More than words ... is Dylan really the greatest lyricist?
Shortly after he was given the task of editing the Great Lyricists series, I ran into my colleague Michael Hann. His face, I noted, was strangely pale and he looked as if he were wearing a very heavy coat. It seemed that already the responsibility of choosing not only the world's best lyricists but also the finest fruits of their labours, was getting to him a little. The stress of who to choose was almost too much to bear.
It was thoroughly understandable of course - lyrics, after all, are a highly contentious subject, a world in which one man's Tom Waits is another man's Boris Gardiner. There was, first, the small matter of which eight artists to include - they had to be suitably well-known that the majority of our readers would have heard of them, so this meant that some magnificent lyricists - Will Oldham, Smog, Joanna Newsom, and John Darnielle among them - were deemed too obscure. And there were others, too, who didn't find space - there was no room at the inn for Paul Simon, for example, who is one of my favourite lyricists; I find it impossible to listen to the words of America, for instance, or Graceland's "As if I'd never noticed/ The way she brushed her hair from her forehead" without my insides buckling just a little bit. And no place either for Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian, a band often dismissed as twee, yet beneath those sweet refrains Murdoch's lyrics are often brilliantly cold-eyed and sharp-tongued.
The eight artists chosen are, however, a splendid bunch: Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Chuck D, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Morrissey and Alex Turner; all, to my thinking, write with such effortless beauty and wit, and all appear to recognise that words can be not only powerful but also delicious. I don't, truth be told, wholly agree with some of the choices of songs - I would have chosen Dylan's Lay Lady Lay, for example, above his Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues, but that's because I prefer Dylan at his simplest and sloppiest, rather than at his most calculated and composed. I would, perhaps, also have found room for Alex Turner's Fake Tales of San Francisco, and Patti Smith's Land, which I believe one of the most extraordinary songs in existence. But that's just me. Who do you think deserves their own swanky lyrics booklet?
