Story Songs
Story Songs
I have to confess… concision isn’t one of my strengths as a writer. Even after ruthless editing, my stories are often 10% longer than they’re supposed to be. Naturally I’m attracted to “flash fiction” or “drabbles”, where laconic authors achieve intense drama with minimal words. The best example, I think, is the 6-word story claimed to be written by Hemingway (untrue): “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”
How can that be done—emotion, character, conflict, message—all present in just a few words?
Well, there’s a branch of storytelling that achieves that level of narrative and theme, using melody, rhythm, and rhyme—the contemporary pop song. Now it’s true that the whole point of “pop” is that the melody hooks and dominates, so that we can hear a song like “Come On Eileen” a thousand times and never really understand the rather impressive lyrics or understand the eternal story of a young couple trying to break free of a dying small town (the same story as “Fast Car” and “Born to Run” and a dozen other greats). About the only line I can reliably remember is the old Irish cheer “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra Too-Ra-Loo-Rye, Ay”. But as the songwriter promises, “You’ll hum this tune forever.”
But some popular songs combine catchy tunes, a compelling story, and (importantly) great enunciation so we can understand the story!
What makes it a “story” rather just a slice of life or a moment trapped in time? For example, Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight” features a character in conflict who acts and interacts, so there’s a “beginning and middle” of a story. But there’s no end—no resolution of the conflict, no lesson learned or irony achieved, only characters left in eternal suspense:
Thought of calling ya, but you won’t pick up
‘Nother fortnight lost in America
Move to Florida, buy the car you want
But it won’t start up till I touch, touch, touch you
Similarly, the JP Saxe song “If the World Was Ending, You’d Come Over, Right?” sets up a pretty ultimate problem (the end of the world, or more realistically, a regrettably broken relationship), and a demand for action (“… you’d come over, right?”). But it ends without even an answer from the lost lover. The ending is just a poignant wish:
The sky’d be falling while I’d hold you tight
No, there wouldn’t be a reason why
We would even have to say goodbye.
…followed by not an answer but a repeat of the question:
… If the world was ending, you’d come over, right?
You’d come over, you’d come over, you’d come over, right?
If the world was ending, you’d come over, right?
Those sorts of songs’ poignance relies on the un-resolution, the unanswered question. In fact, that’s a contributor to their popularity—they don’t resolve, they stay in your head, they make you wonder forever.
They are compelling precisely because they don’t resolve; they leave us hanging. But there are other songs that have the classical Aristotelian plot structure: They set up the situation and characters in the beginning, increase the conflict and interaction in the middle, and resolve the conflict in the ending. The difference is these story songs add an ending that fulfills the promise of the beginning, resolves the conflict, and/or answers the story question.
So in this blog series, I’m going to explore “story songs”, where the songwriters and performers create a story world, inhabit a character, and achieve a resolution all in 3-4 minutes. (Oh, they also have melody, rhythm, and rhyme.) The story song tradition is as old and as contemporary as story itself—the first sung music was probably a braggardly tale of hunting success or a lament for a romantic failure. I’m probably going to focus on the soundtrack of the story of my life, that is, the pop and rock songs of the second half of the 20th Century. I know that folk and rap are also brimming with great story songs, so I might happen on one of them. But I’ll start with the story songs I know best, the ones probably most of you have heard too.
The first one up is in memoriam to Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” That will be next week.
I’m looking for suggestions of other great story songs!