Music is something I don’t write about often here mostly because it is something I find really difficult to write about. Which is a shame, because I love music; I just don’t really, well, know what it is. I can talk about video games and game feel and player agency and I can talk about how movies use editing and camerawork to enhance a mood, but music? I don’t know what a measure is, 4/4 time is a novel concept, and picking out individual instruments is a challenge. I probably should have spent more time paying attention in music class back in Primary School and less time trying to play the recorder with my nose.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to music with great lyrics. Some of my favorite bands, like Relient K and Frightened Rabbit, have masterful writing. When Matt Thiessen of Relient K sings
It's been forever since I've gone
But I'm the Cusack on the lawn of your heart
in “Part of It,” the allusion to Say Anything… immediately conjures up not just an iconic image from an iconic film but uses it to reinforce the sense of bittersweet longing that runs throughout the song. In addition, the couplet is composed in tetrameter (with an internal rhyme [‘gone’ and ‘lawn’] tying the two together) with an anapest after a caesura resolving it (with a slant rhyme [‘heart’ with ‘gone’ and ‘lawn’]. It’s brilliant, both in meter and imagery.
Frightened Rabbit’s “My Backwards Walk” describes the difficulty of a break up thus:
I'm working hard on walking out
Shoes keep sticking to the ground
My clothes won't let me close the door
'Cause the trousers seem to love your floor
The first and third lines are in iambic tetrameter while the other two aren’t, making those lines feel more like asides (but still part of the whole courtesy of the rhyme). But to focus on the meter is to ignore how wonderful the wordplay is. Scott Hutchinson personifies his clothes, lamenting that they won’t let him close a door. Of course, the narrator’s clothes aren’t actually stopping him from closing the door — it’s a device that attributes the desire to stay to another party while also a synecdoche for himself. The metaphor of trousers loving a partner’s floor is a beautiful image of intimacy and desire, one almost crude in how forthright and messy it is.
Lyrics I can talk about. Probably because of poetry classes in university and an eternal fascination with language and the way that words work. That background gives me a language with which to talk about all this. The actual music, though? It’s Greek to me. That said, it is something I’m trying to learn to understand. Podcasts I occasionally listen to like Chris DeMakes a Podcast and Song Exploder get into the nitty gritty of making music. The recent Song Exploder episode on A-Ha’s “Take On Me” is an excellent dive into the song and its instrumentation and how it comes together to make a perfect song. Learning how the song works, like going behind the scenes of a movie, makes me love it all the more. My day job, too, involves a nonzero amount of pulling apart music stems in Premiere and, as part of it, I’m learning about rhythm and measure and how instruments come in and out to make a whole.
There’s a maxim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” and in many ways it feels quite true — it’s hard to capture how and why music works in words. Maybe someday I’ll understand music enough to be able to really, really talk about it. Until then, it’s still something wonderful to enjoy.
Essays, Not Rants! 