Waxing Lyrical
“Oh, mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Oslo with the Nobel Prize again.”
This was my Facebook post, a kneejerk reaction when I first found out that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. The same year that Donald Trump became president of the United States of America. I’m not sure which depressed me more. No, that’s a lie of course.
But it was close. One thing I knew for sure, in both cases guard rails were in danger of being torn down.
I consider Dylan one of my cultural heroes. When I first started writing in my late teens and early twenties in Montreal during the 1970s, it was mostly poetry with a growing interest in
lyrics, occasionally collaborating with musician friends and acquaintances. Although I had a deeply hidden aspiration to write fiction, I didn’t attempt prose until the early 1980s, while still
in Montreal, and then again in the mid-90s in Toronto. I only started focusing seriously on fiction after I moved to Prince Edward Island in 2001 at the ripe old age of 45.
These days I consider myself primarily a fiction writer who also writes poetry and lyrics. A bit of a turnaround from where I started. So, it is with some interest (and a healthy dose of bewilderment) that I find lyrics cropping up more and more in my fiction. It started innocently
enough with a short story that appeared in my first book. An anonymous love note causes a rift in the relationship between a couple because neither knows which of them it is for. One of them
is an aspiring songwriter and, seduced by the note’s poetic language, sets it to music. In my next book, the lyrics of a ditty written for the female protagonist by her composer cousin (with whom she is in love) become a recurring motif that acts as a kind of connective tissue in the novel’s non-linear structure. My latest novel includes lyrics for a satirical revision of Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece Hallelujah.
Now, if Leonard Cohen had been nominated for the Nobel Prize, I probably would have let it slide, since he actually wrote novels and poetry. Sure, Dylan wrote Tarantula, a book of stream-
of-consciousness rambling, but it’s hardly Nobel-worthy. As I understood it, he won the prize on the basis of his main body of work, his lyric writing. The grey area here is that many consider
Dylan a poet, which I can’t argue with. And yes, his lyrics have been compiled in books. Still, it just didn’t sit right with me.
The announcement that he had won spread like wildfire throughout the media. The controversy, at that time, was that he had not formally accepted the prize. The Nobel committee was growing frustrated that Bob was taking his sweet time in getting back to them. I was actually
holding out hope that he would turn it down. But after he finally decided to accept the prize, in his speech at the ceremony, he justified this decision by claiming to have been influenced by
literary giants such as Herman Melville. All well and good. I can make the claim that my fiction has been influenced by many great musicians and that music itself is a driving force in my
stories. But I don’t reasonably expect any of my books to be nominated for a Grammy or a Juno.
Or maybe I should?
The thing is, a snatch of lyric here and there is a common enough occurrence in many stories and one might think I was merely filling my quota, but lately I’ve begun to double down on the lyric content in my fiction. I recently wrote a yet-to-be-published novella set in a club that is a combination cabaret and bordello. As such, there is a song lyric in each of its nine chapters. The lyrics are meant to be commentary on the story as it unfolds and I think of the novella as a kind of literary musical. In my current novel-in-progress, a struggling middle-aged poet is writing a memoir of when, in his late teens and early twenties, he was the lyricist in a rock band during the
late 70s and early 80s. Every chapter will open with a full lyric, representing the songs on the unreleased album the band recorded. The impetus for the novel came from a long-held fantasy
from my adolescence of being the resident lyricist in a rock band like Keith Reid in Procol Harum or Pete Sinfield in the early King Crimson.
What exactly is going on here? The idea of lyrics as literature has always been anathema to me. In 1981 I began collaborating with a composer. For twenty years we wrote songs and tried our hand at a few musical theatre projects. During that time, I slowly gained some understanding of the relationship between words and music. Often, my deep-seated yearning to write fiction found its way into my lyrics, giving them a literary tone. At times, my composer partner found
them a bit unwieldy to sing and, in the course of setting them to music, words fell by the wayside. The music itself was acting as an editor and I soon learned that simpler language was better suited to singable melodies.
In the comments section of that original Facebook post, where I satirized the refrain from Dylan’s song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, I opined that if a lyricist had to win the Nobel Prize, it probably should have been Stephen Sondheim. Aside from being a great admirer of his work, I felt it somehow more appropriate that he be bestowed with such an honour. Perhaps it’s because in an interview, Sondheim shared some wisdom that his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II told him. Essentially, lyrics are not poetry, they are text, but when paired with the right music they become elevated to poetry. This is often borne out by the fact that much of the time, lyrics don’t stand very well on their own and, when spoken as poetry, often
tend to fall flat. Whenever I see lyrics to popular songs on the page, I invariably hear the melody of the song in my head. The words don’t seem to make sense without the music. I don’t care if we’re talking about the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, John Lennon or anyone else who’s been saddled with the mantle of rock poet. The words carry the meaning, but it’s the music that gives them their thrust and etches them in our memories.
Maybe it’s my own particular bias, but I think that if anyone’s lyrics were going to be described as “literary” and awarded the Nobel Prize it would be Sondheim’s. Then again, maybe I assumed that he would have had the humility and the grace to turn the thing down.
Given my firmly entrenched view of the unliterary quality of lyrics, I ask again, what’s going on? What is this need to contradict myself and let lyrics sprout like unsightly weeds throughout my fiction?
Around the time I moved to PEI, my composer partner and I stopped writing together. I wanted to focus more on fiction and poetry and he had his own projects and interests to develop.
Another twenty years passed, during which I’d sometimes get an idea for a lyric and let the muse lead me where she may, even without the prospect of music to come. Every now and then, he
and I would mention writing again, although it never went any further than that. It was only during the Covid lockdown of 2020 that we finally started writing together once more. A few songs ensued until he asked if I’d be interested in collaborating on a rock opera, which we did over the next couple of years and it will soon be staged for the public.
One might expect me to be content to let my lyrics keep their natural place in the occasional collaborations with my composer partner. And yet, I found myself frustrated and could not help envisioning a more prominent role for lyrics in my writing life. When I began to see more
opportunities to include them in my fiction, I decided to throw caution to the wind, despite my nagging doubts about what I hoped to achieve.
While I still maintain that lyrics in themselves have no literary value, I’d argue that in the context of the novels and short stories in which they appear, they take on a life of their own. The fictional worlds I create only exist in the reader’s ability to make sense of squiggles on a page, to translate them into ideas, emotions, sights, sounds, smells, and tastes through the interactive magic that is reading. Is it too farfetched to expect that, presented with a song lyric in the context of whatever story is being told, the reader will also provide, through their own inventive mentality, the music that would elevate those words to the level of song, as if hearing it with the inner ear, the same way they experience a scene through the mind’s eye?
Perhaps it’s a lot to ask and, I suppose, a lot to expect.
All I know is that I’ve staked the last twenty or so years of my life on the power of words and my ability to coax an alternate reality from their meaning and their music. The craft and art of the writer culminates into what is best described as the illusion of authenticity. This is a bargain struck with the reader that their suspension of belief will pay off in a story that will engage their emotions and exercise their intellect. In the end, the writer’s journey is to push beyond the
boundaries of their own cherished beliefs and obstinate ideologies and use whatever is at hand as the connective tissue between where we are and what we can imagine.
The big question now is, if my next novel is miraculously nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, will I listen to my Sondheim angel perched on one shoulder or my Dylan angel roosting on the other? While it’s tempting to quote Stephen, regarding such an odd couple for my guiding voices with, “Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?”, at this hypothetical point, I have to side with Bob’s sage observation: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
