Songs are marriages of two different media. Like with any other relationship, the quality of the individuals (music, rhythm, and lyric) and the quality of their union go a long way to determining one’s reaction to the finished song.

You and I have collaborated on a couple of songs now; doing so in different ways each time out. With this one, you wrote your lyrics to accompany the music after it was fleshed out. With “Winter Rain”, you wrote to a song that I had not heard and I then wrote music around the lyrics, uncolored by what had inspired your meter. In both songs, the poetry became lyric out of a slavery to rhythm and structure, though I think the lyrics in “Winter Rain” stayed truer to the initial poetry because you sought out a song that fit better with the tone of what you were feeling and I then had to lock onto some quality of your meter. Likewise, the music in “Winter Rain” was nothing that I would normally write since it needed to play off of words and a feeling that weren’t mine.

Although exceptions are surely out there, my personal feeling is that good poetry, unaltered, invariably makes bad song. Melody, rhythm, and word need to play off each other in a balance, the same way that musicians take turns soloing in a freeform piece. None of the three can storm along, ignorant of the other, without ruining the final product.

Thank you for posting this. I’ve learned a bit about the nature and nurture of collaboration in reading it. It seems to be the lesson I’m supposed to learn right now. There’s a temporal aspect that I’d previously ignored. Songs have to live in the moment, too.

Simon though the difference was that a poet was free to choose the exact words and never bend them, while a songwriter needed to bend or break the poetry to make it work as a song.

Take THAT, Homer!

Nope. Joe Henry.