Lyrics + Meaning
half-formed thoughts on how we interpret songs and who they belong to
Late last month Hell World published “Approaching perfection,” a collection of words by writers discussing their five favorite songs by David Berman of Silver Jews/Purple Mountains. I’m not a regular reader of Luke O’Neil’s newsletter but I do enjoy the format of pieces like this one, where he enlists writers he likes to share thoughts on music (previous editions covered the Cure and Jason Molina). The sheer open-endedness of it all is a big part of the thrill—some people approach the project from a personal POV while others write something closer to more traditional music criticism. The collection is also very long, tens of thousands of words, so it invites dipping in at different places, reading for a bit, and coming back later.
Reading through the entries after it ran, something struck me about the commentary on “How to Rent a Room,” a Berman song that probably would have landed in my own Top 5: something that was obvious to two of the writers—that the song was about Berman’s lobbyist father—had never even occurred to me. “How to Rent a Room is first and foremost raw invective aimed at his rotten lobbyist dad,” wrote Justin Sayles, I writer I admire a great deal. I wondered where this seemingly widely understood truth came from, whether I missed an interview with Berman somewhere in which he explained “How to Rent a Room.” I couldn’t find it on a quick google but I’m assuming it’s out there somewhere. I did see that someone had annotated the Genius page with the lyrics of the song, connecting almost every line to Berman’s relationship with his father but without attribution.
What interests me isn’t so much what the song is “really about” but rather how meaning gets attached to songs, and how a site like Genius serves as a source of truth for decoding what songs mean. This was a particularly interesting case for me because I first heard “How to Rent a Room” shortly after the album came out, probably in 1997 or 1998, and I played it hundreds of times between then and when Berman revealed who his father was in 2009 (it was the kind of song I’d have in my CD Walkman and hit the rewind on 10 times when walking around a city). So that’s 11 years of living with the song and thinking about it and internalizing it without a clue to to its origin, those facts being unknown presumably outside of Berman and maybe a few people close to him (this is assuming the Genius annotator and writers are correct).
I knew it was about the narrator being angry at someone he had history with, I knew it was funny and evocative and had some brilliant lines like “when your curtains move in the wind you can bet I’m betting against you again,” which captured the hot charge you feel when you’re pissed at someone you despise and wishing terrible things for them. I also knew that it has one of my favorite lines in music—“An anchor lets you see the river move”—which strikes me as not angry but wise. Who knows, if Berman were another kind of artist and in 1996 was doing a typical press roll-out and the internet in its current state existed, he might have done a “Silver Jews Track-by-Track” feature interview where he explained the impetus for every song and what he was thinking when he put them together, and then those observations would be recorded on Genius as the “official” word, shutting down future debate about where the songs came from. Is that a better world?
For my part, by the time Berman revealed who his father was, the song was in me. I was always going to think of my life when hearing it, not his, and I had so much history with it I remembered where I was walking and what I was doing while it played. In a certain way, I had written it.
At some point in one of the pieces I wrote about Berman on Pitchfork, I quoted Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino: “Reading [him], I had the unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become One.” That’s Berman to me—I encounter his work is both frightening and comforting because it seems to come from my own mind. Not that I have 1% of his skill or insight as a writer, I need to make that very clear even as it’s obvious. But that feeling of recognition is what makes his work special to me. You can sense the mind working, and for many who connect to his work, you can feel how it mirrors the working of your own mind, even if you don’t have the ability to articulate it.
I was thinking of Berman too because this morning I finished Ann Powers’ great new book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Maybe I’ll have the time and space to write about in more detail later because I have many thoughts. But one thing about Joni’s work you can’t deny is that people have always listened to her songs wondering who she wrote them for, what true events they describe. And she reinforced this every step of the way, discussing in interviews which relationship or situation was connected to a particular song—this one is about Graham Nash, that one is about David Geffen, etc.
I’m not immune to appreciating that kind of biography in song and it’s fun to parse. But, perhaps I’m alone in this, it’s only distantly disconnected with what I love about her music. Unlike with Berman, I don’t have the uncanny sensation of feeling like I wrote her words, but I still have a desire to map them onto my own life, to think about her adventures and observations and connect them to mine. What she was thinking and doing is in the mix, but it’s less important than these other connections. It’s how all that comes together that matters.
Am I self-obsessed, living in my own head? Maybe. It might explain why I can (sometimes) continue to enjoy music by people who years later did or said something repellent: The Smiths catalog is mine, not Morrissey’s. But that’s a topic for another newsletter.