Ladies and gentlemen, I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, but I have decided that unclear song lyrics really are the best. I think the reason is that you can only say so much when you do it with precision. When you repeatedly sing about something clearly and specifically, it’s only a matter of time before you realize just how much the emotions that we feel can only be expressed in song are just like everyone else’s. There’s only so many ways to sing “I love you”, “I no longer love you”, or “I’ve changed my mind, I love you again”. And seeing as how these are apparently the only regular emotions that are musically inclined, we end up with decades worth of top forty hits all expressing the same sentiments, and a future bevy of songwriters desperately trying to find new ways of saying the same things, often landing on retarded ways that irreversibly embed themselves in the popular culture.
Two words: Disco Stick.
But then there are those artists who realized that the only way to sing something different was to write lyrics that were indecipherably vague, or outright nonsensical. Growing up, They Might Be Giants were one of my favorite bands, partly because they had impossible to resist catchy music, and partly because there was no one else in history who had sung about Particle Man (particle man), doing the things a particle can. Another of my favorites was Laika and the Cosmonauts, who eschewed lyrics altogether and just used Russian surf guitar riffs. Instead of hearing how much some guy wants “you” back being expressed in the simplest terms possible (“I want you back”), I got to listen to surf guitar and picture wacky aliens doing wacky things. Which is not too hard to imagine when their album cover looks like this:
Am I just showing off how much better my musical choice as a child was then yours? Okay, yes.
Going by this logic that vagueness makes the best lyrics, I’ve decided that two of the best songwriters ever are Beck and KT Tunstall. Listen to almost any song Beck has ever done, and there will be maybe one line that sounds like it makes sense. He talks about “robots and gigolos”, “one’s got a weasel and the others got a flag”, and says he’s “wishing I was living with a hit man.” Not a one of those lines makes any more sense in context, either. It doesn’t take long to realize he’s most of the time saying absolutely nothing, but he says it so well, often, even humorously. KT Tunstall on the other hand is not too different from mainstream writers, if you only count subject matters. She’s a perfect reminder that you do sound totally original even when you sing about the same things as everyone else except that you dredge them through extended metaphors until they’re gloriously unrecognizable. I listened to her first album for a couple years, and it still took her outright saying in an interview one song is about long distance romance before I got it. Makes sense in retrospect, but I’ll be damned if I was ever going to guess something so mundane from lyrics about icebergs melting. And that, it turns out, is what she does best: bringing metaphorical imprecision to what would otherwise be mundane (she also holds the distinction of creating the only positive use of the term "banjo solo" that I can think of).
So for all you fledgling songwriters out there reading this, learn from these artists and always remember to write vague.
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