A big part of my preparation and education, if you want to call it that, for being songwriter was (and is) playing thousands of songs – on gigs, in recording sessions, in Broadway shows. A lot of covers, a lot of originals. For many years I was primarily a bass player – a sideman – and I still am, part-time, among other things.

Songs always fascinated me, so I paid attention to the lyrics of the songs I played. At the same time I noticed that, though some musicians listened closely to lyrics, most didn’t. Yet many of them were able to play the songs just as ‘sensitively’, with as much awareness of the song’s nuances, as I did. Often more so.

I’ve been at many rehearsals where the songwriter painstakingly explained their lyric… why, for example, the music had to get very quiet in a certain section to follow the words… Sometimes this was helpful. Often I felt it was unnecessary, for reasons I’ll go into below.

When I started my own band about 14 years ago, I was lucky enough to enlist some of New York’s finest musicians, people I had played many sessions and gigs with, to perform and record my songs with me on a regular basis. Unlike the aforementioned bandleaders, I rarely brought up the particulars of a lyric to my band. And I never felt the music suffered for it.

After having the band for a while I started to realize that most of my musicians truly had no idea what my lyrics were, other than the song title at the top of the chord chart. Even though of course I wouldn’t’ve minded hearing something from them along the lines of, “Heavy lyric, MAN!”, I not only didn’t mind their inattention to the words of my songs; overall I considered it a plus.

Why? Well, I should reiterate that these musicians have played for some of the greatest songwriters of our time… without a doubt they know how to interpret a song! I always felt that they were taking in the essence of the songs at a deep level, a level where most of the time it wasn’t necessary to ‘know’ the lyric.

On top of that, I usually prefer to not have my songs interpreted literally. To not have the tom toms roll when I’m singing about thunder, to not have the guitar ‘cry’ when I sing about heartache, to not have the organ play circus music if I sing about a carnival, etc… Hey, that’s fine with me!

To my taste it’s frequently better to have the musical arrangement provide what you might call subtext. Think of examples when music and words work well together. I believe you’ll find they frequently don’t ‘match up’ literally.

To me the literal interpretation tends to be more superficial… I think listeners take in songs in a more holistic way… and that’s how these musicians hear and play mine – in a deeper, more intuitive way. Songs themselves aren’t literal… it’s all sound. Ideally, as important as lyrics are, there’s much more to a song than can be put into words… or lyrics.

So the fact that my band members might fail miserably at a quiz about my lyrics doesn’t bother me a bit. That said, it would amuse me greatly to give them such a quiz.

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