the story or the tune

How do you tell which one best captures the classic spirit of horseness? I guess you are talking about your own personal sense of horseness, because what other classic sense of horseness would you know? And how could the artist know what your own classic spirit of horseness is? I guess he has to go for his own personal sense of horseness and hope that everyone’s sense of horseness is close to his own. But how likely is it that everybody has the same sense of horseness? Not very I think. I think he aims at something close to the classic spirit of something, but I don’t know what that is. That’s as much sense as I can make.

And it’s an odd thing about lyrics. Sometimes you take them away from the song and they sound perfectly good:

And the sailors on the water
They all want the captain's daughter
They want her beauty and her youthTo grace their bow out on the sea

-Nanci Griffith

There he goes gone again
Same old story's gotta come to an end
Lovin' him was a one way street
But I'm gettin' off where the crossroads meet
It's a quarter moon in a ten cent town
Time for me to lay my heartaches down
Saturday night gonna make myself a name
Take a month of sundays to try and explain

It's gonna be easy to fill
The heart of a thirsty woman
Harder to kill the ghost of a no good man
And I'll be ridin' high in a fandangled sky
It's gonna be easy; It's gonna be easy from now on

Raw as whip but clean as a bone
Soft to touch when you take me home
When the mornin' comes and it's time for me to leave Don't worry 'bout me, I got a wild card up my sleeve

-Susanna Clark, Easy from now on

Then there is this

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

-Jim Morrison

In fact all the Doors songs and a lot of the surrealistic Dylan songs are like that, the words sound perfectly good in the song, but take them out and they sound like almost random collections of words.

I’m way out on a limb here, but I think there are two distinct elements to art, the aesthetic and the story. The aesthetic would be like just the notes and beat of the song and just the colors and the shapes of the painting. They are just like what I like to call mathematical things, they are just patterns, pleasing patterns, things that we like just because, the way we like chocolate just because of the way it tastes.

Then there is the story. In a song it would be the words, and in the painting it would be the subject matter of the painting, a cat, a landscape, the rape of the Sabine women, whatever.

I think there is something more to be said about that, but nothing comes into my mind at the moment. It just seems like a useful distinction.

My history of music is a little different from yours. First there was the music of Your Hit Parade, which I guess I liked well enough because I didn’t know much else. Then there was Elvis, who at first I didn’t like because my sisters liked him, but eventually I came around, and then music became insipid with all those teen idols and all, but then along came the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and music was really good, and then along came psychedelic music and since I was doing drugs at that time music was terrific. But then when I got to my late twenties, I kind of lost interest in music. I would hear it on jukeboxes and in car radios, but I wasn’t paying much attention, I wasn’t buying any albums.

When I moved to Texas I sold my record player and my records, and music was just not a big deal, and it continued not to be a big deal until around 1990 when I got into CDs. I bought all the music I had liked in my youth (I think I have said before that I’ve observed that while musicians keep up with music all their lives, most other people like music from their teens to maybe their thirties and after that they cling to that music and don’t pick up much on anything new), and I ventured out into a couple different genres. I got into some pop folk music like Townes Van Zandt and Nanci Griffith, and I got into the blues.

The blues had been mixed into my earlier rock and roll, and I had dismissed it as stodgy and boring, but eventually it began to seem more substantial to me than than flighty rock and roll. And then following the blues back I got into roots or delta blues. It’s usually just one guy and his guitar, and some people consider it folk music, I wonder if you do.

It seems to me that there was some folk music mixed into the Your Hit Parade, and it was ok, but it sounded a little plain and boring to me. When I got to college there was a committed folk music contingent, and I went along with it a little. I remember that they were very purist. There was a big controversy about whether you could write your own folk music or if you could just sing songs that had already been written. But then along came the Beatles and then psychedelia and Dylan went electric, and the folkies just seemed to disappear.