REVIEW FILES ATTACHED TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING IN THE SAME ORDER AS PRESENTED: Di

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REVIEW FILES ATTACHED TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING IN THE SAME ORDER AS PRESENTED:
Discussion 4.1: Lyric
Analysis
Both songs were top
hits. Only one has stood the test of time.
I’m not an old woman,
nor am I an English clergyman, but I can personally relate to the characters
and the emotion in “Eleanor Rigby.” We all share the same human
emotions; getting to know specific characters who are going through specific
situations generally evokes an empathetic response. By the end of the song, we
know Father McKenzie by name. We know who he is burying. We know that no one
even showed up for Eleanor’s funeral.
On the other hand, the
lyrics in “Heartbeat” have very little in the way of specifics. We
know that the narrator is “Going to go it alone now, cause that’s the way
it’s got to be,” but we don’t really ever know who he is or who he is
speaking to. There’s a very general progression to the lyric, but we’re dealing
more with generic issues that could relate to anyone’s situation: “I’m
looking for love, a love like mine; They tell me it’s so hard to find.”
The writers of
“Heartbeat” have succeeded in avoiding specifics, but this hasn’t
made the record more relatable—I would submit for your consideration that
perhaps this has made the record more forgettable.
Both of these songs deal
with loneliness and longing, one by writing very specifically about
“Eleanor” and “Father Mackenzie,” the other, while in first
person, is mining clichés and keeping things general.
There is a saying that
songwriters, authors, and poets use that could be of use here:
Show us, don’t tell us.
In other words, it is
more effective to show us why you’re feeling something than to tell us,
“This is how I’m feeling.”
While this may at first
seem counterintuitive, the hard and simple truth is that we don’t care how you
feel. Why should we? Okay, sure—we’ll care how you feel if we know you . . . if
you’re our friend or lover or family member.
Unfortunately, this means that if you’ve played your recordings of
songs telling how you feel for your friends, lovers, or family members and they
were interested, that is an unreliable indicator of whether anyone else will
feel the same way. Sorry to break this to you.
So how do you get us
interested in how you feel?
Well, we care about
people we know. Show us around your life, or the lives of the characters in
your songs. Let us get to know you (or them). Show us what is happening in your
slice of this human experience (or to the characters in your songs), and you
won’t need to beat us over the head with how you’re feeling. We’ll volunteer to
feel it empathetically.
Now, you may have been
moved by “Heartbeat,” and “Eleanor Rigby” may have done
nothing for you, and that’s fine. “Heartbeat” was a successful record.
A lot of people bought it, and it obviously has things going for it. It is
curious, though, given its sales and high position on the record charts of the
day, that “Heartbeat” has been all but forgotten. It receives almost
no airplay on stations that play hits from that era, and it seldom appears on
playlists or compilation albums.
A search on Spotify just
now for the song “Heartbeat” placed the Don Johnson hit way down at
number 33 of songs named “Heartbeat,” pointing towards the dangers of
having a title so generic that many other records have the same name.
By the way, I tend to do a search like this for the title of each
song I write, just to see how many songs are already out there with the same
title.
Consider the following
discussion questions, and feel free to listen back to the records to help
support your opinions.
Why
do you think “Heartbeat” was a hit song in the ’80s?
Why
do you think the record of “Eleanor Rigby” is accompanied by a
double string quartet, rather than the Beatles playing their instruments?
Discussion 4.2: Another
Lyric Analysis
For me, once I get to
know the character in “Tom’s Diner,” once I relate to the
uncomfortable feeling of trying not to notice a woman hitching up her skirt in
the reflection of a window, or not being too interested in an actor who has
passed away since we didn’t recognize his name, we’re ready to fill in the
pauses:
Oh,
this rain it will continue
Through the morning as I’m listening
To the bells of the cathedral
[pause – – –
interesting, I can hear the bells in my mind . . . ]
I am thinking of your voice…
[pause – – – two
auditory cues in a row, and I’m feeling . . . nostalgic]
And
of the midnight picnic
Once upon a time before the rain began…
[midnight picnic . . .
yeah . . . we didn’t know how much fun we were having, did we? Now I feel
. . . longing . . . ]
I
finish up my coffee
It’s time to catch the train
[back into the moment .
. . shoot, gotta go!]
By showing us what was
going on, complete with details and a slice of life, the songwriter is able to
trigger an emotional response in most listeners.
By contrast, the
record Feelings, despite being a huge hit in the ’70s, has become
the target of much ridicule since, making it onto charts like “Worst Love
Songs of All Time” and a compilation called Party Killers.
“Feelings” is
a great example of telling, not showing. The songwriter is telling us that he
is “feeling,” but he’s not even letting us in on what he
is feeling. General angst? Maybe.
Apart from some overused
clichés about “teardrops” and “I wish I’d never met you,
girl,” we have little to guide us to discover what the specific situation
is. The lyricist definitely kept it general, and yes, a lot of people did
initially relate to it, but in retrospect, the record’s success seems now to
have stemmed more from the melody, arrangement, and emotional performance than
the lyrics.
I don’t see many people
rising to the defense of this record, and this is mainly due to the lyrics. And
once public opinion turns on vague drivel, it gets pretty ugly. To add injury
to insult, according to some sources, the artist was successfully sued for
plagiarizing the melody, which was apparently written years before by a French
songwriter.

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