How important are lyrics to you in music?

I'd like to add that lyrics, together with artwork (especially on LPs), make listening to vocal albums a multiart experience which

can be much richer than only paying attention to the sounds alone. Lyrics can have much poetic beauty, and they can be very 

intellectually giving and inspiring as well.

If you would like to share some of your favourite lyrics with others, you can do it in this thread (only excerpts allowed):

Poetic Pieces for the Mind and Spirit 

Very interesting topic.   I guess option 4 is the most adequate in my case.

Beginning 10-15 years ago, I started to pay much more attention to the lyrics, and I've had much pleasure of doing it.

One of the best examples, I can tell, is my initially experience with H to He Who Am... about 10 years ago. The first couple 

of times I listened to it, I found it rather boring. But then, I got the idea to read the lyrics which showed to move me 

very much, and suddenly this album became entirely another experience for me.

Today, it's one of the albums I'm most fond of, while I find its lyrics not less than simply the best I've ever seen. H to He showed also

to be the door for my entrance to the world of VdGG, so today I'm fond/very fond of two other albums by them as well. 

"...  Yes lyrics are mostly gibberish ..."

"... bad lyrics ... "

"...Another interesting point is that lyrics in languages I don't understand become part of the music, like another instrument..."

"... most singers don't enunciate properly..."

From a theater perspective, there is something about "lyrics" that we do not accept, or wish to understand or, worse, don't give a damn about. It is no secret in a LIVE theater audience that EVERY NIGHT is different, even though the actors are using the same moves and the same words. For us to think that the audience is stupid and actually follows, or believes, what is being told them as if it was the church in many places ... is only going to confuse any ideas and thoughts you will have about this.

In the earlier days of the "start" of "progressive this and that" you had The Moody Blues give you some poetry ... which sounded really pretty in that album. The next album, you got the whiff ... it was cardboard, and when you go back to the previous, it is nice ... but nothing fancy or out of the ordinary, and certainly not a "major" work of poetry, as defined by academic standards.

I still think that many folks in the "early" progressive music days, were more about POETRY, than they were about lyrics, which had a reputation in radio for crap and just "ditties" (quick dirty rhymes and clever set of words in a sentence) ... and all of a sudden, some things don't fit. But, "poetry" was not for everyone, and STILL to this day, folks dismiss Pete Sinfield, for his work and assist in various places, that helped elevate the quality of his words ... it also helped that some folks were better at "poetry" than they were at "rock singing" which was the case with Greg Lake, that helped define the idea and mode even better, in a polarizing album that to this day, folks might not see how much of a photograph the album is of the time and place, and who, specifically, they might be talking about in murky clouds or words. There was no secret anywhere who the megalomaniacs were in one song. There were no secrets to the wind, that no one heard (intentionally I might add), as a way to say that they disliked all the drugs, clothes and rock music! The wind moves, and the meaning of the words ... changes!

Fast forward a few years, and you get someone like Roy Harper, and now clearly, Peter Hammill. And, at the time, it was either love or hate. And even RH did not do much touring other than by himself because everyone thought he was mooching off Jimmy, and so on ... but no one could handle PH, and how different, he sounded. It created a love or hate it thing. The weird thing, is that NO ONE said anything about his words at all ... it was all a dislike for his personal style of singing, which was emotional to the core, and a lot less about the 'emotion" that one note is supposed to have and show, which is where another musical fallacy needs to die and fall apart ... the this is happy and that is sad crap. RH was for the longest time about his words, and how the song came out of it. He doesn't even care of a song comes out of it or not, because he is just following his words as he plays and sings ... we have a hard time with this, because these folks have a "tendency" to never know when to stop, and the audience has a tendency to get bored, specially the rock audiences, who have an idea that only their songs matter. Never mind the artist and writer.

I have a lot of music that is "different" and I have it because it was something that challenged the "norm" when it came to "lyrics". Someone I met, that liked AD2 told me their lyrics were weird and made no sense. Well, to me they do make sense, and they are written as if it was meant to be so. I believe they knew what they were saying, and how, and we sit here and try to figure out how and why. CAN was the same thing with Damo ... what was he saying, though he had a few words here and there as some sort of hint, however, in his case, it was less about the meaning of any words, than it was about the "expression" itself ... which generated a lot of positive reviews and concert footage that we still watch, wondering how he did that. However, both of these were close to the artistic scene that became known as "krautrock" (sick!) and had been aligned with film, theater and the written arts. In theater, at the time, as well as rock concerts, actors got on stage and free formed words, and you can see an example of Klaus Kinski delivering his spiel to an audience is the Werner Herzog special. Were the words important? Yep! Many responded. Were the words themselves, something that you would read and think about? NO. And now you have 2 opposite things ... words that mean something delivered in this way, and words that don't mean anything delivered differently. 

Where is the bottom line?

We still don't have an answer, and in some cases, refuse to answer, because we think that "jane got a gun" is heavy lyric and something else isn't. At that point, I'm not sure that the words themselves are the issue ... it's how it is said, or sung that brings it across, and makes it well known. And, in this area, there are a lot of rock singers that are very good. A lot of folks might not like Mick, but he is one of those folks that works on HOW his words have to come out to get the effect on the song, and The Rolling Stones perfect that for many years ... you remember the song by how Mick introduced it! And if you said the same words at a party ... you would get a lot of blarney, I bet! Does that make it a good lyric? Not necessarily, but it does add CONTENT to the song, which is a characteristic that we like to see in a lot of our music.

Another good example these past few years, is Kate Bush, and how she has started to create pieces of music that are not beat driven, and are strictly flow driven, and it is a style that is really hard to listen to since we are attached to the beat, but there is a certain beauty in its freedom that is neat ... we rarely consider that ... and in the end, all it is there for, is to color her words, which (generally speaking) is rather poetic.

This ends up leading me to some of the big names in words, or lyrics, which I will try to work on a different thread. It's hard to ignore a Bob Dylan, a Ian Anderson, and so many others out there ... 

Hi,

What is strange to me, is that a lot of the early "progressive music" was not quite, or exactly about the "melody", and the work was defined differently. I suppose that we could say that YES and JT kinda changed that to more "melody" ... but in the end, "progressive music" in the early days was more about adding/including elements of new music ... and not the same old thing. The joke used to be that the American AM Radio was all about the melody ... nothing else.

I probably would use the word "composition" instead of "melody", being that a "melody" gets repeated, and within a compositional definition, it might not get repeated. IF ... mighty IF ... it is repeated, then we are looking at the pop structure and not necessarily "progressive music".

Lyrics is another story and more on that in a different post.

As a musician, this is a question that really interests me. The "problem" I have with lyrics is that, by and large, as soon as lyrics are added to a song it becomes "about" something -- this has a huge bearing on the mood of the piece. Of course, instrumental music also has a mood and a feeling (or many), but the interpretation for the listener is much wider -- I feel more free listening to instrumental music. Another interesting point is that lyrics in languages I don't understand become part of the music, like another instrument.

My own view is that lyrics are the hardest thing to get right in a song. It's no accident that "most singers don't enunciate properly" -- I think this is usually deliberate - an attempt to make the lyrical content more like an instrument. In fact, I find that when singing a vocal part, I very quickly forget what the words actually mean and concentrate rather on stretching/splitting/moulding them to fit the music. In that sense, I could be singing absolute gibberish and it wouldn't make any difference to me.

In the prog genre, I can think of one example where lyrical content has become a problem for me -- Porcupine Tree. I love their music up to a certain point (around early 2000s), since the lyrical content was either sparse enough or vague enough to seem to balance well with the music, but at some point the lyrics became too much "about something" in particular and this began to put me off.

Outside of prog... listening to Bob Dylan without the lyrics would seem fairly pointless, so it does depend on the music. That said, I really enjoyed some of the Zeppelin bonus mixes in the latest incarnation of their re-re-re-re-re-re-re remasters that were sans-lyrics.