tongue-tied/the Saint John River on my side.

I asked friends on social media to talk about particular lyrics that excited them. I received fun responses from Bluesky and Facebook friends, including the following:

John K. Sampson, The Weakerthans, My Favourite Chords

“When you get off work tonight, meet me at the construction site/And we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines”

No surprise here as John’s lyrics and poems are splendid. I own a copy of Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012 from ARP Books, and have dog-eared this song: Diagnosis, with the lines “I have a headache, I have a sore back/I have a letter I can't send/I have desire, it falters and falls down/It calls you up drunk at three or four AM”

Samson has a lovely sense of whimsy and a strong leaning toward metaphor that always intrigues me in a song because it’s the metaphor that sticks with me as an image I carry into my day. His personification in “Diagnosis” makes me think of Lynn Miles, “Loneliness”: “Loneliness is an envelope you can seal yourself into/And send off to a stranger in a town across the sea/Loneliness is a tired old friend who carries your baggage/Through airports and train stations for free.” The Song is on her album, Slightly Haunted, an album that is one of my all time favourites.

Neil Finn, Four Seasons in One Day, Crowded House. I like this line: “Four seasons in one day/Lying in the depths of your imagination” and the concept of a change from one season/mood into another in rapid succession.

I have always loved the song “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” It has become an ear worm over the years: “catch a deluge in a paper cup” – so good!

Sufjan Stevens’ Casimir Pulaski Day.

I love these lines: "Your father cried on the telephone/And he drove his car into the Navy yard/Just to prove that he was sorry."

If, like me, you don’t know who Casimir Pulaski was, a Polish man who was involved in the American Revolution, and a hero in both USA and Poland, you want to understand why Sufjan Stevens chose to write about him, you will Google. Tbh, after reading this article, I still don’t know, but this is as far down the rabbit hole as I can go, before preparing lunch…

It comes as no surprise to me that someone mentioned Nick Cave with a link to some of his most widely known and loved songs and their lyrics.

I always think I should love Nick Cave, but he hasn’t won a place in my heart, even though he has a cameo in Wings of Desire, one of my favourite films. I do love Red Right Hand and the whole idea of the murder ballad.  And Into My Arms too! And yes, the lyrics are great.

I think too of Tom Waits, who has one of my favourite lyrics from Alice: “And I must be insane/To go skating on your name/And by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice/

Of Alice.”

Another mention was of Beck. I love his album Morning Phase. Here’s the song that was referenced: Loser.

And Bon Iver:

Thanks to the folks who contributed! Tell me about the songs you love and why. I’d love to know.

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