Lyrics and Stories

Pop music is not technically difficult. At least not usually. It is hard in other ways, though. In the space of about three minutes, how do you grab someone's attention and keep it? How do you get the listener from one end of the song to the other? How do you convince the listener that they should give your song a chance? Even harder, how do you get someone to listen to your song a second time, and then to listen over and over again? Getting that first chance is a challenge. Every chance after that is what separates good music from ordinary music.

The greatest songs express themselves through a combination of compelling, beautiful, and yes, tightly structured music. The songs that we remember have a hook. Beyond the music, the songs that stick in our minds and in our hearts have lyrics that lodge in our memories and strike emotional chords. The very, very best songs have musical and lyrical structures that work together to propel a story forward. The song is a narrative art form; it recounts an event, expresses a feeling, describes a person or situation, looks back in time and casts an eye forward. The songs that are most effective invite the listener into the story, and ask him/her to be a part of it. They tell a story that is universal in its appeal and individual in its telling. The characters in the story are both inside and outside of the song. Listening, we imagine ourselves into the story of the song. As we explore that fictional universe, we discover things about ourselves that we had not known or been able to express until we encountered them there. We make a song by someone else into a song that is our own and we wonder how the songwriter could have known so much about us.

To write a song like that, one has to imagine oneself as both a character in the story and as a listener. Imagining onself as a listener, one must, in turn, speculate about the listener's role in the story. This is a complex specular exercise -- I'm thinking that he's thinking that she'll be thinking that he's thinking this way and I'm betting that she realizes that I am imagining that he is thinking this and I am hoping that she imagines the same thing as if she had thought it herself -- yeah, it's not simple.

Sometimes songs use complicated lyrics and carefully crafted images to make a point. Sometimes, they just drive ahead with simple words and simple lyrics, inviting you to drive along with them. "Time Runs So Fast" is a song that just asks you to run with it. "Little Child" is more subtle. It's a lullaby and a love song and the image of the "whisper at night" is intended to be richly evocative. "Tantalus" is based on a myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The words are written to reflect that and they are in a register that is less usual for pop music. Another thing stands out: they are chanted more than sung, in parts.

Barbara Drive hopes never to disappoint its listeners with its music or its lyrics. We want you to follow the stories, see something in them that is yours, and make them your own. That's why this is FREE MUSIC.