I was chatting with latsot on Twitter about worrying or weird or cryptic song lyrics and mentioned Emmylou Harris’s “If You Were a Bluebird” as the most random song lyrics of my acquaintance. So then I decided I needed to revisit them to see, and yes, they’re still that random.
If you were a bluebird you’d be a sad one.
I’d give you a true word
But you’ve already had one.If you were a bluebird,
You’d be crying
You’d be flying home.
The way Emmylou sings it, it seems to mean something…but then when you think about the words with your brain, you see that there is no something that the words mean. You’ve already had one? You’d be flying home? Wut?
If you were a raindrop,
You’d shine like a rainbowAnd if you were a train stop,
The conductor would sing low
Well that’s just rhyme-seeking. What rhymes with raindrop.
If you were a raindrop,
You’d be falling
You’d be calling home
If you were a raindrop you’d be calling home? Come on now. Why would a raindrop be calling home? What would it say if home answered?
If you were a hotel
Honey, you’d be a grand one,
But if you hit a slow spell,
Do you think you could stand one
Well I guess it would depend on the last quarterly report and – wait, how did we get from bluebird to hotel?
Weirdly, it’s a great song – but the lyrics always make me laugh.
Comments
6 responses to “If you were a hotel”
So in the early 1980s, Leonard Cohen made a “short musical film” called I am a Hotel. I don’t think I ever saw the piece, but I did use the phrase a lot when I was pregnant in 1984.
Rhyme-seeking can cause a huge, grinding gear-change-failure but oddly doesn’t in this song, at least to my ears.
Some examples of where it doesn’t work quite so well:
From the otherwise brilliant Bowie: Life on Mars. Brilliant song but WHAT WERE YOU ON WHEN YOU WROTE THOSE LYRICS?* I mean, it’s bad enough that we have:
What?
But then we have
Talk about phoning it in. It has all the hallmarks of a placeholder he never got around to fixing.
See also more or less everything by Rod Stewart. Some decent tunes there, but then we have lyrics like this, from Maggie May:
cringe
It seems like they should have known that these were not good days at work. I’ve certainly written terrible hacky code on occasion to fix an urgent problem with the full intention of going back later and doing it properly. But, you know, time moves on and a year later I find other people writing equally bad code to get around the horrible hack I’ve committed. At least I have the decency to pretend someone else wrote that original code. I don’t sign my name on it and sell it to people as art.
* I have a fairly good idea what he was on but I’m still not sure that was an excuse for those lyrics.
Alanis Morissette’s What if God was one of us? contains the self-answering question “If God had a name, what would it be?”, but she really outdid herself with Ironic. It’s a decent enough song but the only genuinely ironic thing about it is that none of the examples of supposed irony she sings about are actually examples of irony.
The opening lines to The Chi-Lites’ Homely Girl made me almost choke on my coffee the first time I heard them. In fact, “It must have broke your poor little heart / when all the boys used to say / you looked better in the dark”, still makes me shake my head.
.
Well, there’s no shortage of songs with wacky, strange and often banal lyrics.
I bought Carl marsh’s Too Much Fun on a whim closer to 3 decades ago than 2 and I still find it strangely compelling. Possibly because I feel many of the lyrics are trying to tell me something – I’m just not sure what all that often. I’ll leave this here…
https://genius.com/albums/Carl-marsh/Too-much-fun
Another favourite from James McMurtry…
Hear the trucks on the highway
And the ticking of the clock
There’s a ghost of a moon in the afternoon
Bullet holes in the mailbox
Bullet holes in the mailbox
Key holes in my mind
On forced rhymes:
It’s no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like that old man in
That book by Nabakov
But all these are mere amateurs compared to the great Jon Anderson. I defy you to take any lyric from any song on Fragile, Close to the Edge, Tales from Topographic Oceans or Relayer and come up with a sensible interpretation.
I love love love