I'm thinking of a new blog project. Here and there, when I find the time, I'll write a short essay about a song whose lyrics are really good. What motivates this is this 33 1/3 book I've had in my head that someday I'll start working on and propose to them. The album in question, which will remain nameless here, is significant to me for many reasons, but one of them is its explicitly literary character. Which, to me, makes sense for a 33 1/3 book, devoted to treating the old, dusty medium of the album like the old dusty medium of the novel.
(Sidenote: A couple of years ago, Chris Ott wrote to great acclaim that "Downloading Kid A was probably my generation's last novel, shared musical experience." I have commented on this quote myself in the old blog, but in the years that have passed, this quote has stayed in my head, slightly transmogrified, as "Kid A was probably my generation's last novel." What falls out—the downloading—of course also remains in a deeper, structural way.)
So the little essays to come will see me exploring how to treat songs on a literary level, hopefully without also losing what makes them songs and not, say, poems or short stories. I don't approach this little project without trepidation; done badly, this is basically NPR or McSweeney's: I See a Darkness and In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Corrections, John Darnielle as Jonathan Lethem. (Note: in this model, Colin Meloy is Chuck Klosterman.) (Second note: American Water is awesome.)
