Gratuitous Lyrics Post

[unforth]

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...

Comments

Gratuitious lyrics criticism :)

[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...