In everything I've read about the New Pornographers, as far as I can remember I can't remember critics saying much about Carl Newman's lyrics; at most, you'll get a "sure, they don't make any sense, but that's OK." And honestly, that seems like a pretty fair assessment. Sure, they're in the same ballpark of randomness as the Fiery Furnaces' lyrics, but in the case of the latter there's a real feeling of narrative flow there, so you're compelled to dig deeper, and usually rewarded. (More on this later.) With Carl's stuff (but less so Dan's), individual lines or couplets might have some resonance, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of coherency to individual songs. For instance, here's a reasonable bit from "The Electric Version":

Our electric version calls, you alone create the full spectrum of light, so what could go wrong? Just as long as it sounds lost, streaming out of the magnets. The card you're dealt by the crowd goes wild, make believe you are an only child. Here are the clothes, please put them on. Still to come...

Eh? You certainly get a sense of some sort of thematic unity in some tracks (especially this one and "All For Swinging You Around"), but who the hell knows what they're actually talking about? Theoretically it could be a situation like with Nivana's "Scentless Apprentice" where it seems random until you know what it's supposed to be about and then it all clicks into place, but supposedly "It's Only Divine Right" is about the Bush daughters, and while this does make some of the references more clear in the song, it still doesn't make it actually make sense.

While this essential incoherency didn't disturb my listening experience a whit, with the headphones off I sometimes wondered. I'm certainly not the lyrical fascist I used to be (i.e. in high school, followed by a total drop-off in college), but given the opportunities here, and given Newman's general deliberateness about everything, I couldn't help but consider whether or not he'd faltered in this fairly major way, songwriting-wise, although the ability to write entirely incoherent songs that weren't disturbed by this incoherency is impressive. But why do that?

And then this morning, it hit me, while listening to "The Laws Have Changed" and thinking about Carl's claim that it had originally had even more hooks but that he'd had to take some out to make the song intelligible, why this was so. A big problem for me when I'm writing songs is that, when I finally seize upon a subject for the song, I want to explore it fully, and so sometimes I end up writing a lot more lyrics than I really should have, and throwing in extra bits just to get all the words in. Sometimes whole verses or bridges will end up getting cut, and that's certainly fine. But there's still more than maybe should be there, and I recognize that I can't say less because I'm basically tied to the narrative or argument of the thing.

But what Newman's managed to do as a songwriter is essentially divorce himself from this need, and thereby free himself up a lot more compositionally. Because just as the music is made up of a series of "hooks," so are the lyrics, functioning less as a melodic, narrative line than like the way a pop song does: as a series of connected repetitions with less of a linear relation and more of a parallel one, being connected with previous sections chordally (which in the case of lyrics consists of words in the same meaning-family--see the Word Menu) or in a theme-and-variations way (for the music, this would mean variations on a central rhythm). For every meaning-based impact, the lyrics just as often have a euphonious or purely aesthetic impact, but what makes them hooks is that this impact is contained in no more than four lines in a row.

And so what this means is that there's no reason to extend, say, a verse section, or a chorus, to encompass more of the narrative, because it can all be encapsulated in, at most, twice the minimum length of a musical unit. In some cases (mostly in other songs on Electric Version) Newman even extends thoughts over multiple sections, and you don't realize this is the case until you actually see the lyrics printed and realize that, say, three sections of "Electric Version" actually contain two sentences, the first two quoted above. Thus "The Laws Have Changed" flows seamlessly from one basically unrelated (except by key and tempo) section to another, without real transitions, lyrical or musical. That's why it's a song that you could pack even more hooks into: there's so many bits, you can just add new bits over the existing ones and have new hooks.

To illustrate, let's map the song. Instead of my usual time measurement, I think it'll be more instructive to note how many bars each section lasts for.

Verse riff (4 bars)
Verse w/singing and upturn at end of each rep (6 bars)
Pre-chorus ("Introducing...") (4 bars)
Chorus ("All hail...") (7 bars)
Verse riff (4 bars)
Verse w/singing and upturn (6 bars)
Pre-chorus (4 bars)
Chorus (7 bars)
Hook pt. 1 ("Na na na...") (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Verse riff (2 bars)
Verse (6 bars)
Pre-chorus (4 bars)
Chorus (7 bars)
Verse riff (1 bar) [ed. note--this is awesome! I always wondered why it worked so well here.]
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Verse riff (4 bars)
Coda (6 bars)

I may have cheated a bit by breaking the bridge hook up into two separate bits, but they're pretty separate arrangement-wise (different drums, different keyboards, not just chordally), so I'm OK with that. Anyway, look at it: nothing longer than 7 bars! That's incredible! Even if you disagree with my bridge assessment, it's 8 bars. And so many different bits! That's partially, I think, why Electric Version is a harder thing to grasp at first than the first album, Mass Romantic--it's more fractured and short, sectionally. Mass Romantic's "Letter From an Occupant," for instance, consists of 16-bar verses broken up by 4-bar choruses (that are distinct 2-line hits, as opposed to the lyrical flow across sections of Electric Version) and an 8-bar verbal hook, with a 4-bar verbal break and a bridge that's four bars but probably gets repeated for at least 16. And so the longest section there is twice as long as the longest of "Laws."

Anyway, looking at the tab, it's not as fractured as you might think, but still, it slips in and out of key, especially with that D at the beginning of the pre-chorus that throws everything off. But the arrangement is incredibly fractured, with bits dropping in and coming out and changing after 2 bars to something else for 4 bars to something else for 2. Are there horns in any other section besides the pre-chorus? And the keyboards are constantly shifting, too, to say nothing of the drums that still groove despite the fact that they pretty much change every section.

And so there you go. It's a lovely little trick that Carl's done, because there's no reason that it should work; the songs should require a lot more to hold them together. Hell, "Laws" even has two lead vocalists! But the compositional technique works across the whole album, and that's neato. He's explicitly avoiding narrative for the sake of the hook.
posted by Mike B. at 6:05 PM 0 comments