unforth | Gratuitous Lyrics Post

I'm gonna write something long and involved in the next few days, I expect, but for now, I'm currently nuts about this song.

I found a letter that said:
"I'm sorry that you were asleep when I wrote these words down,"
You'd think I'd ought to be used to that by now.
Save for a few of those late night episodes,
Missed opportunities, and "I Don't Cares,"
There's not a lot that I feel obliged to share or talk about.

I'll have my brother stop by this Saturday to pick up my things,
Just make sure you're not there.
This may sound bad, and don't take it the wrong way..
I love you, however,
You hold me down

You're the echoes of my everything,
You're the emptiness the whole world sings at night.
You're the laziness of afternoon,
You're the reason why I burst and why I bloom.
How will I break the news to you?

Cancel our dinner with Max and Coraline,
feed Jacky's gerbil and try to stay clean.
We'll talk it over after I've had some time alone to sort it out.
You hold me down

You're the echoes of my everything,
You're the emptiness the whole world sings at night.
You're the laziness of afternoon,
You're the reason why I burst and why I bloom.
You're the leaky sink of sentiment,
You're the failed attempts I never could forget.
You're the metaphors I can't create to comprehend this curse that I call love..
How will I break the news to you?
Or, here's a music video of it on Youtube.

Okay, now back to moving my furniture around...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

schenker28.livejournal.com

Interesting -- I haven't listened to the whole song yet, but it illustrates something I'm currently doing some research on: relationships between lyrics and rhythms in popular songs. I think there is a lot of sort of music in the genre of this song where the lyrics and music have a sort of schizophrenic relationship. It will take a more sophisticated computer model than the one I have so far to quantify these things, but here's an example:

"I found a letter that said:
'I'm sorry that you were asleep...'"

This text is sung with musical break after the second "that", more like so:

"I found a letter that said 'I'm Sorry that,
You were asleep...'"

The accent on "You" (both in the rhythmic and melodic domain) sounds ridiculous, silly, amateurish, etc. etc. to me, and it really makes some popular-style songs hard to listen to, for me. It have the same effect for me as when a 5th grade student is trying to read a book out loud, and pauses at the end of every *line*, instead of after the periods. You can imagine the halting, disturbing, and perhaps humorous effect of listening to such a reading, right? I think it's the same effect here.

I'm not pointing this out to be snobbish or to complain, but just because it's academically very interesting to me. Moreover, I think that this kind of "mistake" (indeed, it sounds like a mistake to my ear) is actually normal for the style -- perhaps it's part of the genre, to make these sort of weird schizophrenic dissociations between text and music!

The chorus and one bridge section I heard don't seem to have the same problem, but that first verse seemed to be problematic. "Missed opportunities, and" wasn't quite as bad as the first example, but it's similar -- I think the "and" should be musically joined to the following phrase instead of the preceding one. Otherwise, we would write things like:
"I'd like an apple, a pear and, a banana". That's the sort of weird grammatical mistake implied by these dissociations I'm talking about.

One final example: in the line "This may sound bad...", I would have accented the word "bad" or even "sound" or "may", for different meanings, but to accent this is so weird: "THIS may sound bad" doesn't seem to be expressing the right meaning... it's a very awkward say to speak or sing that phrase!

Curious what you think. Also, I want to know what part of the song it is that you like so much, if you are able to tell :) Knowing you, perhaps it's the lyrics more than anything else here? Or maybe the long notes on "You hold me down"? Of course there are things to appreciate, despite my complaint above :)

Related work by me, at the syllable-level (which doesn't account for the phrase-level issues above):

http://cs.indiana.edu/~epnichol/files/epn/lyricbasedrhythms2009.pdf

Tomorrow I am starting a research project with a big database of pop music, where we're going to try to get into these issues some more...

From:

unforth.livejournal.com

Wow, that's interesting! Thanks for sharing! I definitely hear what you mean. The flip side is that, while I wouldn't say that I find this mistake to be more or less auditorily appealing, it doesn't particularly bother me, and, in fact, I think that I do find there to be something about it that makes the music interesting, kind of like syncopation, except with the words. (I know I'm going to sound amateur in what I write - sorry about that).

As we've discussed, I have a hell of time explaining what I like or don't like about a song. First, I think the theme of the lyrics speaks to me, especially since I heard the song a lot before I read them, and thus I had a different interpretation of one critical part of the song - in the transcription, it reads,
"I found a letter that said 'I'm sorry that,
You were asleep when I wrote these words down.'
You'd think I oughta be used to that by now."
But I interpreted it as the ENTIRE SONG being the letter - which affected how I interacted with it's content. Thus, thinking of it all as a "Dear John" letter, I found it to be emotionally moving.

Second, it's musical range is very good for me, and so I like to sing it. The words are pretty clear and easy to understand, which made it very well suited to my road trip, when I wanted music that I could sing along with.

Third, it happens to sound relatively similar to other music that I've been enjoying recently. With the thought that it might help you, here are a few other songs that I've been really into recently. Some of them are like this song, and other's aren't.
1. Alkaline Trio - Calling All Skeletons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4K3ThV3M1Y) (I heard this song for the first time about a year ago and it's been one of my favorites since then.)
2. Alkaline Trio - Warbrain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98cmO6NfBFE) (this has been one of my favorite songs for almost two years)
3. Motion city Soundtrack - Everything is Alright (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci4-_hVwf4A)
4. Dragonash - Hot Cakes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UICHaT8Tke4) (I haven't translated enough of this to tell you what it's about, but my favorite line is "itsumo kimi no onagi no sora shita de onagi yume o miyo(?)" - not sure about the last word - but it basically means "let's always aim for (or reach for, or try for, or a few other things, depending on that last word) the same dream beneath the same sky." (that's not quite right, but it's not that easy to translate, the more so because I've had trouble making out the verb. ;) ) (this is a pretty crappy recording of it, but it'll have to do...)
5. Sundowner - Steal Your Words (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSjkBQWiQb0) (I couldn't find anything but a live recording, but I LOVE this song - another more recent discovery)
6. Goldfinger - Youth (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdX7Z4_oDKA) (I heard this song a long time ago, then rediscovered it in February)
7. Third Eye Blind - Never Let You Go (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS8w4jG9Yk8) - this isn't the whole song, but it's the only clear recording of the ones I checked.
8. Hellogoodbye - All Time Lows (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRdqwftGBPk) (ignore the music right at the start, that's not it)
9. Last one - I couldn't get a youtube mostly complete version, but I can get 28 seconds of it from Amazon - Treble Charger - I Don't Know (http://www.amazon.com/gp/recsradio/radio/B0000520NL/ref=pd_krex_dp_001_008?ie=UTF8&track=008&disc=001</a) (hopefully that link works - it seems to on my end)

So, normally I wouldn't bore you to tears with this, but since you seem pretty interested and you're doing a project related to it. So these, along with a few others, make up my list of current favorites - and in particular, the ones that I've found recently all seem kind of similar to me, and this song too (that's numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9). They all have a musical quality that I like, and I like how it interacts with the lyrics and the main melody.

(continued in another comment)

From:

unforth.livejournal.com

Along those lines, I think a major reason why the phenomena you've pointed out to me doesn't bother me is that I don't really listen to lyrics as having to fit together and make sense. If I did, I couldn't enjoy music in other languages, but I do, because in a sense the vocal track is just another instrument, if I like the way the NOTES interact, I don't care that much about intonation or meaning. This is compounded because in Japanese songs it's not uncommon for lines and emphasis to break in all kinds of funky, weird ways - often in the middle of words - which is definitely not how it is in spoken Japanese.

Lastly, as for which part of the song I like the best? That's easy -
"You're the echoes of my everything,
You're the emptiness the whole world sings at night.
You're the laziness of afternoons,
You're the reason why I burst and why I bloom"
I don't know why, but that verse, especially the line in bold, just makes me smile.

I'd be happy to chat about this more if you have the time-

From:

schenker28.livejournal.com

Great! Thanks for the reply -- I'll need to listen to the songs you posted and think about this more... but I need to write some lyric analysis code first for this project!

I'm really curious about what happens in Japanese. If I had thought of this project earlier I'd want to include J-Pop in the paper I'm writing, but I only know of one good computer data source there for music + lyrics, but I have to buy it on physical CDs and have it shipped from Prof. Goto in Japan, and I don't even know if it has all the matched up lyrics+rhythms data I need. So maybe I'll do a followup study there.

I'm curious if your experience with weird chopped-up words in japanese music is exclusively fairly modern J-Pop... perhaps an older Japanese folk tune wouldn't have this property? Maybe what you've heard is so strongly influenced by modern Western pop that the rhythmic-lyric divorce is actually carried over as part of the genre? (I'm stealing that "divorce" term from Prof. Temperley, who has a paper called "The Melodic-Harmonic Divorce in Rock", which probably explains some issues I have with melody in rock music!)

It would be a bit strange to me if the natural word breaks in Japanese words and the natural Japanese way of stressing different word parts were totally ignored in setting music to text. It's certainly possible, because of the different role of stress -- English, and I believe American English in particular, is the very most syllable-stress oriented language on the planet, and the mora of a language like Japanese behave very differently.

However, the old adage says that "Music is heightened speech", so I expect text and music to be in some sort of relationship. Also, there is an interesting study that shows how *instrumental* classical music (no words involved!) differs significantly based on whether the composer is an English or French speaker -- the stress-timing of English results in typical rhythmic patterns in the music much different from those arising from a composer used to speaking with the syllable-timing of French. That paper didn't take mora-timed languages like Japanese into account (but it was in the "future work" section, so maybe it's been done by now).