Unsung songs are sweeter?
Hal
"If the brain were so simple we could understand
it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
--Lyall Watson
Halvard Johnson
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On Sep 4, 2007, at 12:38 PM, Jon Corelis wrote:
> In my own experience song lyrics divorced from their music may or may
> not seem embarrassingly naked, depending, interestingly, on what sort
> of songs are involved.
>
> Most rock and popular song lyrics, even good ones, sound quite stilted
> when experienced as a written text. It's hard to tell whether this is
> true of something like Farewell Angelina, since most of us can't read
> it without playing it to the tune in our heads. I suspect it wouldn't
> sound as good to someone who had never heard it sung. (There was a
> hilarious routine relevant to this in Annie Hall, when one of Woody
> Allen's horrible dates talks about how great Bob Dylan is: "... and I
> really like the one where he says um ... she takes just like a woman,
> yes, she does ... and um ... she makes love just like a woman, yes,
> she does ...")
>
> Traditional ballads (like the Child ones) come across fairly well on
> the page, though finally hearing one familiar to you only through the
> text sung can be a revelation.
>
> Elizabethan lyrics have the best of both worlds: wonderful on the
> page and even better when sung. Campion's lyrics are great poetry,
> but some of them become unbearably beautiful when sung. A good
> performance of his "Never weather beaten sail" is almost enough to
> make me get religion, which is saying something. I read somewhere
> that this hymn was still sung in Anglican parishes well into the
> twentieth century. Say what you will about the C of E, they certainly
> have the best language of any denomination I know.
>
> --
> ===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
>
> ===================================
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