JPF Home Page Forums Lyric and MP3 Feedback Lyric Feedback Forum 3 Shiny

Hi Donna,

I'm liking this for the most part. Please forgive my brain this morning, it's disorganized and wants to jump around a bit.

In V1, the adjective "dead" doesn't work for me, as it sings clunky, and being dead it doesn't make sense as to how it could write, even if it was a magical or extremely talented fly, but either "..fly on my windowsill/could write.." or "..fly stuck in my windowsill/could write" are both okay--the latter has an inner rhyme "in/win," and also would seem to be more in line with the singer's sentiment of how she feels "stuck" but not dead.

The chorus works okay, but it wraps around to the title at the end, and although you give reasons that the singer longs to be shiny right above, there could be one more killer reason added below the second "I want to be shiny" that might make the chorus even stronger. I think it's because being "shiny" is such an unusual thing to want to be, in and of itself, that I want to be reminded why up to the very end. The singer wants to "glow like a beacon" and we know she's speaking metaphorically, but it also produces a pretty strong literal image, one not too different from "lit up like a Christmas tree" which has a negative (inebriation) connotation, so I'm wondering if such glowing in "somebody's night" makes it an effective metaphor there. Glowing and shiny-ness would seem to produce "warmth" as a byproduct, and that warmth could be mentioned perhaps, and would seem to be a welcome part in somebody's night. Also..how strong a shine would the singer have --would this "somebody" maybe need to wear shades? Shades in there might prove to be too much a humorous diversion, but it would certainly tell a listener that the singer was indeed pretty shiny!

V2 is pretty strong; I love "bleak panorama" and its rhyming partner. You can probably lose "almost" --how does one "almost" ache, anyway? Let the singer ache!

I like the contrast of using moon in the second pre-chorus.

So the singer has no particular man in mind, but the bridge shows that she does like a certain type, and "I know he’ll be funny, loving, and wise/A room with a view, a wide-open door" tells me that without being told so in the last line, and that might free up another thought there.

That's all I got for now!

EDIT: I never had much exposure to the concept of "shiny" used as descriptive of people until the REM song "Shiny Happy People" --and I always took that song to be about conforming and being like everyone else--but before that I had never encountered the word as referring to people.

And so although I realize it to be used here to mean a kind of self-confident ebullience, I'm one of those Neanderthals that at some gut level can't not also see/hear the literal meaning simultaneously. I guess that's why I felt okay to suggest "shades." I didn't want to pretend the literal meaning didn't exist, but felt it maybe to be a good thing, to acknowledge it in some way, in the song.

Mike