Read Songbook for Free Online Page A

nothing resolved, at least externally, and I doubt that DiFranco will ever write another song quite as piercingly pretty, or as moving.
    Mann’s song is more straightforwardly about work, and is, I would guess from its detail, unmediated autobiography, an anecdotal scrap which has been worked and enriched until it contains more resonance than it had any right to. Mann and her band straggle together to play a gig in New York, a gig that none of them seems to have any expectations for; but then ‘something strange occurs’: the band might not be going anywhere, yet clearly some kind of musical epiphany takes place that night. It’s not a happy song, however – Mann chooses to regard the epiphany as ironic (this is our finest hour?) rather than redemptive, and ‘I’ve Had It’ becomes a song about the triumph of bitter music-biz experience over hope.
    I listen to ‘I’ve Had It’ a lot, and there are occasions when I find the tinge of self-pity in the lyric immensely comforting. (Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it,and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.) Even so, there’s something a little troubling about the song’s breathtaking melodic strength. Here’s the thing: which came first, the tune or the words? Because if it was the tune, then that makes you wonder why Mann thought music that sublime was best served by her travails in music. Wasn’t there a break-up that meant this much to her, or a parent, or a childhood memory? (Her song ‘Ghost World’, incidentally, contains a verse indicative of what a fine writer she is: ‘Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool / They hang out by the pool / So I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school’. These few words do the job of perhaps as many as 700 recently published semi-autobiographical but deeply sensitive first novels.) And if the words came first, then are we to presume that it is only her career that can produce this level of musical inspiration? Either way it bothers me a little, and makes me doubt whether my love for the song is really to be trusted. This frequently happens in pop music, of course – all sorts of people knock up a neat tune and then can’t furnish it with anything but a few tatty second-hand lines about eagles flying and love dying – but one is struck here by what seems like Mann’s inability to tame and control hermelodic gift. It is, perhaps, the curse of the trade. ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,’ Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me (if I could write music, I’d never have bothered with books); music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like Mann, find that, even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring towards the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so fallibly human, all at the same time. Maybe it’s only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt on a bad day.
    But what is appropriate subject matter for a song? There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication, something both timely and timeless, and, in the case of pop music, something that will sustain over several hundred plays and, possibly, a couple of margarine advertisements. Sometimes songs seem to survive the going-over they are given by fans and radio stations almost despite themselves, more by luck than judgement. The Clash probablydidn’t think that ‘Complete Control’, an attack on