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Conspiracies, and, Perfect Songs?
May. 4th, 2003 08:00 amSo my temp assignment at the loverly law firm ended, and here I am, on a Monday morning at eight (yes, 8) am, taking part in the same temp agency's Guaranteed Work Program.
The suck is that you show up at 8 am. The bonus is that you kinda hang out, do what you want (thus this journal entry), go out on assignment if they get one for you, and get paid.
Yeah, I can do that.
So as I sit here listening to the Beatles and Dylan pipe through the office, I have a query: What, to you, constitutes a perfect song? My criteria are pretty stiff; though I haven't fully defined them yet, I do know that I've found only three songs (if that) that qualify. What they tend to have in common:
1) They're short
2) They do not have fade-out endings
3) They have poignancy; that is, they skilfully raise emotion in a way that isn't sentimental or cheap
My three that make it? "Eleanor Rigby," by the Beatles; "Ave Verum Corpus" by W. A. Mozart, and "Bookends" by Simon and Garfunkel. (And that last one barely makes the cut, since it very nearly dips into sentimentality.)
To give you an idea of both my taste and my stringent needs for perfection: "Slip Sliding Away" by Paul Simon, despite being an amazing song, falls short because of its inferior fourth verse ("God only knows..."). Simon himself has written that if he had been braver, he would've kept it to just the three (the man, the woman, and the child). "Washing of the Water" by Peter Gabriel moves me terribly, but it spills all over the place with gospelish emoting.
What's your opinion? For me, I think what a perfect song needs most is economy, true emotion, and restraint; as Chekhov said about writing emotion in fiction: keep it cold. "Eleanor Rigby" is probably the saddest song there is, yet there isn't a drop of sentimentality. Tight, buttoned-up violins. Two characters. Three short story-poems for verses. "Ah, look at all the lonely people." Done. Perfection.
Thoughts?
The suck is that you show up at 8 am. The bonus is that you kinda hang out, do what you want (thus this journal entry), go out on assignment if they get one for you, and get paid.
Yeah, I can do that.
So as I sit here listening to the Beatles and Dylan pipe through the office, I have a query: What, to you, constitutes a perfect song? My criteria are pretty stiff; though I haven't fully defined them yet, I do know that I've found only three songs (if that) that qualify. What they tend to have in common:
1) They're short
2) They do not have fade-out endings
3) They have poignancy; that is, they skilfully raise emotion in a way that isn't sentimental or cheap
My three that make it? "Eleanor Rigby," by the Beatles; "Ave Verum Corpus" by W. A. Mozart, and "Bookends" by Simon and Garfunkel. (And that last one barely makes the cut, since it very nearly dips into sentimentality.)
To give you an idea of both my taste and my stringent needs for perfection: "Slip Sliding Away" by Paul Simon, despite being an amazing song, falls short because of its inferior fourth verse ("God only knows..."). Simon himself has written that if he had been braver, he would've kept it to just the three (the man, the woman, and the child). "Washing of the Water" by Peter Gabriel moves me terribly, but it spills all over the place with gospelish emoting.
What's your opinion? For me, I think what a perfect song needs most is economy, true emotion, and restraint; as Chekhov said about writing emotion in fiction: keep it cold. "Eleanor Rigby" is probably the saddest song there is, yet there isn't a drop of sentimentality. Tight, buttoned-up violins. Two characters. Three short story-poems for verses. "Ah, look at all the lonely people." Done. Perfection.
Thoughts?
