Anyone with ears knows Joni, Paul, and Gordon have no equal.
Be sure to keep your dial glued to the oldies stations so that you will never have anything to compare with.
«Today’s Lyrics Are Pathetically Bad» Rick Beato
He know better than me. He is a musician and i am not. I dont listen contemporary lyrics anyway, they are not all bad for sure, but what is good enough is few waves in an ocean of bad to worst...
I will never dare to claim it because i am old, not a musician anyway, i listen classical old music and world music and Jazz...
And old very old lyrics from Franco-Flemish school to Léo Ferré and to the genius Bob Dylan Dylan...
Just write what you think about Beato informed opinion...
I like him because he spoke bluntly and is enthusiast musician ...
Showing 35 responses by immatthewj
@devinplombier , that's a big +1 (or more) for Texas Love Song! (In my opinion, for what little it's worth, that actually was an okay album. And Taupin's lyrics were the reason I followed Elton John back then.) |
To name some, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams and Michael Timmins have continued to write lyrics in to the 21st Century. I don't listen to the radio much anymore, but I am sure that there are plenty of others. But maybe you are right. After all, what can compare to such great lyrics like those of The Bird Is The Word? |
Maybe. However, although I don’t listen to the radio much at all these days, going back a few (or even several) years when I did, but still in the 2000s, I remember that I thought that Brandi Carlile and Ryan Bingham and Josh Ritter and Justin Townes Earle were writing some good stuff. I realize that they are probably all in their 40s now (and I think Justin Earle would be in his 40s if he were still alive) but it is 2025 after all, meaning that they were probably in their 20s at the turn of the century. But still, it’s hard to compete with the likes of ". . . hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on . . .". |
As an aside, back in nineteen eighty and something I read Up And Down With The Rolling Stones (because the review in Playboy seemed interesting) which was theoretically authored by an "insider" and I remember the author claimed that Brown Sugar was referring to unrefined heroin. |
They just don't write great songs like this any more:
Well I met him on a Sunday (oooooo) |
I had to do a google search because I’ve lost track of the years, but Justin Townes Earle’s first CD release was in 2008, and according to Wiki, he followed that with seven more. I admit that I haven’t heard everything that he did, but I listened to a public radio station that played his stuff and I thought that what I did hear was pretty good. And all of it from the 21st century. |
@8th-note , you've got five years on me, but how did your dad feel about Dylan and The Beatles? I remember that my dad did not like either of them--not at all. |
I won't argue with that; I was only remembering what someone who was theoretically an "insider" stated in a book. |
@8th-note , I recall my two older sisters listening to them (The Beatles and Dylan) when I was growing up. There was a pretty good age gap between them and me, and back then I didn’t have a real appreciation for music, however I did find a lot of what they listened to interesting, and I now credit their (my sisters) influence to be why I became a fan of Dylan as I grew older. Speaking of offensive lyrics, I remember them playing a protest song quite loudly (my oldest sister’s bedroom had the "stereo" and it was down in the basement) and what I remember was "GIMME AN F!! [. . .] WHAT’S That SPELL!!" I remember that rather clearly. I think my oldest sister did that to piss my folks off. I also remember some interesting songs off of the Hair (was it a sound track?) album. The one I am thinking of at the moment was titled Sodomy. The line that got my attention back then was, ". . . masturbation can be fun . . .". I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason she played that was also to get on my folks ’nerves. |
@tyray , LOL! I didn't shoot you those old Jim Croce lyrics because I thought you were a 70 YO 'boomer; I just thought, after reading your last post, that you might appreciate the sentiment. @devinplombier , funny that you should mention Billie Eilish. A few years ago I made a friend on another audio forum (a forum that I never go to anymore) and he is not someone who I would imagine liking Billie Eilish. A while back ago we touched base about some music and some vacuum tubes, and he recommended her to me. I almost forgot about that. |
Actually, @tyray , the Jim Croce lyrics that I posted came to my mind after I read your post
and truly, nothing negative was meant to be implied.
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Actually, @tyray , at the time your post made me think of those lyrics (". . . memories can be friends . . .") I could not remember the name of the song. I did a google prior to that post, and the song title was Recently, and I just did another google, and that was released on the I Got A Name album. Which, as an aside, may have been the first cassette tape I ever bought, when I was a teenager, for my "stereo, which was a little portable cassette player. However, I also thought that Photographs And Memories was a pretty good song. |
Here are a couple of more song writers I just thought of that I personally like what I have heard from them: Ray LaMontagne was born in ’73 and according to Wiki his first CD was released in ’04 and since then he has released at least seven more "studio albums" and some EPs and some singles. I say "at least" because it appears to me as if the wiki article is a bit dated. I slowed down considerably on buying CDs in the post 2001 world, but of the two of his I did buy, the one I like the most (and it is up there on my rack where I keep my favorite go-to CDs) is God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise. Mia Doi Todd was born in ’75 and her first two CDs were released in ’97 and ’99; After those two, and up until ’21 she released nine more "studio albums" and some singles and two "remix albums" and one soundtrack (Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2018). (I do not know if she has any post ’21 "studio albums".) As I’ve typed previously, I do not listen to the radio much any more nor do I buy many CDs these days, but on one of the rare times I was listening to the radio and hearing her sing My Baby Lives In Paris, that was enough for me to buy Cosmic Ocean Ship and in my opinion the CD is made up of solid writing. |
I don’t have any problem with Frank Zappa, but these are not the lyrics that I would use to try to make a case for today’s lyrics being pathetically bad when compared to those of yesteryear. "Dreamed I was an eskimo It was a hundred degrees below zero... Save your money, don’t go to the show And she said, with a tear in her eye
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. . . and how about Norah Jones? She was born in ’79 and according to Wiki she has nine "studio albums" under her belt, apparently starting with Come Away With Me in ’02 (which, in my opinion, has some stuff on it that is quite well written). If that Wiki article is current, her last "studio album" was Visions and released in ’24; I haven’t heard that one yet, so I cannot comment on it, but I have a bunch of other CDs and SACDs by her, and although I don’t like all of the stuff on all of them, I feel that there is also well written stuff on them. (I may put Visions on my list.) |
On a personal level, @stuartk , I could point to many exceptions to that. However, I think that there is also a lot of truth to that statement. But I would also say that if some one writes something (could be song lyrics, poetry, a short story, a book) that somebody else is able to relate to due to situations/experiences, it is probably, at least to a certain degree, well written to be able to strike that chord. At least that’s the way I feel when something that I read or hear strikes that chord in me. "Wow, the author did a pretty good job when s/he wrote that." Here’s an example of what you just said that is NOT an exception for me: "When Daddy told me what happened, I couldn’t believe what he’d just said; Sonny shot himself with a .44 and they found him lying on his bed." You are probably familiar with those lyrics, but in case you are not and in order to give the ARTIST due credit, that was by Lucinda Williams, the title was Pineola, and it was off of the Sweet Old World CD released in early nineteen nintey and something. That song seemed to speak directly to me, and the first time I ever heard it I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up. I wanted to tell Ms. Williams how I felt. I am relatively certain that this was not exclusive to me. (And from what I subsequently read, the writing did come from her heart/gut/personal experience and I remember that back when I first started attending her performances, she always used to open with that track.) Anyway, getting bacl to your statement above, perhaps that’s where Rick Beato comes to that opinion he has (I think badly) stated: the lyrics that speak to him on the basis of personal experiences and life situations come from yesteryear. But that’s on him. I started out this response by saying that although I was not discounting it that, for me, there were personal exceptions. An example, for me, would be Bob Dylan. I really cannot relate much at all via experience/situation to what he writes, but the imagery his stuff invokes in me is just killer. And I’d go so far as to say that quite often it is the imagery that lyrics invoke for me that makes the difference. (’For me’ being the operative words.) But with that typed, and coming back again to what you typed regarding situations and experiences, often the imagery invoked by certain (not all) lyrics are, in fact, images of experiences and situations that I can easily relate to. |
You know what they say--beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder (or listener). But putting nonsense in a song and giving it a title doesn't make it anything but nonsense, no matter what year it was composed, and my point is that I wouldn't use it as an example of why yesterday's lyrics are better than those of today. But this, of course, is only my opinion. Unlike Rick Beato, I will not state that Don't Eat The Yellow Snow is pathetically bad when compared to music of today. |
@ezwind , the reason I picked those artists, and others, was because at some point in the course of this thread the statement was made about what was or was not being written in the 21st century. All of those artists I have listed released their first studio album in the early 2000s, with the exception of one who released two in the very late ’90s and then followed up with several releases in the 21stt century. |
. . . @ezwind , I will just quickly point out that I was not the member who posted that query to you (about how hard have you tried to hear new music), but no-matter. I remember my childhood in the ’60s and my teen age years in the ’70s, and I can tell you that most of the AM country &/or top 40 stations that were popular in the small town in north central Montana where I grew up were not playing Dylan very often. I doubt my Dad (who did like Lawrence Welk) would have even known who he was if my sisters hadn’t have been playing it in the basement. And I don’t know how they were exposed to it, except my oldest sister was a small town hippy-girl, and I suppose that they were privy to some kind of "underground hippy network" whose reach mangaed to extend to the northern plains. As far as being exposed to contemporary artists these days, back in the mid ninetys someone at work turned me onto a public radio station, 91.3 WYEP, that got me away from the classic rock stations. I don’t know what their play list is like now, but at the time it was like, "Wow! I never heard of this group/artist! This is real good!" And I bought a lot of CDs due to that radio station. I kept my car radio on 91.3 and the radio at my bench at work as well. At work, except for two other guys who listened to that station, all everyone else knew was classic rock or what passed for country back then (meaning Garth Brooks, et al). I caught a lot of grief over that.
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That probably had the most to do with it, @ezwind . They played top 40 hits and old-goldies and C&W. They probably played Blowing In The Wind back then, unless it had some kind of bad rap of being a protest oriented song--as good as my memory is, I do not remember. My Mom liked different types of music--she was relatively open minded. Relatively. She bought the 45 rpm of Hey Jude because she thought it was beautiful when she heard it on the radio. She did like what she heard by Paul Simon, although she was a bit aghast by Kodachrome ("When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . ."). My Dad was different story. I remember playing an 8 track (I think it was a greatest hits) for my mom because I had just discovered Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and I thought it was so cool, and my Dad walked by and was quite condescending. He liked Lawrence Welk and he also liked Kenny Rodgers. In the ’90s, after my mom died, he’d come to visit us for Thanksgivings and one year we all went to DC to see Lucinda Williams at the Oh Nine Thirty Club and that didn’t do anything at all for him. A year or two later we went to a local club to see Jill Sobule and Warren Zevon. Not impressed. I played him some Leonard Cohen on my system which was, even back in the later ’90s , not a bad system, and maybe you can guess how he felt about that. He wasn’t liking the Cowboy Junkies cover of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry; "I don’t think that’s how Hank Williams meant for that to ever sound." Which is all to say that different people have different thoughts about what is great and what is pathetic. |
@mapman , +1 on The Bird's The Word. I had that very same thought when I was recently watching a rerun of Full Metal Jacket on Flix. An example of yester-year's lyrics that were not extremely good. |
@stuartk , I would agree with probably everything you typed in that post. However, I would point out that you should have addressed that post/reply to @ezwind instead of me. Not that I took offense or anything, just that the post that you were responding to was made by @ezwind . As for me, in the mid ’90s I was introduced to a public radio station, 91.3 WYEP, that totally transformed my appreciation of music. And although I do not listen to the radio much anymore, what I have heard when I do listen makes me tfeel that there are still good artists writing lyrics in the 21st century.
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Going back a few years ago, I remember hearing He's Fine on the radio a few times so I bought the CD for that song. I cannot say that, for me personally, anything except that song really grabbed me. I'll have to give it another listen. |