Keep It Simple, Stupid!

     I woke up this morning about 4am with one of my old songs in my brain. It was something I had written in the very early 1980s. I could remember almost all of the lyrics, except for the beginning of the second verse. After getting up out of the bed, and moving around a little bit, the words all came back to me. I even remembered the chord changes and melody. I also realized what a pretentious piece of work it was.

     At the time that I wrote it, I was listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt's music. I was playing in college town bars, and covering songs by him, Kris Kristofferson, and Jesse Winchester, in addition to Hank Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, and some country, rockabilly, and old-time rock 'n' roll tunes. I was starting to hang out with other writers who read books, and poetry, listened to traditional folk music and blues, and told exciting and exotic (or so it seemed to me) stories. I slipped right into a "Let me show off my vocabulary. Surely people will be amazed" phase.

RENEGADE
You try to burn your bridges down the moment that they're built
Into my mind you've plunged confusion way up past the hilt
You rash rapacious renegade you burning shooting star
Unfortunate mistake I made and the consequential scar

     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade

Love me for a little while and stay 'til you must leave
But please don't tell me stories you don't want me to believe
A Rapunzel or a rapparee a lover or a thief
Your indecision instigates my flux from mirth to grief

     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade

     The crowd I was running with all seemed to really like the song. The girl I wrote it about even wrote a reply song (the next day) called "Renegade Woman", letting me know that she only wanted me when she wanted me, and she certainly didn't need me. In spite of the fact that my love life was virtually non-existent, I was quite impressed with myself, even though I often felt like I couldn't hold a candle to some of my "peers".

     But at some point I came to the realization that people's eyes would glaze over if I pulled out a song like that at a campfire or dive bar. I had to face the fact that I wasn't writing songs for English professors, and that I had a better chance of communicating with people if I wrote songs with words that more people understood. In certain circles, the songs went over fine, but intellectuals and artistes are such a niche market. Nobody talked the way I wrote songs, at least not contemporaneously.

     I began to choose my words more carefully. I found that my songs that sounded like the way people actually talked got a much warmer reception than the ones that audiences needed a dictionary to listen to (and in fact were often written with one open in front of me). Not to say, I won't throw a challenging "fifty cent word" into a song these days, but the ten dollar ones are generally nowhere in sight, nor within earshot. Polysyllabic can be problematic, so I have learned to keep it simple.

It's much less complicated that way.