‘Songwriters are not poets, Or songs are not poems, I should say. In fact, songs are often bad poems. Take the music away and what you’re left with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpy syllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors.’
SIMON ARMITAGE
By and large, I wouldn’t disagree with Armitage’s claim. The vast majority of song lyrics exist simply to keep the walls of the song from falling in. There’s always been more than an element of service industry to the work of the professional song writer. Horses for courses is the intention and it’s the overall subscription to the genre/style in question.
For me, only a handful of lyricists’ compositions stand up proud without the superstructure of music around them. Amongst them, I’d nominate Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Ian Dury, Richard Thompson, Bob Dylan…
Now, having set myself up for ridicule and scorn, here’s a group of lyrics that I wrote for my good friend Steve Moorby to set to music. Each one has been fully arranged and, until lockdown, was being played at gigs by the trio we share with fellow songwriter Gemma Moorby, named, somewhat unimaginatively, Moorby Jones.
I don’t know whether they have life beyond the vehicle of the song. But they derive from the same underground source that produces my poems so at worst they have the status of cousins. Here they are, all standing up stark naked, waiting patiently to be cloaked once again in music…
BECOMING GHOSTS
There’s a houseful of lights on the cliff top up high.
At the end of the track there it’s shining.
And the summer dark swarms like invisible wind
all around us where we two are climbing.
There’s sand on our skin and rime in our hair
and salt on our tongues as communion.
I smile in the dark; I know you’re smiling too
as we clamber towards the reunion.
It’s deep into night and we’re stumbling blind
with just candles of gorse here to guide us.
Voices rising like sparks: friends and lovers above
and a world that must shortly divide us.
As we rise into light and our story is told,
we take up our place in the chorus,
ghosts in the present, ghosts in the past,
ghosts through the long years before us.
§§§
NOW
CHORUS
This is where they live, the wise ones,
in the gap between each heartbeat,
in the space between each breath.
There the light will always find them,
clear before, no ghosts behind them,
cold eye cast on life, on death.
Past is past,
it’s just a story,
evening primrose,
morning glory.
What’s to come
is just a notion,
part still life
and part commotion.
On the way
we count each second,
minutes tallied,
hours reckoned.
Constellations
gliding by;
each star numbered
in the sky.
Now’s the moment,
grain of sand,
countless falling
hand to hand.
Pinch in passing
every one
or watch them dwindle
down to none.
§§§
sisyphus 