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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...
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...
Re: Gratuitious lyrics criticism :)
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-
Re: Gratuitious lyrics criticism :)
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).