Songbook (6 page)

We're sitting in my back garden on a hot summer night, eating barbecued chicken and listening to Todd Rundgren, when a friend suddenly explodes into a rant about pop music. His argument, as far as I could follow it, went as
follows: it's crap because the words are crap, pathetic adolescent poetry rather than lyrics, and so if it's all crap then you might as well listen to music that performs a function and has no pretensions whatsoever . . . Which is why he only bothers with house music. House music doesn't bother with words very much, and has an express goal, namely making you dance when you're off your face.

This, it seems to me, is like saying that because most restaurants are very bad, one should play the percentage game, forget about trying to find the good ones, and eat at McDonald's every meal. There is no doubt, though, that lyrics are the literate pop fan's Achilles heel. We have all lived through the shrivelling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. ‘What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during
Top of the Pops
. ‘ “Get it on / Bang a gong”? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer – ‘Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' – is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. (I suspect that this humiliation continues, and that it makes no difference whether the parent doing the humiliating was brought up
on a diet of T. Rex, or Spandau Ballet, or Sham 69, and therefore should really avoid the literary high ground altogether. My mother, after all, belonged to a generation that danced – danced and
smooched
– to ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' and if she felt able to be snooty about ‘Get It On', then surely snootiness is a weapon available to all. Rubbishing our children's tastes is one of the few pleasures remaining to us as we become old, redundant and culturally marginalized.) I do not, despite (or possibly because of) my day job, pay that much attention to the lyrics of my favourite songs. ‘Call Me' by Aretha Franklin, pretty much the entire lyric of which runs ‘I love you / So call me the moment you get there', is the last word in any argument about whether greatness in a song is attainable without lyrical ambition or complexity. (The last word, that is, unless someone wishes to point out that a great song must by definition offer a little more than a line or two of what sounds like a particularly uninspired telephone conversation. Well OK, but ‘Call Me' still gets further down the road towards something wonderful than is easily explicable.) Half-heard phrases don't worry me, and I am happy to let anything pass which does not actually make me blush.

The more forgiving one is of one's favourite artist's
literary pretensions or inadequacies, however, the easier it is to forget that songwriting is an art distinct from poetry. You don't have to be Bob Dylan, and you don't have to be whoever writes the songs for Celine Dion (in other words, you don't have to use the words and phrases ‘dreams', ‘hero', ‘survive', or ‘inside my/yourself', because life isn't an ad for a new type of Ford); you can, if you're brave, have a go at being Cole Porter, and aim for texture, detail, wit and truth. Ben Folds is, I think, a proper songwriter, although he doesn't seem to get much credit for it, possibly because rock critics are less impressed by sophisticated simplicity than by sub-Dylanesque obfuscation: his words wouldn't look so good written down, but he has range (on his second album there are songs about apathy masquerading as cool, an unwelcome guest, and the ugly triumphalism of a bullied nerd made good), an amused eye for lovestruck detail (‘Words fail when she speaks / Her mix tape's a masterpiece', he sings on the ecstatic ‘Kate') and he makes jokes – but not in the choruses, crucially, because he knows that the best way to wreck a joke is to repeat it seven times in three minutes.

‘Smoke' is one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the slow death of a relationship that I know. Lots of people have assailed the thorny romantic topic of starting all over
again (for example, off the top of my head, ‘Starting All Over Again', by Mel & Tim), and the conclusion they usually come to is that it's going to be tough, but both practicable and desirable; the heartbreaking thing about Folds's song is that it manages to simultaneously convey both the narrator's desperation and the impossibility of a happy outcome. He doesn't know about the latter, though – only Folds the songwriter, who has the benefit of both music and a vantage point, can see that the relationship is doomed.

In ‘Smoke', the central conceit is that the relationship is a book, and so its unhappy recent history, the narrator wants to believe, can be destroyed by burning it page by page, until ‘all the things we've written in it never really happened'. ‘Here's an evening dark with shame', he sings. ‘Throw it on the fire!' the backing vocalists tell him. ‘Here's the time I took the blame. (Throw it on the fire!) Here's the time we didn't speak, it seemed, for years and years . . .' Wiping the slate clean is the fantasy of anyone who has ever got into a mess with a partner, and the metaphor is witty enough and rich enough to seduce us into thinking just for a moment that in this case it might be possible, but the music here, a mournful waltz, tells a different story. It doesn't sound as if the narrator's lover is terribly
convinced, either: ‘You keep saying the past's not dead', he tells her, ‘Well, stop and smell the smoke'. But the smoke, of course, contains precisely the opposite meaning: it's everywhere, choking them. ‘You keep saying . . . we're smoke', he concludes sadly, and we can tell that he's beginning to believe it, finally; the smell of smoke, it turns out, does not symbolize hope but its opposite.

‘Smoke' is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever and sad and neat, in a way that my friend would not credit; it's also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You can't ask much more of a song than that.

It's possible that this sort of craft goes unnoticed because ‘Smoke' is ‘just' a song, in the way that ‘Yesterday' or ‘Something' weren't ‘just' songs. The young men who wrote them were also, unwittingly or not, in the process of changing the world (or – to attempt to cover all the arguments in one clumsy parenthesis – in the process of being given credit for changing the world, unwittingly or not). This inevitably means that an awful lot of attention was focused on their talent – which, after all, was ostensibly the only
world-changing tool at their disposal. If you're singers, and you're changing the world, then people are bound to look pretty closely at what you're singing – because how else are you doing it? As a consequence, some very good, very pretty, very sharply written, brilliantly produced and undeniably memorable songs have been credited with an almost supernatural power. It's what happens when people are deified. The eighteenth-century British scholar Edmond Malone calculated that Shakespeare ‘borrowed' two-thirds – 4,144 out of 6,033 lines – from other sources for
Henry VI
, Parts I, II and III. And, though
Henry VI
is a minor play, the point is that this stuff was out there, in the world, and Shakespeare inhaled it. What he exhaled was mostly genius, of course, but it was not genius that came out of the blue; it had a context.

The Beatles had a context, too, but they seem to have inhaled that along with everything else: they have hoovered up and become the sixties, and everything that happened in that extraordinary decade somehow belongs to them now. Their songs have therefore become imbued with all sorts of magic that doesn't properly belong to them, and we can't see the songs as songs any more.

Ben Folds has not changed the world, and nor has he changed popular music. (Indeed, at the time of writing, he
may well be struggling to earn his living from popular music, although I hope not.) He is writing songs at a time when nobody equates music with social change; he has no context to hoover up, and he is working in a medium (loosely, pop/rock) that at the time of writing – and, let's face it, at the time of reading, unless you're reading this in 1970 – is widely regarded as washed-up, exhausted, finished. So his songs are just songs. They represent nothing, and nor are they a part of anything else, and they must fight for attention in an industry and a critical climate that is only interested in cultural significance.

This is what has to change, if pop music is to survive. Literature seems to have just about maintained a toehold in our culture because we're prepared to accept that books can be
sui generis
: Zadie Smith's
White Teeth
, for example, represents nothing but itself. It isn't at the forefront of a new, young, hip, multicultural, etc., literary revolution, and it belongs very firmly to a familiar narrative tradition. But that doesn't make it any less of an achievement, or any less interesting; and it certainly hasn't made it unpopular, either with critics or with readers. If it had been a record, however, we'd probably have ignored it; the general view would have been that we've heard all that great writing and ambitious narrative stuff before, thanks
very much, and we're waiting for something new to come along.

There is an argument which says that pop music, like the novel, has found its ideal form, and in the case of pop music it's the three- or four-minute verse/chorus/verse song. And, if this is the case, then we must learn the critical language which allows us to sort out the good from the bad, the banal from the clever, the fresh from the stale; if we simply sit around waiting for the next punk movement to come along, then we will be telling our best songwriters that what they do is worthless, and they will become marginalized. The next Lennon and McCartney are probably already with us; it's just that they won't turn out to be bigger than Jesus. They'll merely be turning out songs as good as ‘Norwegian Wood' and ‘Hey Jude', and I can live with that.

‘You must be excited about the film coming out,' a friendly and well-meaning acquaintance remarked at the end of 2001, a few months before the movie version of
About A Boy
was released. (Those weren't her actual words. Her
actual words were, ‘You must be excited about
About A Boy
coming out.' I changed them because, prose stylist that I am, I wanted to avoid that double ‘about'. I'm sick of it. My advice to young writers: never begin a title with a preposition, because you will find that it is impossible to utter or to write any sentence pertaining to your creation without sounding as if you have an especially pitiable stutter. ‘He wanted to talk to me about
About A Boy
.' ‘What about
About A Boy
?' ‘The thing about
About A Boy
 . . .' ‘Are you excited about
About A Boy
?' And so on. I wonder if Steinbeck and his publishers got sick of it? ‘What do you think of
Of Mice and Men
?' ‘I've just finished the first half of
Of Mice and Men
.' ‘What's the publication date of
Of Mice and Men
?' . . . Still, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I smiled politely, but the supposition mystified me. Why on earth would I get excited? There had been interesting, sometimes even enjoyable bits along the way – selling the rights to the book for an unfeasibly large sum of money, for example, meeting the people responsible for the film version, seeing the end product, which I liked a lot. I'd be very suspicious, however, of any writer who was actually excited by any of this process, which can be on occasion distasteful (
About A Boy
ate up a director and got spat out by another film company even before it was made) and
stupefyingly prolonged; indeed, the time before, during and after a film's release is positively unpleasant. You get reviewed all over again; you discover that half your friends never read the book in the first place; the bits of the film people like the most turn out to be nothing to do with you.

But the first time I heard the soundtrack to the film really was exciting, in the proper, tingly sense of the word. Seeing one's words converted into Hollywood cash is gratifying in all sorts of ways, but it really cannot compare to the experience of hearing them converted into music: for someone who has to write books because he cannot write songs, the idea that a book might somehow produce a song is embarrassingly thrilling.

Like a lot of people, I spent a large chunk of 2000 listening to and loving Badly Drawn Boy's
The Hour of the Bewilderbeast
album. It's one of the very few English records of recent years I've had any time for; it's thoughtful, quirky without being inept (despite my earlier presumption that the name of the artist was somehow indicative of the ramshackle nature of the music, a presumption that stopped me from listening to him for a while), it's melodic, it borrows lightly and judiciously from all sorts of folky, rocky things I like (Damon Gough is an early-Springsteen
devotee), it doesn't show off, it is un-English in the sense that it wouldn't be much use to Ibizan clubbers or boozed-up football hooligans, it has soul. It also sounds cinematic, with its little snatches of orchestration (it begins with a brass-band instrumental that would not have sounded out of place in a gentle sixties comedy) and its range of moods. It seemed to me that Damon could write a wonderful film score, and I would have suggested him for
About A Boy
had I not known that writers have less chance of influencing film adaptations of their books than they do of changing the weather. And then, the first time we met, Chris and Paul Weitz, the co-directors, told me that they had already asked Damon to provide all the music for the film. This struck me as being troublingly neat – could it really be possible that the music in my head was the same as the music in theirs? – but anyway, here I am, in my office, listening to a whole lot of new Badly Drawn Boy songs and music cues that very few people in the world have heard yet, and feeling lucky.

I began writing
About A Boy
in 1996, the year my son Danny was finally diagnosed as autistic. There were lots of things to think (or panic, or despair, or lose sleep) about, and money was only one of them, but I suddenly went from feeling reasonably wealthy – I was in my fourth year of earning a decent wack from writing, and for the first time in
my life I had some savings – to financially vulnerable: I was going to have to find enough to make sure that my son was secure, not just for the duration of my life, but for the duration of his, and that extra thirty or forty years was hard to contemplate, in more or less any direction. And then, no sooner had these worries begun to take hold and chafe a little bit than this Hollywood money arrived. Until the movie was made, this was the only connection I had forged between the book and Danny. The character of Marcus was nothing to do with him (Marcus is twelve, and brightly voluble, if odd; Danny was three, and five years later is still unable to speak), and I don't think that Danny would recognize the parenting that Marcus experiences. It's possible that, if I had been childless, I would have been attracted to a different kind of story, but that's the only way that
About A Boy
is about Danny.

‘A Minor Incident', a sweet, heartfelt, acoustic strummer with a wheezy Dylanesque harmonica solo, refers directly to a major incident in the book and the movie: Marcus comes home from a day out to discover his mother, Fiona, lying comatose on the sofa after an attempt to kill herself, her vomit on the floor beside her. The song is her suicide note to her son. I wrote one for her too, but it wasn't in the form of a song lyric, and Damon's words capture Fiona's
dippy depressive insouciance perfectly. But here's the thing: once I'd listened to ‘A Minor Incident' a couple of times, it started to make me think of Danny in ways that I hadn't done when I was writing the book. ‘You always were the one to make us stand out in a crowd / Though every once in a while your head was in a cloud / There's nothing you could never do to ever let me down', sings Damon as Fiona, and the lines brought me up short. Autistic children are by their nature the dreamiest of kids, and Danny's ways of making us stand out in a crowd can include attempts to steal strangers' crisps and to get undressed on the top of a number 19 bus. But that peculiar negative in the last line . . . How did Badly Drawn Boy know that it's the things that Danny will never do (talk, read, play football, all sorts of stuff) that make those who love him feel the most fiercely proud and protective of him? And, suddenly, five years on, I find a mournful undertow of identification in the lyric to the song, because the money from the sale of the film rights has forced me to contemplate my own mortality; like Fiona, I'm thinking of a time when I won't be around for Danny – for different reasons, but the end result is the same.

So there we go. That's where the excitement lies: in the magical coincidences and transferences of creativity. I write a book that isn't about my kid, and then someone
writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did. And I won't say that this sort of thing is worth more than all the Hollywood money in the world, because I'm a pragmatist, and that Hollywood money has given Danny a trust fund which will hopefully see him through those terrifying thirty or forty years. But it's worth an awful lot, something money can't buy, and it makes me want to keep writing and collaborating, in the hope that something I write will strike this kind of dazzling, serendipitous spark off someone again.