I think good lyrics are nice to have but not essential since the melody is more important to me. But you need to be able to remember the words as well.. so I dont really know what I'm trying to get at here :lol:
Then again I dont really like the prog rock stuff which seems to tell more of a proper story than other songs.
^ lol you just talked yourself into a circle!!
I'm good at doing that haha
:lol:
I still know what you mean tom! Even if no-one else does... and trying to explain it usually does end up going in circles!
Unless I'm listening for a specific reason, I don't listen to music for the lyrics, I also don't listen to it for the guitars, or the drums, or any specific bit... I do hear all those things, but usually I'm listening to music for a more general thing: an emotional experience.
Everything the artiste/producer has put on there adds to that experience.
If there are lyrics involved, I feel that they do need to be "good", because cr@p lyrics stick out a mile, aren't memorable, or they are memorable for the wrong reason! (Bear in mind that we all have a different idea of "good" when it comes to lyrics :lol:)
But the lyrics of something I'm listening to, and their meaning when taken in isolation, are an area that I concentrate on quite some time later, if at all, in my relationship with a piece of music. Often, I've already heard it enough to have learnt the lyrics subconsciously before I even worry about what they mean as a whole.
It does mean I
might miss out on something that others are getting enjoyment/etc from, though.
For example, when Rush were making these albums, I loathed this pretentious type of story-telling concept thing in long rock/pop songs. I liked this particular album (but never owned it) for the guitars and not much else. Then I bought it on CD a year or so ago - and I discovered there's more to it than meets the eye.
And now this thread has made me appreciate far more what a fine job Mr Peart did on the lyrics and lyrical concept on this piece. I finally got into prog-rock and concept pieces in the mid-90s via Jethro Tull and Thick as Brick (about 15 years after I should have done... :lol:). T-as-a-B finally broke the barrier for me so that I was prepared to listen to a band I'd
hated in the 70's early 80's - Genesis. I grew very fond of Supper's Ready, Musical Box, Lamb Lies Down. I quite like the Ian Anderson and Peter Gabriel approach to "concepts" - stream of consciousness. But someone else could regard it as a bit lazy and meaningless - what they've done is write little snippets of meaning and emotion and then cobbled them all together in a way that they can pass off as a "complete work" rather than working them up properly to produce several or many finished songs. The thing is, although this is "easier" to do, you still have to do it well, and it leaves
so much space for the listener to interpret and add his/her own emotional reaction.
What Mr Peart has done (in my view, when I try to do anything along these lines) requires far more work - he's written an entire set of lyrics that hang together and are focussed from start to finish.
And he's left space for interpretation - class :D
However, I still personally prefer the Anderson/Gabriel/Bowie/Lennon/etc stream-of-gibberish approach if it's done well... because
I don't concentrate on the lyrics when I first get to know or appreciate a piece of music!
