It had been going on long before the Buzzcocks' Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) and it'll keep going long after new Oasis track (Get Off Your) High Horse Lady. But for some songwriters, using unnecessary brackets is a habit that's hard to kick.
As round brackets exist, almost solely, to give additional information to the reader (in this case, the person looking at the CD sleeve), we'll give passes to songwriters who use them for subtitles (see Radiohead's Hail to the Thief and its use of alternate titles) or when the most recognisable part of the song is different from the title – like Green Day's Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).
But when the information contained in the brackets is just the end/beginning of the bloody sentence, one has to question the logic of adding them. Recent offenders - and there must be many more - include Love's Not a Competition (But I'm Winning) by Kaiser Chiefs and Hard Fi's Can't Get Along (Without You), which use brackets to contract the lines "love's not a competition, but I'm winning" and – you guessed it – "can't get along without you". Why?
I don't want to pick on Noel, but Oasis' main songwriter is a peerless purveyor of pointless parentheses. Scanning through an Oasis discography I found nine examples:
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
It's Getting Better (Man!)
(Probably) All in the Mind
(It's Good) To Be Free
(I Got) The Fever
(As Long as They've Got) Cigarettes in Hell
(You've Got) The Heart of a Star
Sittin' Here in Silence (On My Own)
(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady
We'll let What's the Story pass because it acts as a counterpoint to the track Morning Glory, but some of these are farcical. You wonder if It's Getting Better (Man!) only has the brackets to distract from the fact that it almost shares a name with a Beatles track.
If you take the brackets away on (Get Off Your) High Horse Lady – as one ought to be able to do, such is the nature of the bracket – all context is lost. You're just left with the tricky mental calculation of trying to work out what, exactly, a high horse lady looks like.
So, songwriters of the world, leave the brackets out of it unless absolutely necessary. Or else forget brackets altogether and follow the lead of the quite brilliant Sufjan Stevens, who's fond of naming songs like this:
The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!
That's the spirit.
