Give It Time is the love and light, surrender to the flow, uplifting anthem a certain other hamband songwriter I love has been trying to write for 15 years.
Why is it when Goose expresses those sentiments, it's cool and uplifting, but when Trey does, it's cheesy? They sound effortless and quite natural singing those lyrics.
@aburtch I have some theories. But here’s the first thought I had to your inquiry. If you want to write compelling lyrics about surrender, elevating your soul, and a higher power for good, you write a chorus about turning up the song on the radio. It’s poetic but relatable, which makes the tune soulful and authentic. In the alternative, you could take a more direct approach and write Soul Planet.
This is basically my thesis re: trey and his recent lyrics. He mostly just comes out and says what he's thinking without using imagery, metaphor, etc, except a small set of very similar repeating images we could all name. Or they're SO abstract they're hardly about anything
Lonely Trip is his best song in ages not just bc it's bittersweet (a more sophisticated kind of feeling) but bc he found a simple, direct metaphor to carry the message
@mrcompletely@Rosey I like this thesis. The best songs are slightly abstract and allow you to hold the feeling in a way that’s unique to you. Overly specific or “on the nose” lyrics tend to spoil that feeling.
@mrcompletely@Rosey Trey needs the other members of Phish as a balance. Left unchecked, he tends to the “first draft” love and light style you mention that we see frequently these days.
@aburtch@mrcompletely Trey needs an editor because his ADD is out of control. I get it. I've got that ADD thing too. The good news is he is not paralyzed by his constant thoughts. He's learned to dump them out, but he cannot stop creating long enough to get the distance and perspective necessary to edit.
@Rosey@aburtch that feels about right. I'm sure he's coming at it from a zen "first thought best thought" perspective but that doesn't really apply to wordcraft for most people. He's not a freestyler.
@mrcompletely@aburtch Kerouac was mind blowing when I was 19, but I’m halfway ashamed to say so was Ayn Rand at the time. I was a kid athlete but I’m glad that sort of lonely selfishness didn’t stick.
@Rosey@mrcompletely@aburtch Great conversation. My own default listening habit is to ignore lyrics - I usually have to make an effort to focus on them. (I realize this is atypical and partly explains my affinity for instrumental music and perhaps even Phish.) While the nonsensical lyrics of classic Phish (no offense to Tom) blend seamlessly with the gestalt of the music in my brain, I find it hard to tune out the forthright lyrics of Trey's new age love & light songs.
@BEK97@Rosey@aburtch to my way of thinking, not that many of the OG phish lyrics are truly nonsense, though we could all name several pretty easily. A lot of the abstract/odd ones have enough coherent symbolism to be good Rorschach songs - which is a fair trick, having just enough there for people to project their own meaning onto. And some are quite meaningful, just usually in unique/oblique ways. Certainly by Rift they'd mastered writing conceptual lyrics with matching music (e.g. Maze, Ice)
Add comment