I just read your "songs and stories" essay in the UT WWW pages.
A couple of things on that topic that weren't covered that seem
important:
- For me, at least, while I may lose interest in a song after five
minutes while I'd be willing to take several hours to read a story,
it's also true that I'll happily listen to a song a dozen or a hundred
times, while I wouldn't usually reread a story more than once, if
that. It's not just a matter of length, either. I remember getting
tired of at least one recorded two-minute introduction to a certain
song long before I got tired of the song, even though the intro
was hilarious the first few times. (No one you know; it wasn't a
filk song; it was "Ode to a Gym Teacher" by Meg Christian.) I think
it has something to do with the more highly structured nature of
a song, compared to the type of story you're talking about. Stories
that do get repeated a lot (e.g. bedtime stories, Sumerian mythology)
are structured a little more like songs, and have a "hook" like
songs do ("but it was TOO HOT", "I'll huff and I'll puff", "What
big body parts you've got.")
- About the 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration -- that's definitely
true in my experience -- getting an idea or one funny line is much
easier than making the rest of the song not only technically correct
but entertaining and not just filler -- but it reminds me of another
possible difference between songs and stories. I don't know if this
is true of people who write originally lyrics, but when I write
a song parody I usually can hold the entire original and the parody-in-progress
in my head at once. I rarely parody a song I don't have memorized
(more than memorized; I need to almost literally know it forward
and backward, or at least be able to "jump" to any line in the song),
and I only write down an incomplete parody in case I wind up setting
it aside for a long time. I don't think prose works that way; I
think the 90% perspiration has to be done on the word processor
(or with pen and paper or whatever). That's been my own experience
the few times I've written (or not written) a prose parody.
- I agree with your point that lyrics often make more sense when
they're sung, because the tune gives them the correct intonation.
There's also something else that the tune provides, which for lack
of a better word I call "emotional texture", because it changes
from one word to the next and the lyrics have to fit with it. I
don't understand how it works, except intuitively, but try singing
"Velveteen" to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun". It's not just
funny because the whole tune is wrong for the song; to me individual
lines are funny because of what the tune does at that point (e.g.
on "have left their marks behind"). Or take "Heretic Heart", which
is written to the tune they use for "Little Town of Bethlehem" in
the U.K. (albeit sung more stridently). It would sound completely
different to the U.S. tune for "Little Town of Bethlehem".
