I have no idea what you're talking about...

[TheGreek]

I was listening to "You can call me Al" earlier when I realised that even though I know every word I don't have a clue what the song is about.

 

I also remember my brother, who was a huge The Jam fan, suddenly realising what "The man in the corner shop" was about. 

 

I expect I'm not alone in this.

 

What songs do you know nothing about? E.g. whiter shade of pale.

Edited April 16, 2023 by TheGreek

[Waddo Soqable]

5 minutes ago, TheGreek said:

I was listening to "You can call me Al" earlier when I realised that even though I know every word I don't have a clue what the song is about.

 

I also remember my brother, who was a huge The Jam fan, suddenly realising what "The man in the corner shop" was about. 

 

I expect I'm not alone in this.

Indeed, I don't understand any of the above..... 

[Hellzero]

It's a song about Artificial Intelligence.

[Gasman]

McArthur Park...

[Waddo Soqable]

Fire.. Fire.. Don't Panic.... 

[Hellzero]

I read the lyrics again, listened to the track too (which is great like the rest of the album that said), and I think Paul Simon was simply high, it's just words making sentences without any sense.

 

A bit like automatic writing.

[Shaggy]

From Wikipedia re “You can call me Al” -

 

The names in the song came from an incident at a party that Simon went to with his then-wife Peggy Harper. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who was attending the same party, mistakenly referred to Paul as "Al" and to Peggy as "Betty", inspiring Simon to write a song.[2][3]

Jon Pareles noted that the lyrics can be interpreted as describing a man experiencing a midlife crisis[4] ("Where's my wife and family? What if I die here? Who'll be my role model?"). However, as Simon himself explained during the Graceland episode of the Classic Albums documentary series, by the third verse the lyrics move from a generic portrait-like perspective to a personal and autobiographical one, as he describes his journey to South Africa which inspired the entire album.[5]

The song opens simply, with its protagonist wondering aloud why his life is difficult, amid other questions. Simon structured the song's lyrics in a way that listeners would be given the simplest information first, before getting abstract with his imagery in the song's third verse: "Because there's been a structure, [...] those abstract images, they will come down and fall into one of the slots that the mind has already made up about the structure of the song."

 

So it was all obvious, really. 😉

”A winter shade of pale” really is pretty much random lyrics stuck together.  

People have done full PhD theses on songs like Eleanor Rigby - which I think rather bemused McCartney

[Hellzero]

Americans and what they dare calling poetry. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Edited April 16, 2023 by Hellzero
Spelling

[MacDaddy]

Carmina Burana.

[Waddo Soqable]

Er.. "The boy stood on the burnin' deck, eating a four-penny Walls........ "

[Delberthot]

I'm pretty sure that Jon Anderson said that he just liked the sound of certain words so I don't think that many Yes songs that he wrote the lyrics for are about anything in particular

[Waddo Soqable]

The Nik Kershaw "Riddle" thing was apparently some gibberish he jotted down purely as a temporary "guide vocal" when building the track, to be replaced with the real lyrics version when written later on. 

In the event they thought   "Ahh sod it, they'll do..."  and so the story goes, that's the record that came out. 

[Mykesbass]

7 minutes ago, Waddo Soqable said:

The Nik Kershaw "Riddle" thing was apparently some gibberish he jotted down purely as a temporary "guide vocal" when building the track, to be replaced with the real lyrics version when written later on. 

In the event they thought   "Ahh sod it, they'll do..."  and so the story goes, that's the record that came out. 

The songwriting equivalent to Ipsum lorem!

[WinterMute]

Turning Japanese was not a song about emigrating to the Land of the Rising Sun.... Apparently.

[Waddo Soqable]

1 minute ago, WinterMute said:

Turning Japanese was not a song about emigrating to the Land of the Rising Sun.... Apparently.

Do you really think so....

[NancyJohnson]

You want to try deconstructing some of the lyrics in Shudder to Think material:

 

Dip a cloth in a bowl of blood

Clean your horse's hide with it
Stick a fish in a tattoo gun

Watch what colour ink comes out.
Die gin bottle wedged in wet hand

Best at what I do, mom says.
Shake your halo down

Like snow

From a pregnant cloud about to blow.
Makes a neckbrace, a belt.
And then a hole in the ground.

 

OR

 

Veins and a rope.

Gold hair wrung out.

Laughing.

From back of the sheep-shack,

a high bleat hum.

Veins map the hair pillow.

Strung out.

I'm sleeping.

Its the kind of a nap

You don't wake from.

Sky of gold.

Pink and lazy in pond I lay.

Take it slow.

Drunk and crazy in a pond I lay.

[Waddo Soqable]

It's the old write some random stuff on a bit of paper, cut it up, rearrange, blah blah... 

[Hellzero]

29 minutes ago, Waddo Soqable said:

It's the old write some random stuff on a bit of paper, cut it up, rearrange, blah blah... 

A Beatles trick, even used for the music...

[Waddo Soqable]

53 minutes ago, Hellzero said:

A Beatles trick, even used for the music...

Didn't they all get it from  William Burroughs or something 

[TheGreek]

I saw a documentary with David Bowie doing that.

[TheLowDown]

It's like with the Beatles' Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Many/most Beatles' fans would often read more into their lyrics than was intended. Lucy in the sky with diamonds, they claimed, was about LSD(Lucy Sky Diamonds), when it was about nothing more than Julian Lennon's childhood night sky painting.

[Baloney Balderdash]

2 hours ago, Waddo Soqable said:

Didn't they all get it from  William Burroughs or something 

I think it originally was a quite common technique poets prescribing to the surrealism movement developed and used frequently (together with the stream of conscious (or rather, as the idea is, stream of sub-conscious) like automatic writing technique), which would date it all the way back to the mid/late 1920's.

 

Also it is worth noting that the Fluxus art movement of the 60's/70's had a lot in common with the Dada art movement of the 10's/20's.

 

But yes, William Burroughs is famous for using the cut up technique, and I think that was actually where at least David Bowie originally got it from.

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by Baloney Balderdash

[chris_b]

Cal Me Al is about a lot of stuff, as Paul Simon songs usually are, but the title came from a politician whose stock phrase was Call Me Al. 

[NikNik]

7 hours ago, Delberthot said:

I'm pretty sure that Jon Anderson said that he just liked the sound of certain words so I don't think that many Yes songs that he wrote the lyrics for are about anything in particular

You can be him!

 

Virtual Jon

[Cato]

I understand what all these words mean individually, but....