Who wrote this comely verse? "In the lowlands, nestled in the heat/A brain-cradle rocks its babe to sleep/Its contents watched by Sycorax and patagon in parallax." TS Eliot in a tender moment, perhaps?
And then there's this one: "Out of a gunnysack fall red rabbits/Into the crucible to be rendered an emulsion." Who could that be? Someone really gory with a Heathcliff complex, like crow-fancier Ted Hughes.
But what about this third? "Awful atoll/O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow/Bawl, bellow/Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow." Gerard Manley Hopkins? John Donne? Someone who's just swallowed a dictionary and snaffled Daddy's absinthe?
Pish and piffle, all the above! These plucked parcels of poetry come from three of the hottest properties in alternative music. The first lyric -- those pesky patagons and parallaxes -- comes from The Decemberists' Come And See, a track off their new album The Crane Wife, named with fitting literary flourish after a Japanese folktale.
The second, all gunnysacking and grisly business, is from the pen of James Mercer, frontman of The Shins, whose third LP, Wincing The Night Away, comes out next Monday. The third is from the 17-minute-long Only Skin by Joanna Newsom, from her critically acclaimed album Ys, which she toured recently around the UK.
So why the long words? Colin Meloy, the Decemberists' lead singer and songwriter, said in a recent interview that he turned to strange language and unusual subjects because he "ran out of interesting things to say about myself".
When I recently interviewed James Mercer for the Guardian, he said that writing in wild, passionate metaphors was a great way of getting rid of personal demons. Joanna Newsom used to study creative writing at a prestigious Californian college, and has said that Ys has five long tracks because it's an homage to William Faulkner's five-chaptered The Sound And The Fury. (She's really bloody brainy.)
But are these people just pretentious show-offs who like thumbing through thesauruses? Or are they brave pioneers scooting away from three-chord, na-na-na indie territory towards proper lyrical adventurousness? Readers, you decide! And offer us any other weird and wonderful examples of the scholarly stuff while you're at it...
