Part of the reason I'm so fascinated with music is the wide variety of styles that make up the patchwork quilt of popular song. Regardless of style, though, and despite my fondness for quirky rhymes and outrageous puns, I think I'm most moved by those songwriters who are also poets.
Aren't all songwriters poets? After all, most songs rhyme, don't they? To my way of thinking, all songwriters are lyricists--but then there are the poets, the ones who push beyond the basic envelope of rhyme and meter in order to communicate their visions.
Poets are the ones with the ability to use words in ways that conjure up thoughts and images in the mind of the listener. Poets are the adventurous architects of language, building directly upon metaphor without necessarily establishing foundations of simile, or coherence, or various other prose-related boundaries. Poets are also communications sorcerers, staying in touch with the zeitgeist and the muse while remaining in synch with the dreamlike state that houses the cradle of creativity.
There are no hard and fast rules for distinguishing between poets and lyricists, although I could ramble on for quite a while about the poetic merits of various pop songwriters. Most would probably agree that Bob Dylan was one of the first poetic songwriters of the modern pop music era. However, the real reason I broach the subject is to discuss the work of another artist, someone I hold in high regard as both songwriter and poet.
Townes Van Zandt, a Texas-born songwriter whose songs have been recorded by a wide variety of artists, was a restlessly rowdy persona. He availed himself of various consciousness-altering substances throughout most of his life, and acknowledged that his own erratic behavior was part of the reason his career was never more successful. But he was also a deeply sensitive and soulful person, and his work exhibits a powerful gift for metaphor within the structure of popular song. Van Zandt was considered a songwriter's songwriter when he died at the age of 52 on January 1, 1997.
"Pancho and Lefty" is probably Van Zandt's best known and most widely recorded song. I remember marveling at the song's imagery when I first heard Emmy Lou Harris' version in the late 1970s, and Willie Nelson scored a hit with it on the country charts in 1983. Some of my favorite lines include those that open the first two verses:
Livin' on the road my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath's as hard as kerosene
and
Pancho was a bandit, boys
His horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
"Pancho and Lefty" is one of those wonderfully enigmatic songs that, despite the forcefulness of its imagery, leaves one wondering just how much of a story is there, and what the hell it's about. For example, did Pancho and Lefty even know each other? And who are they? Van Zandt once said that he remembers writing the song, and consciously thinking at the time that it was not about Pancho Villa.
I also love the way the chorus changes ever so slightly during the course of the song, giving us a sense of the passage of time and therefore keeping it moving forward. First, it's:
All the federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him hang around
Out of kindness I suppose
The next time we hear it, the third line of the chorus is "They only let him slip away," which implies escape. Hmmm. Then, at song's close, the first and third lines are changed:
A few gray federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him go so wrong
Out of kindness I suppose
Perhaps it's the song's ambiguousness that makes it so appealing. The references to Pancho and Mexico are offset by Lefty's mysterious flight to Ohio--Cleveland, we later find out--and in the last verse we're told that:
Pancho needs your prayers it's true
But save a few for Lefty too
He just did what he had to do
And now he's growing old
Another favorite of mine is "Tower Song," a quiet but powerful statement to an emotionally distant lover and a sad indictment of a failing relationship. It traverses the tightrope that separates the intense feelings people have for each other, and offers glimpses into the no-man's land that often comes to exist between men and women:
The end is coming soon it's plain
A warm bed just ain't worth the pain
And I will go and you'll remain
With the bitterness we've tasted
I find Van Zandt's use of "the bitterness we've tasted" especially skillful here. It can be taken a couple of different ways, referencing either the sharp tang of physical love or the frustrated betrayal of a busted romance. And I think the four images that follow are especially powerful:
A mother's breast a new born child
A poet's tears and a drunken smile
I can't help thinking all the while
Their meaning won't be wasted
Finally, the song's chorus is very direct and to the point:
You built your tower strong and tall
Can't you see it's got to fall some day
One of Van Zandt's own favorites was said to be "To Live's to Fly," a sparse, personal musing about the nature of existence. Its imagery is muted, like a dress made from a faded floral print. I find the following lines to be haunting and starkly beautiful in their simplicity:
Everything is not enough
And nothin' is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep's the gettin' there
To live's to fly
Low and high...
Van Zandt reportedly felt that his songs first had to "work" as poems on paper. Perhaps it was this requirement that made so many of his songs masterpieces of their kind.