I love music. I suppose that's clear from the rest of my blog.
When I look at what I enjoy about music, it's almost always the instrumental aspects of the music that appeal to me, rather than the lyrical content. I have a few friends who are very focused on the lyrical, and we sometimes find it hard to appreciate the same pieces of music because of it. But it's always an interesting process to discuss our different perspectives.
In one relatively recent occasion, I was (nearly) witness to the process of creating a lyrical tapestry... my friend Simon left a friendly guitar-playing evening at my place, and emailed me the lyrics of a new song about 2am that night. It was something inspired by an image, and the lyrics were very powerful for me, and clearly had just flowed from Simon.
The Tin Man sits in my neighbor's yard, and I had pretty much forgotten about it, but this image is significant in Simon's life, and it was an immediate and strong inspiration.
I'm very impressed with the lyrics of The Ballad of the Tin Man, and had imagined a song around the words when I read what Simon had sent me. I guess this is the power of the imagery that can be created by human language, and no doubt what my lyrically-minded friends find powerful and moving. For me, that has always been a relatively rare occasion, yet I find nearly every piece of music I listen to powerful due to their musical rather than lyrical content.
It's not often that the lyrics are removed from the song, though. In this case, because I had read the lyrics first, the song had formed for me in a personal customized "song" in my head. Imagine my shock when I went to Simon's ReverbNation page the following week to hear the song played and sung... it was nothing like what I had pictured in my head. Sure, the lyrical content was the same, and the end message is still strong. But the mood of the song was significantly different than my image of it. It's still cool, and in retrospect, the music as played matches both the format and subject matter of the lyrics. In addition, the mood matches Simon's personality and not mine... in retrospect that shouldn't be a surprise either.
Here's the Ballad of the Tin Man... lyrics and music inspired by playing guitar outside on a beautiful summer evening and seeing a surprise image. Thanks for sharing, Simon...