Who decides what a song is about?
How an Egyptian History Podcast and a Lambchop song got me wondering about authorial intent, and who gets to say what a song is really about
To step back a moment, there is a song I’ve loved for a long time called ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’ by Lambchop. I first heard it on, of all places, a compilation called ‘The Incredible Sound of Jo Whiley’, a surprisingly good selection of tracks from the former Radio 1 DJ and TV ‘personality’. Despite it being a song I loved, I never gave a huge amount of thought to the subject matter. In as much as I thought about it at all, I thought it might be about alcoholism, due to the title and the band having touched on similar themes before. The lyrics could fit that interpretation, but they could equally fit many others.
The lyrics to the song seemed to have a Biblical or somehow ancient quality, but I had no idea just how ancient until I was surprised one day whilst listening to the Egyptian History Podcast. The episode focused on a particular poem, “A Dialogue Between A Man and his Ba (soul)’ which is over 3000 years old. As the presenter read the poem I noticed that the opening line was the same as ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’. Just a coincidence, I thought. “To whom can I speak today” is not such an unusual opening line. As the poem progressed though, the similarities between it and the song were too remarkable to be coincidence. It appeared the song I loved was based on a poem over three millennia old.
This discovery was a delight. There was the pleasure of knowledge, learning something new, something which spans two of my main interests, music and history. That knowledge also gave me a new perspective on the song, not least because of the subject matter of the poem it is based on. A Dialogue Between a Man and his Ba is one of the earliest known writings on depression and suicide, and knowing this, ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’ seemed to gain a new clarity. It must be about the same subjects I thought, why else would you base it on that poem? Certainly the lyrics could be interpreted that way.
Just to be sure the similarities were not a complete coincidence, I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, found that the song was based on the poem as I had assumed. However, I also found an interview with Kurt Wagner, Lambchop’s frontman in which he admitted a friend had sent him the poem and asked him to try and turn it into a song. So, in a sense, the song may not really be ‘about’ anything, more of an exercise Wagner had been assigned as a songwriter. In the space of ten minutes I had three very different understandings of the meaning of this song which had been part of my life for two decades. But which was correct? And who gets to decide what a song is about anyway?
The most obvious answer is that the person who wrote the song is the only one who really know what it’s about, and certainly songwriters can get extremely frustrated when one of their songs is understood in a way different from their intention (for example ‘Born In The USA’ and ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’, both taken as pro-USA anthems, presumably by people who have only listened to the choruses). However, in many (most?) cases, it’s not as a simple as a song being about any one thing. It’s rare for a songwriter to decide “I’m going write a song about X today” and then sit down and write a song that is about that and only that. The creative process is a strange and complex thing, and lots of factors play into what a song ends up being. It often changes as it is written, and ends up being an amalgam of subjects. Sometimes a lyric just fits, and even the writer doesn’t quite know why. I remember listening to a Song Exploder podcast with Rivers Cuomo of Weezer where he explains he keeps a notebook of phrases which would sound good in a song, and then waits until he has a song where they fit.
Douglas Adams even once wrote that music shouldn’t be about anything, at least not good music “after all, what is a flower about? What is a sunrise about”. I take his point to some extent, I’ve found great beauty in instrumental music or songs sing in a foreign language where I have literally no idea what they’re about. But, I think what he was trying to get at was that songs don’t need a message, and don’t make a political point, they should be beautiful in and of themselves. I agree, but not entirely, I think both things can be true, a song can have a message or story that is clear and explicit, and still be beautiful.
However, I do think that sometimes it’s best not to know exactly what a song is intended to be about, to be able to put your own interpretation onto it, for it to mean something specific to you. So to answer my original question, who decides what a song is about? You do. At least for you
Originally published at http://colourthecortex.wordpress.com on January 16, 2023.
