NEGUS Songwriterssonglyrics 2015

Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition
Author(s): KEITH NEGUS and PETE ASTOR

Source: Popular Music, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May 2015), pp. 226-244
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Popular Music (2015) Volume 34/2. © Cambridge University Press 2015, pp. 226-244
doi : 10.1 Ol 7/S0261143015000021
Songwriters and song lyrics:

architecture, ambiguity
and repetition
KEITH NEGUS and PETE ASTOR
Department of Music, University of Westminster, Regent Street, London W
E-mail: [email protected]
Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, Lond
Abstract
This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting

tecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwrit
explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in respo
for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make
architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs t
regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score
systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in wh
bined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the
of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song ar
less of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily
In this paper we argue for an architectural approach to th

tive that treats songwriters as architects rather than roman
artists. Our approach implies that listeners are indeed dan
architecture when responding to popular songs, and it is a
informs the practices of songwriters.1 By architecture w
characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities reg
formance, recording or version.
Focusing mainly on lyrics, our aim is to contribute to th
and the practices of songwriting - an area neglected or tre
of popular music.2 We also wish to offer an alternative app
as entity: we emphasise the architecture of the song again
tion with lyrics as semantic statements and poetic forms, or
voice, melody and memorable tune. Lyrics, along with me
important - but not always in the ways implied by literary
1 We refer to the quip that 'writing about music is like dancing about ar
musicians including Thelonius Monk, Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and L
provenance cannot be firmly accredited.
2 A notable exception is Joe Bennett's research into collaborative processes
mercial chart-oriented pop music. For many insights into the collaborat
for astute observations on the limits of taking what songwriters say at
226
Songwriters and song lyrics 227
performance theories of voice, songwriting handbooks and psychological surveys of

listener responses.
In developing our argument we are indebted to the ground-clearing work of
Simon Frith (1996), notably his criticism of the ways lyrics have been treated as poet
ry, abstracted as verse on a page, and equally his debunking of a type of sociological
realism that treats lyrics as indicators of values, beliefs and events. Our position in
this essay is intended to complement and to counter those approaches to the popular
song which emphasise the exceptional expressive moment - the claim that a song
only exists as it is realised in its performance, the argument that Frith (1996) devel
oped through his interrogation of lyrics. In addition, we wish to challenge one of
the claims that such performance theory has been reacting against, that is, the
focus on the producer which has returned with the resurgence of research and writ
ing about the 'art' of recording. Here we are opposed to the emphasis on the record
ing as definitive artefact. In our argument, producers are structural engineers making
a contribution to songs that exist as entities independently of their manifestation in
various recordings and performances. And, it is also worth us stating, although it
may be obvious from our approach, that a song cannot be reduced to or explained
through a visual score - the lead sheet or notated sheet music.3
Hence, we are addressing the song as entity. What is it? Where is it? Our
response to such questions is that songs endure irrespective of their manifestation
in a sheet music score, a particular performance and an apparently definitive record
ing. This also presupposes an argument about how we should know, understand,
research and study popular songs, and how we gain knowledge of them.
Musicologists of the popular song have tended to address these questions by
offering interpretations derived from intense personal listening to recordings. The
writings of Richard Middleton (1990, 2000), Allan Moore (2012), Philip Tagg
(1991), Susan McClary (1991), Dai Griffiths (2003, 2012), Sheila Whiteley (1992)
and David Brackett (2000), to name some of the most significant, is dominated by
the method of critical listening. Although occasionally highlighting how a song or
style might articulate forms of inequality (class and gender divisions, attitudes to
sexuality, pejorative musical expressions of various demonised 'others'), such argu
ments have rarely been informed by 'source studies' of the practices of songwriters,
musicians and composers, as has been the case in the tradition of Western art
music, jazz scholarship or studies of the Great American Songbook where explor
ation of creative practices have been more prevalent (see, for example, Furia 1992;
Friedwald 2002).
In contrast to the musicological focus on the text, sociologists have highlighted
the social contexts of production, mediation and consumption (referring to indus
tries, media, markets, patterns of reception). Yet they have also ignored the practices
through which songs are created. The sociological approach, after Pierre Bourdieu
(1993), Howard Becker (1984), Peter Martin (1997, 2006) and Tia DeNora (1997,
2000), avoids musical sound and creative practice, and maintains that to understand
cultural production we should not look towards the talented originator but be
attuned to the quotidian qualities of music in everyday life or the struggles for pos
ition and status within fields of cultural production.
3 For an example of such an approach, based on an analysis of sheet music as an unproblematic equiva
lent of the song, see Alec Wilder (1990).
228 Keith Negus and Pete Astor
There are dissenters. In an article first published (in German) in 1982, Kurt
Blaukopf warned of the 'danger of detaching the sociology of music from the
music itself', arguing that it would suppress the 'dialogue between the disciplines'
(Blaukopf 2012, p. 14). Nearly 30 years later, Lee Marshall argued that this detach
ment is a pressing issue and called for sociologists to address the aesthetic character
istics of music and develop 'new ways of writing about popular music' uninhibited
by the technical, intellectual orientation of musicologists (Marshall 2011, pp. 167-8).
Marshall advocates a focus on how music 'feels' rather than what it means and illus
trates his approach via a brief case study of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are
A-changing'. Despite this ambitious incursion into territory usually vacated by
sociologists, Marshall follows musicologists in attempting to describe and compre
hend Dylan's song from the 'listener's perspective'. Again, the songwriter's view
point is evaded. Yet, the circumstances through which Dylan created this song are
surely important, not only for understanding the song as music but also for compre
hending how listeners appreciated the song.
We endorse Marshall's proposal for writing about music in a non-technical
manner and for making greater use of metaphor, not least to encourage dialogue
between musicology and other disciplines. We believe that songwriting practice
should be more central to the study of popular music and that understandings of
songs are far more determined by the processes of songwriting than is allowed for
by musicological and sociological approaches to reception. By using the word 'deter
mined' here, we mean shaped, limited, influenced, contested and disputed, mediated
rather than fixed. We are not seeking to elevate the creative songwriter and lyricist as
exceptional; nor do we wish to privilege the originator as authority and source of all
meaning. We take a cue from David Lodge's discussion of fiction. Lodge acknowl
edges that the writer has no 'sovereign authority as an interpreter' of their own
texts, and that readers can provide interpretations of which the author was and is
not aware. Yet, it is still the case that 'literary texts do not, except very rarely,
come into being by accident. They are intentional acts and their manifest intention
is to communicate (even if what is communicated, as in many modern texts, is the
difficulty or impossibility of communication)' (Lodge 2001, p. 299). This is a comment
entirely apt for the study of songwriting.
Intentional acts of songwriting are central to the dialogues that Richard
Middleton refers to when he argues that 'musical meaning cannot be detached
from the discursive, social and institutional frameworks which surround, mediate
and (yes) produce it' (Middleton 2000, p. 9). We will be emphasising a range of tech
niques and showing how, when taking these creative processes into account, the
architecture of the song is important for the creators of a song and, by implication,
for listeners (creators being some of the most empathie and engaged listeners).
We approach songs through the voices of songwriters and largely through
lyrics, acknowledging that this is one route into the issues.4 Existing studies of popu
lar song lyrics usually emphasise reception, privileging the interpretations of listen
ers rather than musicians and songwriters. Typical is Lars Eckstein's 'reading' of
lyrics in which he explores 'how lyrics are implicated in the emergence of meaning
in songs - in particular performative contexts, specific generic conventions, musical
4 This article builds upon research conducted for Astor and Negus (2014), and we occasionally use quota
tions from critics or musicians that we have also cited in this chapter.
structures, and medial situations' (Eckstein 2010, p. 14). His approach is from the
point of view of how lyrics are understood by various audiences in different cultural
contexts, drawing from 'postcolonial studies', his 'academic home ground' (Eckstein
2010, p. 11). Despite other insights gained from critical reception of lyrics (such as
Christopher Ricks's poetic interpretations of Dylan's words), the songwriter's prac
tice is assumed, vaguely implied or neglected.
Studies of lyrics do make it clear that words are foundational to the design of
any popular song. Our research for this paper, and other sources that focus on song
writing (Flanagan 1987; Zollo 2003) suggest that songwriters usually construct songs
without a completed lyric but with a set of interlocking parts from which they
develop a finished lyric. These parts are architectural in character, providing the fra
meworks analogous to how a building is composed of joists, floors, beams, poured
concrete pillars, walls and floors that are filled in. The architectural frame provides
a space of sections and blocks within which words, hooks, tunes, riffs, refrains can
be moved around and substituted. We will be emphasising the way lyrics occupy
a place within the architecture of songs whereby pattern, rhythm and repetition
are as equally important as the more commonly presented semantic linear interpre
tations of lyrics when set out as verse on a page.
Shaping songs, combining words and music
Words may be created, composed or 'set to' an existing melody and rhythm. This
common practice can be found in vernacular folk traditions, in the commercially
produced broadside ballads from the 16th-18th centuries, in the production of
Christian hymns, and in 20th-century blues, to provide only a partial list. When
reflecting upon his work for musicals, Oscar Hammerstein (1985, p. 6) referred to
'the American songwriter's habit of writing the music first and the words later'
and recalled:
For twenty-five years, collaborating with Jerome Kern, Herbert Stothart, Sigmund Romberg,
Rudolf Friml and Vincent Youmans, I set words to their music ... Writing in this way, I
have frequently fallen into the debt of my composers for words and ideas that might never
have occurred to me had they not been suggested by music. If one has a feeling for music -
and anyone who wants to write lyrics had better have this feeling - the repeated playing of
a melody may create a mood or start a train of thought that results in an unusual lyric.
(Hammerstein 1985, pp. 4-7)
It is not only show songs created during the era when Hammerstein was writing
lyrics that have been composed in this way. Rock songs are often crafted from creat
ing sonic structures first and then adding lyrics after continual listening. This might
initially involve singing words or nonsensical sounds that fit existing musical pat
terns; as the song develops, these words and sounds are refined and developed to
articulate a more precise mood or meaning. Brian Eno, discussing his album Here
Come the Warm Jets, described this writing technique:
I wrote the lyrics at home with my girlfriend with a cassette of the backing track from the
studio. I sang whatever came into my mind as the song played through. Frequently they're
just nonsense words or syllables. First I try for the correct phonetic sound rather than the
verbal meaning. Off the top I was singing 'oh-dee-dow-gubba-ring-ge-dow'. So I recorded
these rubbish words and then I turned them back into words, (cited in Sheppard 2009, p. 148)
Songwriter Richard Hell described this sculptural and developmental process,

explaining how he would 'come up with bass parts within a series of chord changes
that caught a feeling that worked for me and I would bring that to a rehearsal and I
would describe to the band the feel I was looking for' (Hell 2013). Then, having
recorded the rehearsal, Hell would take the tapes home and begin work on develop
ing the lyric, using a to-and-fro process to arrive at a finished work:
Basically, I used the music; it would suggest kinds of emotions and the subject of the songs
would arise out of how the music made me feel. So then I would start playing with the
lyrics. And then once I'd started with the lyrics, then that might start altering the music a
little bit too; the way the chorus went and what I considered to sing might require the
guitars to change a little bit. (Hell 2013)
In contrast, words may also be created first with the intention that music will be
added later: Townes Van Zandt is quoted by fellow songwriter Guy Clark as telling
him 'that words had to work on paper, without guitar' (McKay 2010, p. 66).
Many songwriters and songwriting teams use both approaches - producing
words first or fitting words to music. Speaking of how he wrote with Burt
Bacharach, Hal David recalled: 'Very often he would give me melodies, from time
to time I would give him lyrics. Very often we sat in a room and banged out a
song together, back and forth, back and forth' (Zollo 2003, p. 210). It was often the
architecture of David's lyric that would spur the process. As Bacharach explained:
With 'Promises, Promises' there were a lot of lyrics that came first, as there was with 'Alfie' and
with 'A House is Not a Home.' [...] Hal brought in a lyric, and I got a general kind of first floor
of the house built, you might say, and then started designating where I wanted to change
musically from what's been written. (Zollo 2003, p. 203)
As should be clear from these examples, it is important not to separate words and
music, as the practice of composing lyrics is embedded in an enduring history of per
formed poetry and versification. As Tom Paulin has written:
Poetry begins in speech, in the skipping rhymes and chants children make up in the
playground and the street. It moves from there into the imagination and life of the common
people - into rhymes, riddles, traditional songs - and is then sometimes collected so that it
moves from oral tradition, communal memory, into print. (Paulin 2008, p. 4)
James Fenton makes a similar point:
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its
transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through
nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read. And we learn an analysis of these
rhymes, a beating of rhythm, a fitting of word to pitch, a sense of structure, long before we
can read. (Fenton 2003, p. 22)
Fenton is recognised as an award-winning poet and performed lyricist, serving as

librettist for Charles Wuorinen's opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2001), based
on Salman Rushdie's novel. When advocating the best ways for a lyricist to compose
a lyric earlier than the music, he stresses the importance of the shape of the lyric, its
rhythmic qualities and its implicit 'tune'. He proposes an approach to composition
whereby the lyricist works with a tune in her or his head 'as a private guarantee
that the words are singable in theory' while giving 'the composer no inkling' (Fenton
2003, p. 120) of the tune that is used when writing the words.
The lyricist's metrical architecture allows the composer to 'set' the words. Song
lyrics will imply a series of strong stresses, which will then be made to fall on the
subsequent musical 'bed'. Because the rhythm of popular song will, almost invari
ably, be in fours or triplets, the existing lyric can be easily sung over the beat in
the song. This has a direct relationship to poetic practice, in so far as there is an
awareness of metre and/or rhyme. But, as Latin Quarter's lyricist Mike Jones pointed
out, 'because the music sets the mood and the expectations of the listener, so the
words are words on music' (Jones 2011). In a poem, the metre, rhythm, mood and
meaning exist alone, whereas in a song lyric the metre provides a structural basis
for musical colouring.
Fenton's and Jones's comments about the shape of the lyric are echoed in simi
lar descriptions by other lyricists. Sammy Cahn, who composed lyrics to many songs
that have become recognised as standards (including 'High Hopes', 'Come Fly With
Me' and 'The Tender Trap'), explained his lyric writing by saying that particular mel
odies are 'architecturally great for lyrics' and going on to discuss what he called the
'architecture of the lyric' (in Zollo 2003, pp. 29-30). Cahn had uncompromising ideas
about the aesthetics of lyrical architecture and criticised writers who followed Bob
Dylan as having 'no sense of the architecture. Any one of my songs, you see a
word under a note. You won't see three words under a note' (in Zollo 2003, p. 35).
However, there are contrasting structures of architecture, just as there are varied
styles of songs and different songwriting practices. This point is developed as a meta
phor by Jimmy Webb in Tunesmith, his reflections on songwriting in which he likens
songs, like Bacharach, to designing and constructing buildings:
Perhaps some will say at this juncture, 'A barn doesn't suit my fancy just now. I have in mind a
nice, sturdy cathedral'. Fine. You build a cathedral, I'll build a barn or log cabin. The same
rules will apply. Understanding those rules of construction calls now for a study of the
conventions of form. That is to say the traditional, generic songwriting forms with which we
are all subliminally familiar; the ones that will not leave our listeners confused about
whether we have constructed a gymnasium or a motor lodge. (Webb 1998, pp. 52-3)
From reflecting on his songwriting experience, Webb argues that a song's architec
ture significantly shapes the interpretations of listeners and should not cause confu
sion. He then develops the metaphor by saying that 'word and rhyme ... will be our
timbers and nails. With them we can build an endoskeleton or frame for our edifice'
(Webb 1998, p. 53). In discussing how the songwriter will use words that are most
suited to the construction, Webb presents himself as 'the architect' imagining 'the
kind of building he wants to construct' and thinking about the range of 'materials'
that are available:
In the dictionary he finds oaken words, words of stone and paper, plywood words and words
like steel beams, words of ironwood and ash, rich resonant words of mahogany and cherry,
rococo words that swirl like burled walnut, simple pungent pine words, heavy words of
dark ebony, ephemeral, silly words of balsa, everlasting words of marble and granite, and
translucent words like colored glass along with blunt, pragmatic words made of lead and
cement. (Webb 1998, p. 53)
Webb's point is that words are fundamental to the structure quite regardless of what
critics and listeners might say about their semantic meaning or their apparent
banality. We might push the analogy here and say that many buildings are dismissed
as banal and superficial but this does not invalidate their architectural significance.
Think of the attacks on, and subsequent critical reappraisal of, 1930s and 1950s sub
urban housing, 1970s council estates, and various municipal buildings. Hence, we
should be sceptical of a populist position that plays down the importance of song
lyrics if they are reported as unheard, trite or irrelevant. Such an argument is
given scholarly legitimacy in Theodore Gracyk's (1996, p. 65) dismissive assertion
that 'in rock music most lyrics don't matter very much'. To this we respond: if lyrics
do not matter, why did Paul McCartney spend so long finding words for the song he
had given a working title to of 'Scrambled Eggs' (the song that became 'Yesterday')?
And why did Kurt Cobain write out and re-draft the lyrics to 'Smells Like Teen
Spirit' if they did not matter? Cobain spent a lot of time reworking, evaluating
and rewriting his lyrics - as evidenced in his posthumously published notebooks,
containing different drafts of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' (Cobain 2002, pp.136,138,141).
In both cases the songwriter had a structure of possibilities to be worked on. So,
in certain respects we could say that structure precedes semantics: the sonic shape - its
rhythmic pattern, melodic contour, interlocking sections allowed for a certain feel to
a song. We could also argue that structures create or imply semantics: it was 'yesterday'
and not 'scrambled eggs' that McCartney was instinctively searching for as he
brought together the sonic and lyrical architecture. In a similar way, Hammerstein
recounted how Rogers wrote a melody that became the refrain of 'People Will Say
We're In Love' prior to the lyrics, but 'with the thought that it might serve well as
a duet for the two lovers in Oklahoma!' (Hammerstein 1985, p. 13). The point here
is that the music - whether McCartney's melody or the rhythm patterns on Kate
Bush's Hounds of Love or the songs on David Bowie's Low - was not created first
as instrumentais per se, but as lyric-less songs, structured architecturally with an
awareness of the will to have words added and with some sense of the style and sub
stance of those words.
Popular song and poetry revisited
The writing of lyrics and the use of existing verse inevitably raises questions about
the links between song lyrics and poetry - an issue that has provoked some animated
exchanges. Frith is firmly against any notion that lyrics are poetry or that they stand
up to scrutiny when taken out of their performed circumstances:
Good lyrics by definition, then, lack the elements that make for good lyric poetry. Take them
out of their performed context, and they either seem to have no musical qualities at all, or else
to have such obvious ones as to be silly (this goes as much for Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter as
for Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello, as much for Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson as for
Hank Williams and Tom T. Hall). (Frith 1996, p. 182)
It is debatable whether or not any writers and critics would claim that good lyrics are
akin to lyric poetry. Nonetheless, there exists an audience for popular songs in
printed form. Many collections of printed lyrics disregard strict boundaries between
a song and a poem, echoing the roots of lyric poetry itself. As Cecil Day-Lewis says in
his introduction to English Lyric Poems, the dividing line between songs and lyrical
poems 'is in some places as artificial as an international frontier, and in other places
may seem virtually to disappear' (Day-Lewis 1961, p. 1). And within his collection,
Elizabethan lyrics such as Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'My Lute Awake!' or Samuel Daniel's
'Love Is A Sickness Full of Woes', with their repetitions and refrains, signal this prov
enance very clearly. More recently, book-length collections of individual lyricists'
work, such as Jarvis Cocker's (2012a) Mother, Brother, Lover, Joni Mitchell's (1998)
The Complete Poems and Lyrics and Adam Bradley's and Andrew Dubois's (2010)
Anthology of Rap, provide enduring evidence of the sung or rapped lyric living health
ily on the page. Acclaimed poet Simon Armitage also lives another life as lyricist (and
singer) in his band, The Scaremongers, and published a book-length collection of his
lyrics, Travelling Songs. As he wryly observes: 'describing yourself as a poet is often
seen as a challenge or even an alibi. In those circumstances, it's worth having a few
tunes up your sleeve to prove if (Armitage 2014).
Poetry and song lyrics are bridged and blurred in practice - by songwriters and
poets, by listeners and readers. There are numerous examples of songwriters writing
poetry and verse in notebooks as children or teenagers and this forming the basis for
their future songwriting. Chuck Berry, in an interview with Flanagan (1987, p. 80),
recalls how he wrote poems as a child. Lou Reed's synthesis of poetry and rock'n'roll
was inspired by poet Delmore Schwartz, who taught Reed at Syracuse. Punk innov
ator Richard Hell wrote poetry long before he became a rock lyricist. Paul Simon has
spoken of how he has been influenced by Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Philip
Larkin and John Ashbery (Zollo 2003). Suzanne Vega has talked of how she got
ideas from 'studying poetry', referring to the influence of Sylvia Plath 'because of
the way she uses language, the way she puts words together. She uses language
almost sculpturally' (in Zollo 2003, p. 569). Billy Bragg recounted how he became
a songwriter as a direct result of the recognition he received at school when a
poem he had written at the age of 12 was read out on a local radio station. This
spurred him to continue writing poetry and he recalled that 'by the time I left school
at 16, I had several notebooks full of lyrics; that summer, helpfully, my mate next
door taught me how to play the guitar and, as a result, in 1977, I was in the right
place at the right time when punk rock happened' (Bragg 2012).
Creating songs and writing poetry involve common compositional skills and
techniques, as acknowledged by both poets and songwriters during interviews.
Richard Hell was a published poet before becoming a songwriter and his work as
a poet was very useful when he came to write song lyrics:
I had learned a lot about writing by the time I had started to write lyrics -1 used that. Lyric
writing was different from any other form of writing I'd done but in some sense on some level
writing is writing, and your values as a writer are going to be applied to what you do. So that
definitely contributed to my abilities as a lyricist. (Hell 2013)
PJ Harvey has also spoken of the importance of writing lyrics in these terms:
I work at words quite separately from music. I feel for myself that I can produce better words
in that way, putting all of my concentration into making them work alone, without the support
of music to begin with. So, in some respects working on them as poetry, although I don't have
the strengths that the poet does. But, even working towards them as poetry will produce a
stronger set of words that I might take into a song. If you want to be good at anything you
have to work hard at it. It doesn't just fall from the sky. And, I work everyday at trying to
improve my writing and I really enjoy it. Nothing fascinates me more than putting words
together and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect. (Harvey
2011)
Despite these and many other comments from musicians, scholars of poetry seem far
more willing to discuss these links than musicologists, certainly judging by the num
ber of books about poetry that include discussion of song lyrics when compared to
the way musicologists tend to downplay lyrics. Dai Griffiths is one of the few musi
cologists to draw on theories and philosophies of poetry when writing about music
(Griffiths 2003, 2012, 2013), emphasising the importance of understanding how lyrics
occupy the verbal space of the song, and proposing different ways of transcribing
lyrics as prose or paragraph, using varied font sizes and a 'hard right margin' in add
ition to the hard left margin used in the presentation of poetry. For all the richness of
Griffiths's musicological detail, for us his transcriptions offer key insights into the
way song lyrics encapsulate a song's architectural structure.
To briefly summarise our points in this section, the intersections between
poetry and song lyrics can be characterised in three main ways. First, poetry and
song lyrics are not lived and experienced as separate entities by listeners and musi
cians. Poets listen to, read and are influenced by song lyrics. In turn, songwriters
read, listen to and are influenced by poets. Audiences listen to, read, enjoy and inter
pret both poetry and song lyrics without dividing types of verse into separate
domains. Secondly, the practices adopted when composing poetry and writing
song lyrics are similar and share many techniques in the use of words as sound, in
structuring according to the metre, beat, rhyme and rhythm of words. Thirdly,
poetry and song are similar in the way that they deploy repetition - an issue we
now address in a little more depth.
Patterns of repetition
Jeffrey Wainwright begins his Poetry, The Basics with a discussion of the pleasures of
using language, exploring how young children enjoy rhyme and repetition and con
necting this to the way 'rhythm, rhyme, repetition of word-sound and phrase [are]
deployed in just the same way as part of the pleasure' in the Abba song 'Mamma
Mia'. He then moves quickly to the poetry of Gertrude Stein, linking high art and
low pop through their common use of the 'resources of language, especially recur
rence' (Wainwright 2011, p. 3). Like Paulin and Fenton, cited earlier, he hears every
day poetic repetition as part of an inclusive human history whereby 'the anticipated
pleasure of a sound or shape being repeated - have been used in the pre-literate, oral
tradition of all societies for dances, riddles, spells, prayers, games, stories, and histor
ies' (Wainwright 2011, p. 3). Wainwright highlights the importance of children in
maintaining this tradition and observes that 'their precision has been honed by repe
tition and the fact that the playground can be a very critical arena' (Wainwright 2011,
p. 11).
Wainwright is not alone in viewing repetition as fundamental to poetry.
Repetition is also essential to the architecture of the built environment, and repetition
is integral to music. Repetition is a quality and a technique that is stressed by authors
who produce guidance books, blogs and videos on lyric writing (see, for example,
Davis 1986; Pattison 2010). Yet repetition in music is a quality that has posed pro
blems for many musicologists and popular music critics, particularly those anxiously
attempting to refute or move beyond Adorno's modernist critique of repetition as
aesthetically worthless, politically oppressive and subjectively regressive. Adorno
(1976) supported his claims about the repetitive structure of songs with reference
to books that advocated various types of repetition when offering advice to aspiring
commercial songwriters - a characteristic still to be found in numerous books and
websites purporting to give guidance on 'how to write a hit song7.
A rather straightforward response to Adorno's modernist critique and its popu
list variants ('it all sounds the same') is to argue for the pleasures of repetition - a
theme common in theoretical accounts of the value of electronic dance music (see,
for example, Garcia 2005), and current in celebrations of postmodernist and minim
alist aesthetics. A similar theme can be found in psychological and neuroscientific
accounts of music, whereby repetition is given a positive gloss via the claim that it
fulfils a psychic or physiological need (see, for example, Levitin 2008; Margulis 2014).
A more nuanced response to Adorno can be found in the writings of Robert
Fink (2005) and Richard Middleton (1983). Both draw on psychoanalytical theories
when acknowledging the appeal and potentially oppressive impact of repetition.
Both accept that Adorno might have a point: Middleton suggesting that there is a
process of active struggle against the standardising, repetitive imperatives of capital
ist production rather than straightforward imposition on passive music listeners;
Fink finding parallels between advertising, minimalism and consumer culture
more generally and acknowledging collusion, 'We repeated ourselves into this cul
ture. We may ... be able to repeat ourselves out' (Fink 2005, p. 235).
Philosopher Peter Kivy, discussing repetition in Western art music, challenges
the concern with repetition as a 'problem', suggesting that a 'means-end distinction'
has been imposed on music (apparent in the above sources) in which repetition in
music has to be explained - as a psychological or neurological impulse, or an impera
tive of capitalist consumer culture. For Kivy 'repetition is the means of grasping pat
tern' (Kivy 1993, p. 353) and, by implication, repetition is the means of creating
pattern. Arguing that music is a 'decorative art', Kivy offers his own analogy with
architecture as a way of refuting any suggestion that listening to music as pattern
could be deemed trivialising. He asks his readers to 'forget about music for a
moment and take a good look at the Alhambra. Unlike the Sistine's ceiling's, its
adornments are "merely" decorative. They are also "merely" breathtaking, "merely"
exalted, "merely" magnificent, "merely" sublime' (Kivy 1993, p. 358). Kivy is writing
about instrumental, non-programmatic western art music (or 'absolute music'). But
his conclusion about repetition as pattern is highly pertinent to most music (other
than a very narrow Western modernist repertoire): 'The music which I have been dis
cussing does not merely contain repetition as an important feature, but as a defining
feature' (Kivy 1993, p. 359).
As a number of writers have observed, repetition is also a defining feature of
African American music. James Snead argues that Western culture privileges pro
gress and growth and denies a value to repetition, privileging 'difference as develop
ment'. Snead (1981, p. 147) observes that 'the apparently linear upward striving
course of human endeavour exists within nature's ineluctable circularity'. Ingrid
Monson (1999) draws from Snead, among other writers, to highlight the ethnocentric
and elitist assumptions about repetition apparent in Adorno's argument. She argues
for the value of riffs and repetition as patterns that allow for intercultural and inter
national dialogue - a point that is surely obvious to musicians and songwriters.
Like Wainwright's approach to poetry, Kivy's philosophy of music and
Monson's location of riffs within intercultural dialogue, the study of the novel also
has no anxieties about repetition. In his Language of Fiction, Lodge argued that 'the
perception of repetition is the first step towards offering an account of the way
language works in extended literary texts, such as novels' (Lodge 2001, p. 86). For
Lodge, repetition is crucial for understanding the writings of novelists, notably
Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Martin Amis and Charlotte
Brontë.
Repetition is evidently a major part of popular song and is a prerequisite for all
popular songs. Yet many musicians are also apprehensive about repetition. Stephen
Webber (n.d.), producer and teacher at Berklee College of Music, has spoken of his
experience of working with younger bands and musicians in the early years of song
writing and observed how they will often attempt to 'jettison repetition', believing
(like so many of their peers) that they are doing something 'different', but ending
up with rambling, unfocused, unstructured so-called 'through composed' songs.
Webber reflects further on this unwillingness to embrace repetition:
The stumbling block is we've all been traumatised by repetition. There are songs that we hate
on the radio, by artists that we can't stand, and the chorus beats us over the head. And if you
really don't like Britney Spears or the Black Eyed Peas or Lady Gaga or something and you
hear one of these songs that's a big hit, and it's got a repetitious chorus, it's easy to mistake
that what's annoying you is repetition. Repetition is not annoying. Annoying things are
annoying. Repetition is an enhancer; it will enhance whatever it is brought to bear upon.
So, if there's something that's really great, that you really dig, you want it to repeat.
(Webber n.d.)
Like Webber, songwriter Darren Hayman - solo artist and singer with the band
Hefner - was unequivocally positive when asked about repetition in his songs,
responding, 'Love it, bring it on!' Reflecting further, he explained how he consciously
uses repetition in his songs:
Usually with me the word No or Yes, I love treating those words as a mantra as they are in life.
I love Beckett and all those things. Life is repetition. I am often singing about ennui and
boredom, what better way to express that than through repetition. (Hayman 2014)
In Hefner's 'Hymn For the Cigarettes', Hayman emphasises the elements of a rela
tionship in trouble by the use of repetition to signify a range of different emotions.
He repeats many familiar words ('smoking', 'nothing', 'love'), imbuing them with
an intense yet absurd resonance; he also plays ambivalently on smoking as a repeti
tive behaviour and guilty pleasure: 'But I love to see the girls smoke in my bed/1 love
to see the girls smoke in my bed/1 love to see the girls smoke in my bed.' Here repe
tition conveys both the mundane and something more obsessive, the absurd recur
rent habits of ordinary life captured with lines like: 'B&H remind me of not giving
up but giving in/ B&H remind me of not giving up but giving in/ B&H remind
me of not giving up but giving in.' As the song moves through conflicting emotions,
the vocal melody and the expressive inflections of the singing make the words
appealing at the same time as their repetitions accentuate the ways that things are
not quite working as they should in the relationship.
A failing relationship is also the subject of Metronomy's 'I'm Aquarius', written
by Joe Mount, the singer narrating the tensions between two people with different
(and presumably incompatible) star signs. The song starts and the chorus occurs in
a familiar way, but with no repeats or particular emphasis, so that - unusually for
a chorus - it actually passes in the song more in the way a verse might. But then,
at two minutes in, the mini chorus occurs again but this time the phrase 'I'm
Aquarius' is repeated 18 times. In terms of the structural conventions of the popular
song, this repeat occurs far more times than is usual: the song has been running for
over two minutes with no obvious chorus, but now the chorus phrase feels hypnot
ically insistent. The many repeats of 'I'm Aquarius' offer an absurd and ironic com
mentary on both the meaninglessness of the idea of astrology and the state of the
relationship. As Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in a review of this song:
It's perhaps their greatest song yet, a deftly told tale of the various poisons that seep into
modern relationships: passive aggression, spite, narcissism and an emotional articulacy that
paradoxically means a total lack of communication. 'Never saw just how much you thought
I meant to me', Mount raps, taking the language of love song and twisting it into baffling
anti-logic. He eventually lapses into a desperate repetition of the title, blaming the stars
instead of himself. (Beaumont-Thomas 2014)
Repetition in popular song is not always so semantically nuanced, and is often archi
tecturally grounded in the call-and-response pattern that forms the backbone to
songs like Otis Redding's 'Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)', where Redding plays with
the repeats of the title phrase, singing it through and then, with 'your turn', having
the horn section repeat the phrase back. There is also a dramatic intensity introduced
by the way that the almost wordless chorus articulates a feeling that the singer can
not fully express (the intensity of emotions by describing them in words), so lan
guage is reduced to the inchoate repetition of 'Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa'.
The inability to eloquently articulate love and desire beyond blunt repetition is
a characteristic of numerous songs. PJ Harvey uses musical and lyrical repetition in
'Rid Of Me' to articulate an obsessional love: 'lick my legs, I'm on fire' is repeated
constantly, along with the phrase 'don't you wish you never never met her', within
a blues-based structure that references the grooving, sexual riffing of John Lee
Hooker tracks like 'Boogie Chilien' while deliberately playing them in a much
more aggressive and mechanistic manner. The imperative lover's desire, 'I want
you', is repeated extensively in numerous songs with that title, notably Lennon's
and McCartney's 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)', Bob Dylan's 'I Want You', Elvis
Costello's 'I Want You' and Joan Jett's 'I Want You'. These are examples of a charac
teristic that Friedwald identified in the lyrics of Cole Porter, where lyrical and music
al repetition 'ties into the emotional concept of obsession' (Friedwald 2002, p. 250).
Writing in 1966 in Aspen magazine, shortly before the appearance of the first
Velvet Underground album, Lou Reed articulated a more arch, knowing and ironic
approach to repetition, and described two examples of its use that he believed were
significant:
Have you ever listened to 'You've Lost That Lovin Feeling', where the girls are saying oohhhh
and suddenly, naturally, just right, come in with 'Baby', against Bill Medley's building vocal
line. Repetition. Every head in America must know the last three drum choruses of 'Dawn'
by the Four Seasons. Paradiddles. Repetition. (Reed 1966, p. 3)
Here (notwithstanding the rather overripe language of the time that Reed employs)
he highlights the value of repeating things as homage to a glorious 'dumbness',
valorising the prelinguistic pleasures that it echoes and invokes. Reed and his fellow
musicians in the Velvet Underground were also aware of repetition as art form,
drawing from the minimalist aesthetics associated with strands of visual art, per
formance, poetry and music that had emerged in New York City during the late
1950s and early 1960s, a creative moment that was (as Fink emphasised) in step
with mass-produced consumer culture. Reed recognised this concurrence in the work
of The Velvet Underground's mentor and producer, Andy Warhol:
Andy Warhol's movies are so repetitious sometimes, so so beautiful. Probably the only
interesting films made in the U.S. Rock-and-roll films. Over and over and over. Reducing
things to their final joke. Which is so pretty. (Reed 1966, p. 3)
In his songs, Reed made extensive use of repetition as a way of creating architecture
to articulate a type of emotional disconnection. 'Sister Ray' is leavened with layers of
different kinds of repetition to support its narrative which, according to Reed, 'has
eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. The situ
ation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up
on smack and having this orgy when the police appear' (in Levin 2002). The officially
released version is just under 15 minutes of the same riff, which the band play pro
gressively more manically, while determinedly remaining on the same musical pat
tern. Yet that length is somewhat arbitrary when considered with live performances
and the three versions captured on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes, which
clock in at 38:00, 24:03 and 28:43, respectively. As well as this, there are key lyric
motifs ('couldn't hit it sideways', 'searching for my mainline', 'just like Sister Ray
said'), which are repeated throughout, creating an emotional numbness that frames
the social disconnection that Reed evokes.
Far removed from Reed's use of pop forms to create a bleakly ironic mood of
detached alienation, repetition has also been used in a more conventionally ironic
manner through lyrics, such as in Hoagy Carmichael's 'I Get Along Without You
Very Well'. The key to the meaning of the lyric is that the positivity of the title phrase
is undercut throughout the song - every time the singer tells the addressee how well
they are getting on without them it becomes more and more clear that the opposite is
true. In Willie Nelson's 'Crazy', the notion of the singer being 'crazy' in so many dif
ferent ways about their love is made stronger and stronger by the number of times
the word is used; the sense of the word's meaning increases the more it gets repeated
- the more the singer tells us he is crazy, the easier it is to believe.5
These two examples highlight the mutability of language - the way a repeated
word can change meaning according to the contexts in which it is repeated within a
song's narrative. Before exploring ambiguity in a little more detail, we conclude this
section by briefly summarising the points we have been making here about repeti
tion. First, repetition may be used simply to emphasise the importance of a point -
'don't go, please stay' or 'free Nelson Mandela!' But the repetition of a phrase can
operate in more subtle and nuanced ways. It may carry philosophical expressions
of the repetitiveness of life, convey a sense of the recurrent habits that sour relation
ships, or articulate the obsessive desires that enliven yet fracture relationships. Here,
repetition may imbue the familiar with a sense of the strange, the profound, the
absurd or the erotic. Secondly, repetition may be used in a more knowing, intellectual
and artful manner, indebted to the use of repeated forms and motifs in visual, sonic
and performance art, apparent in the works of musicians such as Brian Eno, Björk,
Laurie Anderson, and bands such as the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads and
5 For further discussion of how the same words repeated in a chorus 'must continue to be relevant after
the song's plot has progressed through additional verses', see Jocelyn Neal (2007, p. 45).
REM. Thirdly, repetition is used for the pleasure of the recurrent, repeated, seemingly
'nonsense' sound word, the legacies of our childhood fascination with rhymes and
chants that appear in numerous hits songs such as Abba's 'Mamma Mia', The
Beatles' 'Hey Jude' and Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. In many songs, repetition
works across all of these distinctions - adding profundity to a familiar word, playing
with art forms and being a pop hook.
Clarity, ambiguity and the protean poetics of pop
Words that are combined together into song lyrics or fiction are no different from
words we use in everyday life. Words come to us loaded with inherent ambiguities,
multiple meanings and semantic associations that have been built up over years of
cultural use. The misheard lyric is not very different from the misheard remark in
an everyday encounter. Misunderstanding a song lyric is not very far removed
from misconstruing something said in a conversations with loved ones, family and
friends, or in the workplace or at the bar.
The mutability and ambiguity of language is something that songwriters are
acutely aware of - they may deploy it playfully in deliberately ambiguous lyrics or
in the use of double entendre or they may attempt to overcome it, particularly if cre
ating a message song. Ambiguity - the play with it, or the struggle against it - is fun
damental to the way songs are constructed.
Songs may be created to convey more than just straightforward semantic
meanings but precise, unambiguous responses: if the architecture of a dance song
or love song or protest song is faulty, then no-one is going to dance or love or protest.
The songwriter may also attempt to compose a 'message' in as direct a way as pos
sible - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five sang such a song, appropriately titled
"The Message', which perhaps contained echoes of the Philadelphia All Stars' 'Let's
Clean Up the Ghetto' (1977). Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had composed that
unambiguous song, based on one insistent repeating riff, with a particular social
purpose, one that Gamble supported with the formation of his Universal
Companies, a not-for-profit, community-centred organisation to help rebuild inner
city Philadelphia.
We are, in part, back to Webb's recommendation that songs should be built in
such a way that they are not misunderstood. Darren Hayman is emphatic about
intentionality and intervention in his material:
As a songwriter I also feel like a director. Telling the listener where to look or listen: right here
is the kernel or point of the song. To make sure you know that I will sing it ten times; I enjoy
being emphatically clear. If I am singing about being lonely then I want the listener in no doubt
as to that is what the song is about. (Hayman 2014)
Any potential for misunderstanding can be a cue for the songwriter to intervene in
order to clarify the meanings in their work. Jarvis Cocker has on several occasions
spoken about his song 'Common People', explaining the narrative and highlighting
the important political dimension of the song. Talking in an interview about the main
character - a wealthy foreign exchange student - he explains that he was 'put off by
some of her attitudes [...] she was going on about wanting to live in Hackney "with
the common people" and I thought "that's a bit much'" (Cocker 2012b). Her 'slum
ming it7 did not sit well with the broadly working-class and left-leaning Cocker. As
well as this, in Cocker's (2012a) collection of song lyrics, Mother, Brother, Lover, he has
included almost 40 pages of commentary, where his editorial voice engages in a dia
logue with the songs' biographical details and meanings. On a more overtly political
level, Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr angrily intervened when UK Conservative Prime
Minister David Cameron declared himself to be a fan of the band when he chose
'This Charming Man' as one of his Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio. In respon
Marr (2010) tweeted: 'David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, n
you don't. I forbid you to like it.'
In contrast, songwriters - like poets and novelists - may knowingly encourage
interpretations made possible by crafted ambiguities, aware of how reception is in
gral to a song's meanings. This is not to suggest that interpretation is infini
Umberto Eco (1990, p. 6) has stressed the 'limits of the act of interpretation' and
Philip Tagg's (2012) comprehensive semiotics of music has demonstrated the way
listeners understand the meanings of musical signifiers within specific circumstanc
and contexts. Musicians, of course, are well aware of this. Michael Stipe ha
observed: 'The listener is outside of the creative process ... [but] ... becomes a per
ipheral force of that creative process because they enter themselves into the mu
and they interpret it to fit their lives and to fit their needs' (in Zollo 2003, p. 633
Stipe followed up this comment by explaining how 'Me in Honey' is 'open to inte
pretation' to the extent that it 'could be very loving, or it can be kind of nasty', th
being 'a diametrically opposed emotional thing that can and does occur' (in Zo
2003, p. 635). Hence, Stipe is aware that the audience will sense how the ambiguit
crafted into the lyric will connect with a listener's experiences of real tensions an
paradoxes in their emotional lives.
A sense of reception is also apparent in the creation and performance of song
that deliver an ambiguous 'message' with an awareness of how this will connect wi
their audience's collective experience. As Peter Mercer-Taylor has written:
At just the moment that the label 'Generation X' was entering popular parlance, Kurt Cobain
who publicly lionized R.E.M. - was equipping this generation with a lyrical style suited to i
own namelessness, in which coherence, comprehensibility, and denotative meaning in gene
were called into question at every turn. (Mercer-Taylor 2005, p. 459)
Pete Seeger singing the lyric to 'We Shall Overcome' was not useful to this audienc
the rights and wrongs in Cobain's world were better framed by the ironic protest
the deliberately equivocal words of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
Ambiguity may also be achieved through the adoption of characters and per
forming personas. Mick Jagger spoke about how, as his work as a writer and fro
person developed, he got 'to a point where you are slightly more sophisticat
when you write. You don't want to always write lyrics from your own point
view. You want to be able to assume other characters' (Flanagan 1987, p. 17
This is clearly evident in some of the most acclaimed Rolling Stones material fro
the late 1960s on - famously, for example, in 'Sympathy for the Devil', whe
Jagger articulates terrible events on the world stage by adopting the voice of St
Nick himself. This way of writing continued through albums like 'Let It Blee
where Jagger's lyric voice and persona overtly inhabited that of the Bosto
Strangler in 'Midnight Rambler' and, less obviously, in songs like 'Gimme Shelter
and 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' where he speaks with the voice of
louche, drug-fuelled dandy.
Ambiguity is not only produced through the arbitrary and protean character of
language, and the adoption of personas. It is structured into the musical and verbal
architecture of songs, and the worlds evoked by the song and the way that a charac
ter and singer inhabit the song. This has been notable in the varied renditions of 'My
Funny Valentine', originally a show song composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz
Hart for Babes in Arms, which premiered in April 1937. As Alan Stanbridge has
pointed out, attempting to dispel misunderstandings and narrow interpretations of
the song, it was no typical love song and in its original setting was 'meant to be con
descending and insulting' (Stanbridge 2004, p. 96). It was sung by lead female char
acter Billie Smith, a '"colour-blind" opportunist7, to the lead male character Valentine
LaMar, 'a principled anti-racist', and conveyed ambivalence about a 'reconciliation to
the lover's quarrel' (Stanbridge 2004, p. 97). As Stanbridge observes:
Hart's finely balanced lyric attempts to portray the defensive petulance of a lover accused of
opportunistic prejudice, in the context of a plot which pits southern racism against northern
liberalism. (Stanbridge 2004, p. 98)
Friedwald homes in on the fact that the song went largely unnoticed after its initial
performances. In his case study of the song, Friedwald makes only passing and brief
references to the song in Babes in Arms and boldly declares that the song 'was really
born when Frank Sinatra recorded it in November 1953' (Friedwald 2002, p. 356).
Sinatra's rendition omitted the verse with the most condescending tone, and his ver
sion has become the standard for many subsequent vocal performances which have
lost the original resonances highlighted by Stanbridge. The dropped lyrics allowed
singers more opportunities, the ambiguities identified by Friedwald in these terms:
As constructed by Rodgers and Hart, it's a road map of infinite possibilities... By making both
the words and the music so ambiguous, that is to say, so open to interpretation, Rodgers and
Hart insured that no one would ever run out of ways to approach 'Valentine'. It's in major and
it's in minor, it's slow and it's fast, if s a romantic song with a comic twist. (Friedwald 2002,
p. 371)
The original architecture created by Rodgers and Hart has been modified by subse
quent singers, notably Sinatra, to stretch and tease new meanings and emphases. Yet
it is still the same song, in the same way that the Byrds' renditions of Dylan's songs -
cutting many verses, changing emphasis, playing with pitch, rhythm and harmony -
are recognisable.
William Empson (1953, p. 3) argued that 'the machinations of ambiguity are
among the very roots of poetry'. We borrow from Empson to argue that the architec
ture of ambiguity is fundamental to the practice of songwriting and the social life of
songs. It is the play with a song's ambiguities that opens up possibilities, accommo
dating different types of structural modification yet still retaining its enduring
characteristics. The Patti Smith group's version of 'Gloria' is an example of a song
where the original serves as the basis for a new version that is radically altered in
structure, scope and intention, yet remains the same song. In her version, 'Gloria'
starts with 'Jesus died for somebody's sins/ but not mine', with Smith continuing
to articulate her impressionistic, poetic lines while the group vamp over the opening
of what is recognisably a version of Them's 'Gloria'. In architectural terms, it is as if
we are entering the main building through a newly constructed entrance or atrium, at
once in a new place but still joined and fundamentally related to the original
structure itself; this new introduction to 'Gloria' is a sung version of the poem 'Oath',
that Smith had written and published previously. Nonetheless, the greater whole
remains the song 'Gloria', as written by Van Morrison, in spite of innumerable lyrical
and structural changes.
Final thoughts on songs and buildings
We have used the metaphor of the song as architecture to argue for the importance of
songwriting and to intervene in debates about song lyrics. We have used this analogy
in an exploratory manner as a way of developing a non-technical approach to
describing and analysing songs and songwriting practice and as a way of broadening
writing about music, seeking to connect musicology with other disciplines. We have
drawn the idea of song architecture from the voices and practices of popular song
writers and highlighted the patterns created by combining words and music,
through the art of repetition and in struggling to impose structure on the in-built lin
guistic opportunities for clarity and ambiguity. We are emphatically not presenting
this as a systematic model, but as a way of understanding how songwriting practice
is central to the way songs are performed and received.
It is worth pointing out that, when architects plan and design their proposals
for buildings, they do not present one diagram drawn from one perspective (as in
a traditional music score or lead sheet), but multiple views of a potential building
with varying degrees of abstraction and detail. No one sketch or diagram could cap
ture the building, but it provides an insight and understanding of the structure, seen
from different viewpoints. Similar principles might apply to understanding the archi
tecture of the song - those elements that endure regardless of whether someone adds
an extension, changes the front door, or puts on a coat of paint. Independent from
performances, recordings and sheet music, a song can be heard, seen and performed
from partial and varied perspectives. As recognised by musicians, performers and
listeners, this is the enduring architecture of a song - you can even dance to it!
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Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition

Author(s): KEITH NEGUS and PETE ASTOR

Songwriters and song lyrics:

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting

In this paper we argue for an architectural approach to th

performance theories of voice, songwriting handbooks and psychological surveys of

Shaping songs, combining words and music

Songwriter Richard Hell described this sculptural and developmental process,

James Fenton makes a similar point:

Fenton is recognised as an award-winning poet and performed lyricist, serving as

Popular song and poetry revisited

Clarity, ambiguity and the protean poetics of pop

Final thoughts on songs and buildings

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