The lyrics… the words…as a writer they were always of paramount importance to me, no matter what kind of song was being written. With every writing partner I’ve ever had, I’ve either done all the lyrics or at least ninety percent of them. With Kurt, it would be him showing me his latest licks and chord progressions, almost “taunting” or “daring” me to sing something cool over them. With “Hang On To Your Life“, one of the first cool collaborations between Kurt and me, the only words Kurt had were the title…he kept playing those cool guitar licks that start the song off and singing that one line “hang on to your life” over and over again. I had to come up with three distinct verses.
Randy Bachman talks openly and often about how he “wrote” American Woman… Randy “wrote” a good guitar lick, but “American Woman” was never a song until those words about war machines and ghetto scenes and coloured lights hypnotizing came out of my head…one of the first real “non-love” songs Randy and I wrote was “No Time“…I think after “No Time” we were taken a bit more seriously as a band…I did the words for “No Time”…the “watch and chain” line was jokingly referring to Ronnie Hawkins’ line about “Mary Lou, she took my watch and chain…” The “killing floor” was something I’d learned about from the Electric Flag lp, a “standard listening fare” album of the times…
All the writers I wrote with sort of “left me to handle the lyrics…”
One of the best instances I can ever recall of lyrics virtually “writing themselves” was a song called “Dreams” on the last Guess Who album for RCA…Troiano had this beautiful guitar piece that descended and curled around again, a musical riff that was begging for lyrics. I sang that first line “I was lost and tossed on a misty morning by a drunken sailor and the genie in the bottle let me down…” right out of the air, and once that rhythm and length were established, the other lines almost “magically appeared”. All the lyrics in that song flowed out like little poems…
To me, the lyrics are the lifeblood of any song…people like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Paul Simon, and Pete Townshend changed the shape of lyrics on the radio…before these guys, most of the songs were about love and crushes and broken hearts and “baby’s blue eyes and long blonde hair…” Once the gates were opened to expand subject matter to almost anything, lyrics broke free of previous chains and restrictions to become anything and everything.
Here you will find many sets of lyrics that I’ve come up with over the decades. Some have stood the test of time better than others. When one reaches middle age, it’s silly to continue writing songs from the point of view of a lovesick, naive teenager, although we see aging artists doing it all the time…
My album “Plus Signs” was all about aging…understanding it and writing about it. I have great reverence for lyrics. I write poems too, but that’s another thing entirely from song lyrics. Here, for better or for worse, are lyrics I’ve written over a period of four and a half decades.
At the very least, I hope you find some of them interesting…
BLC MAY / 2014