JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Why explain abstract lyrics?

Hi Everett,

I'm sure that is true for some people, but for others, put simply:

words are music too

and, like music, they carry no exact meaning, and can only evoke different meanings to different people, no matter how hard the effort to pin them down. Of course certain idioms like country come close to this, but Country music itself loves to exploit words with multiple meanings, especially as a source for hooks.

There are abstract writers who write "top-down" and those who write "bottom-up": "top-downs" know exactly what they're try to "achieve", more times than not it's an "effect" as opposed to an "exact meaning", and go about creating something that hopefully comes close to achieving this.

"Bottom-uppers" put words together from basic cellular units: a word here, a phrase there, oooh, this goes with that, wow, I can add this....and more times than not the writer himself does not know what it means, only that it "feels right" and its meaning exists in...another dimension perhaps; I'm betting this is middle period Dylan, and most abstract lyricists: they simply put words together in a way that "resonated" with them...Any "overarching" meaning to be found usually comes ex post facto, and is just an "educated guess" by the author; if he/she does make such a guess, though, readers must defer to it, unless the author makes perfectly clear that his/her reading is just a stab at it, too...

--Mike