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You’re Pretty Good With Words, But Words Won’t Save Your Life:
A Study of Songwriters Who Majored in English

    What is a rock musician to do when they get to college? There’s no such thing as a songwriting major. Well, in truth, the Berklee School of Music actually does offer one, but that place is an anomaly as it is. There is musical composition and there is English, perhaps with a concentration in creative writing, but no combination of the two. And of course, musical composition is out because no respectable rock songwriter knows how to read music, much less has the desire to arrange piano sonatas. Recently, I’ve picked up on a trend at IU that many English students are also musicians, and the appeal of an English major seems to be pretty clear. Literature, like songwriting, is an artistic expression that can be analyzed and picked apart just like most pop songs, barring the ones that are written by computer programs for Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. Creatively driven students, such as songwriters, still have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the creative output of others through the study of literature, even though it often has nothing to do with music.
    Of course, not all distinguished songwriters are English majors. In fact, the most respected ones probably never went to college. But what of the ones that did major in English? It took about four Wikipedia searches to find that some of my favorite songwriters are English majors. What is even more exciting is that there are a few recurring trends among most of them. I’ve picked out a few of my favorites to analyze and to hopefully answer the question: What can an English major do for your songwriting?
    The songwriter that is most blatantly affected by his English background is Colin Meloy, an English major with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Montana and chief songwriter in the band the Decemberists. By the time the Decemberists’ fourth full-length album The Crane Wife was released, the critical buzzword around his lyrical style was “hyperliterate.” The term is pretty appropriate, given Meloy’s penchant for medieval phrase structures and words that are at least three syllables long. Some of the more prominent examples of this style within his body of work are the lyrics to “The Infanta,” the first song from the album Picaresque. During the song’s bridge, Meloy sings, “From all atop the parapets blow a multitude of coronets/ Melodies rhapsodical and fair,” and later, “And above all this folderol/ On a bed made of chaparral/ She is laid, a coronal placed on her brow.” With lyrics like these, the case could be made that Meloy perfectly fits the common stereotype of English majors, that being the steady use of words that don’t appear in standard household dictionaries and an infatuation with time periods and cultures that existed before modern technological advancement. And much like English majors that actually fulfill this stereotype, he gets plenty of flak for it from the world of music criticism.
    What’s important is that Meloy doesn’t just spew out couplets rhyming “palanquin” with “elephant” for the hell of it. The lyrics always function as narratives to colorful stories of high drama and treachery. “My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist,” one of the first Decemberists songs, follows the story of a family of trapeze artists in pre-World War II Paris as they work undercover against Nazis, fall into poverty, find themselves working in a brothel, and eventually become sailors or farmers, all within six versus. Meloy’s narratives often border on the ridiculous, and it is in these stories that his background in creative writing really shines. His stories are by no means common or unimaginative, and his word choices strengthen and emphasize his unique songwriting aesthetic. And of course, that aesthetic would fall flat if it weren’t for the music itself, a combination dramatic chamber pop and instrumentally dense folk. Meloy’s overblown narratives serve as a great reminder that most lyrics cannot stand on their own as poetry. Strictly on paper, it’s pretty easy to skewer lines like, “Among five score pachyderm/ all canopied and passengered,” but they feel totally appropriate when supported by pounding timpanis and a low brass section in a minor key.
    Carrying on with the trend of storytelling and character development within songs, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, which isn’t a band so much as a name for Darnielle’s solo work, takes the scope of the lyrical narrative a step further than Colin Meloy. Of The Mountain Goats’ sprawling discography of sixteen full-length albums, five of them are entirely devoted to continuous narratives that develop from one song to the next. But storytelling is about the only thing Darnielle has in common with Meloy, as their songwriting styles are perfect foils of each other. Darnielle, who received his English degree at Pitzer College, is frank and homely where Meloy is extravagant and academic. Most Mountain Goats songs, which are almost always accompanied by nothing more than a strummy acoustic guitar, celebrate commonplace domestic routines and find beauty and pain in pedestrian relationship struggles. The cover of The Mountain Goats’ 2002 album All Hail West Texas includes the sincere tag line, “Fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” The album opens with the fan favorite “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” a song about two friends whose dreams of becoming a famous metal band are crushed by the strict ideals of their high school, climaxing with the lines, “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/ Don’t expect him to thank you or forgive you/ The best ever death metal band out of Denton/ In time will outpace and outlive you/ Hail Satan.” There is nothing flashy or difficult about his lyrics, which makes his songs instantly relatable and moving.
    With very little happening musically (sometimes the words are simply spoken instead of sung), Darnielle’s songs succeed because their starkness makes his lyrics unavoidable, almost forcing the listener to digest them and relate them to their own life. “Going to Georgia,” one of the most well loved Mountain Goats songs, features an awkward and stumbling strumming pattern as Darnielle candidly speaks the lines, “The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you and that you’re standing in the doorway,” a line that many devout Mountain Goats fans say is one of the most moving lyrics ever written. His narratives are just as wounded and understated, the most well known of which follows the Alpha Couple, two characters that appear throughout Darnielle’s discography. The 2002 album Tallahassee follows the couple as they inch closer and closer to divorce and decide to drink themselves to death, culminating in the song “No Children,” which triumphantly ends with the lines, “I hope you die/ I hope we both die.”
    While Darnielle’s English background isn’t quite as apparent as Meloy’s, a few Mountain Goats songs do indulge in literary references. His song “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” heavily references the sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft’s feelings of xenophobia and intense paranoia after he moved to New York and even alludes to “cosmic horror,” a sub-genre that Lovecraft is credited for creating. The song ends with Darnielle half-screaming the lyrics, “Someday something’s coming/ From way out beyond the stars/ To kill us while we stand here/ And store our brains in mason jars.” These lines sum up the basic tenants of “cosmic horror,” which deal with the notion that the universe is unknowable to humans and that its forces are indifferent to human existence.
    Will Sheff, probably the youngest of all these songwriters and an English major from Macalester College, is significantly more liberal with his literary references. The chief songwriter for the folk-rock band Okkervil River, Sheff’s song “John Allyn Smith Sails” alludes to the American poet John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith) and his suicide by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis. Sheff’s approach to the subject is a kind of blunt poeticism, exemplified by lines such as, “It was half a second and I was halfway down/ Do you think I wanted to turn back around/ And teach a class/ Where you kiss the ass/ That I’ve exposed to you?” Most of Sheff’s songs are overflowing with lyrics, resulting in lines like these being delivered in a breathless and shaky tenor, adding a sense of urgency to his songs. This kind of vocal approach works well as a counterpoint to the music itself, a surging blend of folk and power-pop that isn’t afraid to indulge in grand and sweeping gestures. In the case of “John Allyn Smith Sails,” the band pleasantly paces an acoustic pop chord progression with touches of orchestra accompaniment while Sheff drops vividly disturbing lyrics about bursting hearts, shattered skulls, and castration. When the song hits its coda, an epic reinterpretation of the Beach Boys’ “John B. Sloop,” the tale of John Berryman’s suicide is transformed into a story of a weary sailor’s return home, and the lyrical tone changes accordingly, finding optimism in tragedy with the lines, “Hoist up the John B. sail/ See how the main sail sets/ I’m full in my heart and my head and I want to go home.”
    Sheff doesn’t have quite the same affinity for narratives and fictional characters as Colin Meloy or John Darnielle. Like “John Allyn Smith Sails,” many of Sheff’s songs take a kind of non-fiction approach. Two Okkervil River songs, “Savannah Smiles” and “Starry Stairs,” are specifically about the 1980’s porn star Shannon Wilsey. The former is written from the point of view of her father as he stumbles upon the diary she kept as a child. The father expresses his disillusionment with his daughter’s current lifestyle and depression and longs for the innocence and happiness she had as a child. The lyrics are poignant and yearning as Sheff sings, “Photos on the wall/ She’s my baby, she’s my baby doll/ Is she someone I don’t know at all/ Is she someone I betrayed?” It is in these interpretations of actual people and events that Sheff’s writing approach is often compared to that of a novelist’s. The early Okkervil River song and live favorite “Westfall” recounts the real-life murders of four teenage girls in a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas from the point of view of one of the college-aged murderers. Sheff employs a Poe-like unreliable narrator device in his lyrics, and the narrator casts himself as any regular young adult male until the last two verses, in which the killer chillingly concludes, “They’re looking for evil/ Thinking they can trace it/ But evil don’t look like anything.”
    Okkervil River’s songs solidify the trend of English majors predominantly utilizing folk-based genres to best serve their lyrics. Historically, folk music has been used to emphasize the words over the music and has been embraced by such notable lyricists as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Billy Bragg. By strictly playing chords and staying as structurally elemental as possible, folk music is meant to serve as a backdrop to showcase the songwriter’s lyrics. But of course not all songwriting English majors fit into this mold, one of the more prominent examples being Ted Leo of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Though he graduated with a major in English from Notre Dame, Leo has a strong and involved background in the punk and hardcore music scenes in the Washington D.C. area. Stylistically, the Pharmacists’ songs are fairly diverse, jumping from frantic power-pop to punk-infused new wave to pub-rock, often combining many styles at once.
Compared to Colin Meloy, John Darnielle, and Will Sheff, the relative increase in volume and musical complexity results in less emphasis on Leo’s lyrics. Leo typically shies away from story arcs or well-developed characters and mostly sticks to politically-informed poetry that never gets too specific, which in no way should be interpreted as a relative decrease in quality. Leo’s lyrics rely heavily on sharp poetic wit and turns of phrase. In the song “Me and Mia,” which manages to turn the struggles of eating disorders into an anti-war message, Leo sings, “All the bourgeois social angels/ Telling you you've got to change/ Don't have any idea/ They'll never see so clear/ But don't forget what it really means to/ Hunger strike when you don't really need to/ Some are dying for a cause/ but that don't make it yours.”  The metaphor is constructed in such a way that both complement and reveal truths about the other equally, war as a metaphor for eating disorders and eating disorders as a metaphor for war. It’s a kind of balancing act that can be a strain for even the most accomplished poets.
    One of the few narrative-based songs Leo has written, “The Ballad of the Sin Eater,” is a stinging and humorous prod at American bullheadedness that follows the journey of an American disillusioned with his home country as he travels across Europe and encounters a slew of unfriendly foreigners. While urgently speak-singing over nothing more than a distorted bass guitar and a seemingly endless supply of frantically shaken percussion, Leo’s lyrics are in top form as the song opens with, “Today I woke up uncertain/
And you know that gives me the fits/
So I left this land of fungible convictions/
Because it seemed like the pits/
And when I say ‘convictions’/ I mean it's something to abjure/
And when I say ‘uncertain’/ I mean to doubt I'll not turn out a caricature.” Here, Leo keeps sharp and original descriptions such as “fungible convictions” grounded by more honest and plainspoken language, which makes the song simultaneously brainy and accessible. Later in the song, the character becomes increasingly more self-conscious of his American roots as he learns that he isn’t welcome anywhere, exemplified by lines such as, “They said, ‘Yankee, you better watch what you’re saying/ Unless you’re saying it in Basque or in Catalan.’ ” His guilt mounts as Leo addresses him personally with a rousing repetitive chorus of, “You didn’t think they could hate you, now didja?” It is worth noting that the Pharmacists song that most prominently features lyrics is musically the most sparsely arranged. It’s nowhere near folk, but it functions under the same principles to emphasize the words over the music.
    While most of the songwriting English majors I’ve stumbled across display varying degrees of their English background in their lyrics, whether it be a tendency toward stories and characters, literary references, or nimble wordplay, it shouldn’t be assumed that every one of these kinds of lyricists makes their education evident in their songs. Rivers Cuomo, songwriter for the popular rock band Weezer and a graduate of Harvard University with a major in English, displays none of the lyrical characteristics of the previous songwriters. While early Weezer songs were lyrically playful and personal, Cuomo is increasingly being chided for writing vague and vapid lyrics. In the case of 2001’s self-titled album Weezer (popularly referred to as The Green Album), Cuomo admitted that he purposely kept the lyrics relatively meaningless, resulting in 60’s boy band couplets like, “Cuz’ everybody needs some love/ Shooting from the stars above,” and, “On an island in the sun/ We’ll be playing and having fun.” Though in Cuomo’s defense, The Green Album seems to be more of an exercise in simplistically direct pop melodies than an honest representation of Cuomo’s true songwriting ability, which makes the seemingly brainless lyrics more appropriate. Unfortunately, the two most recent Weezer albums don’t have such an excuse. The opening verse to 2005’s “We Are All On Drugs” (which follows the same melody as the children’s song about diarrhea, as pointed out by music critic Rob Mitchum) reads, “When you’re out with your friends in your new Mercedes-Benz/ And you’re on drugs/ And you show up late for school ‘cause you thing you’re really cool/ And you’re on drugs.” Most new Weezer songs follow this style of ill-advised proper noun usage and fifth-grade-poetry-assignment couplets, which is unsettling considering the eloquent and moving essay he wrote and posted online concerning his decision to go back to college (to finish his English degree… go figure).
    You also aren’t required to be an English major to write superbly dense narrative songs full of literary references. In this case, it would be unfair to use anyone else but Craig Finn of the Hold Steady as an example, given his heat streak of four wildly acclaimed albums in five years, including the high profile (and often unfairly selective) music webzine Pitchfork Media’s seal of approval, which hailed Finn, a communications major at Boston College, as “The poet laureate for the U.S.’s have-nots.” Most Hold Steady songs stick to the formula of high-energy blue-collar guitar rock with Finn mostly speaking on top of it all in a thick nasal drawl, sometimes disregarding all time and key signatures. The effect is jarring and definitely an acquired taste, but it makes it difficult for fans and detractors alike to ignore the words, which read like gritty urban prose-poetry steeped in the local flavor of Minneapolis, Finn’s hometown.
The Hold Steady’s 2005 album Separation Sunday is a loose story arc that follows the misadventures of Hallelujah, a 33-year-old woman searching for spiritual salvation among the lowlifes of Minneapolis, getting mixed up with pimps, skinheads, religious fringe groups, and an ample amount of drugs along the way. Closing song “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” mostly resolves the narrative and features such golden lines as, “The priest just kinda’ laughed/ The deacon caught a draft/ She crashed into the Easter Mass with her hair done up in broken glass,” and, “These parties they start lovely but they get druggy and they get ugly and they get bloody.” Finn’s lyrics are warmly conversational and devoid of pretense, and in the case of Separation Sunday, chock full of references to Catholicism. “The Cattle and the Creeping Things” is a kind of modern reinterpretation of Bible passages, the best lines of which refer to the story of Adam and Eve. “I guess I heard about original sin/ I heard the dude blamed the chick/ I heard the chick blamed the snake/ And I heard they were naked when they got busted/ And I heard things ain’t been the same since,” Finn flatly speaks as if he were sitting down with you at a bar and trying to talk over the background noise. He doesn’t aim to disrespect Catholicism, as he was raised Catholic, but rather to put it into the context of his story, and the result is vivid, twisted, and humorous.
    Finn also gets the prize for cramming the most literary references as possible within his body of work. The 2006 album Boys and Girls in America takes its title from Kerouac’s On the Road, William Butler Yeats and William Blake get name-checked with surprising regularity, and, like Will Sheff, he wrote a song detailing John Berryman’s suicide, which was coincidentally released within a year of Sheff’s song. In “Stuck Between Stations,” Finn’s approach to the poet emphasizes the pressure of critical acclaim and the tenuous importance of literature as the causes of Berryman’s suicide, which is summed up in the blunt concession, “She said, ‘You’re pretty good with words/ But words won’t save your life,’/ And they didn’t so he died.” All in all, it’s not half bad for someone who wasn’t formally taught from the canon of English literature.
    A major in English is by no means a prerequisite for becoming a great songwriter, but perhaps it can give you an edge that sets you apart from the endless half-constructed similes and cliché expressions that are currently saturating the world of pop and rock lyrics. And just as an instrumental version of a song with vocals might seem pointless and aimless, lyrics out of the context of their song are just as misrepresented. The best songwriters’ lyrics are invariably interconnected with their music and can’t be separated no matter how verbose, witty, or referential an English major gives them the power to be. In an interview with multimedia blog Camp Jinx, Ted Leo sums it up best. “I don’t consider myself to be, like, a poet or a writer, you know. My lyrics are lyrics and they’re meant to be—while I do try to get them to scan well on a page and to read well if you’re just reading them, they’re meant to be as part of the song, which is, you know, words and music. But I do find that, um, the kinds of things you hear about, like novelists and poets and the way that they do operate when they’re writing words, those ways work for me as well.” While that’s some pretty shaky English for a Notre Dame graduate, I’ll excuse him because Hearts of Oak is probably the best power-pop album ever made. Like novelists and poets, however, listening to songwriters such as these can be just as satisfying as reading any great poem or short story. And they are meant to be listened to.

-Michael Squeri



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