On 17 April, NME was dedicated to “Today’s Greatest Songwriters”. I wrote three artist profiles for it, but we lost some pages due to the Malcolm McLaren obituary. Here’s what I wrote in full…
Bill Callahan
Callahan pinpointed the nonsensical subjectivity of great lyrics on his latest record, ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’. On ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’, he falls asleep and dreams “the perfect song”, only to find on waking that the lyrics he wrote down are complete gibberish. But despite it being hooey, it’s perfectly characteristic of his propensity for dark and wry looks at the failings and disappointments of humankind. On ‘Running The Loping’, he indulges in “getting off on the pornography of my past” – and Callahan’s is, or at least was, a dark and rancorous fetish, appealing to the misanthrope that seethes through all of our falters and cracks.
As Smog, his lyrics were an appropriately engulfing bleak cloud, bluntly expressing our most perverse desires in an uncomfortably close, scathing monotone – from fantasizing about your lover standing before the mourning congregation to eulogise about how you had sex in “the very graveyard where my body now rests” on ‘Dress Sexy At My Funeral’, to cruelly disconnecting from everyone to wallow in your own idealistic solitude on ‘I Break Horses’. Equine metaphors crop up continually throughout his earlier career, as harbingers of death, hubris, stubbornness, and, on his final album as Smog, coltish rebirth. He too was reborn, shedding both the old moniker and grievous atmosphere that went alongside it. “I used to be sorta blind / Now I can sorta see,” he sings on ‘Rococo Zephyr’ from ‘Sometimes…’, tentatively dabbling in newfangled happiness, but without forsaking his trademark scepticism.
Where to start: ‘Say Valley Maker’, from the Smog album ‘A River Ain’t Too Much To Love’, released May 2005
“So bury me in wood and I will splinter; bury me in stone and I will quake, Bury me in water and I will geyser; bury me in fire and I’m gonna phoenix…”
PJ Harvey
Sometimes it seems like it’s the law that any successful female musician must be likened to PJ Harvey. A few of the comparisons are apt – take Scout Niblett, whose guttural moans and undernourished guitar recall the caustic Pazuzu by way of Dorset rawness of PJ’s earlier albums. But how many of the world’s Florences and Kate Nashes would dare pen a song about infanticide, as PJ did with ‘Down By The Water’? “I had to lose her, to do her harm,” she sings so malevolently that it caused many to wonder whether she had actually drowned her daughter. How many of them would forgo prettiness to explore the depraved arachnid fantasy of ‘Rid Of Me’, where she sings, “I’ll make you lick my injuries, I’ll twist your head off, say”?
The answer’s none of them, because Polly Jean Harvey is a unique and daring lyricist like no other. Critics have tried to label her a feminist, and you can see why, with songs like ‘Sheela-na-Gig’. Named after disturbing medieval carvings of women, it perverts ‘60s girl group lyrics that “wash that man right out of my hair” and references Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’, the ultimate modern expression of gynophobia. But she’s not a feminist – she rarely judges, and inhabits female and male bodies. Instead, she reduces the female body and motherhood to a series of carnal desires and sensations so strange they’re hardly recognisable. Any musician worth their salt – female or male – should strive for comparison to such an individual lyricist, but few will ever warrant it.
Where to start: ‘Dress’, from the album ‘Dry’, released in 1992
“It’s hard to walk and the dress is not easy, I’m swinging over like a heavy loaded fruit tree”
Stephen Malkmus
Raconteur, riddler and serial Scrabble enthusiast, Stephen Malkmus occupies a throne in the annals of bafflingly sublime lyricists somewhere between Mark E. Smith and Dr Seuss. He’s the kind of songwriter who deserves to have theses dedicated to decoding the strange universe of his songs – where the late photographer Richard Avedon and Rush singer Geddy Lee are natural cultural reference points, and homophones like “career!”/“Korea!” and “puh-lease me”/”police me” make already sketchy meanings slip away even further. However, many have tried and failed to interpret his non-sequiturs, both in his time as Pavement’s frontman and his oft-overlooked and equally brilliant solo career with The Jicks. Admittedly, they’re often completely nonsensical and seem as arbitrary as Lady Gaga’s fashion sense, as the opening line from ‘Brighten The Corners’’ ‘Stereo’ proves – “Pigs, they tend to wiggle when they walk / The infrastructure rots / And the owners hate the jocks with their agents and their dates.” But try as others might to mimic Malkmus, his playful command of language chimes with the inimitable chaos peculiar to true genius. That’s not to say his songs are impenetrably wordy nonsense masquerading as high concept either – occasionally, truly poignant moments shine through, like “Because you’re empty and I’m empty / And you can never quarantine the past,” from ‘Gold Soundz’. The latter line became the title of the greatest hits that heralded Pavement’s enormously anticipated reunion, giving fans the second chance to try and yelp along with Malkmus’ tongue-twisting delivery that we thought we’d never get.
Where to start: Honestly – anywhere, it’s so hard to choose. Maybe ‘You Are A Light’ from ‘Terror Twilight’, released in 1999.
“Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses, they’re insane, I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains…”
Originally published in NME 21.04.10
Originally published in the May edition of The Fly
