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their record label for releasing a single without their approval, would make any sense to people a couple of decades later (‘They said release “Remote Control” ’ is surely one of the less promising first lines of a song) but it still has something to say about naivety and cynicism and artistic impotence. Even ‘Nelson Mandela’ doesn’t sound daft, despite the great man’s release; it celebrates a life – a great life, an important life, a life well-lived – and therefore easily and joyously transcends the focus of its protest. Nils Lofgren’s ‘Keith Don’t Go’, on the other hand, is a song which pleads with The Rolling Stones’ guitarist not to go to Toronto in 1977, because he would have been arrested on a drugs rap; it’s not a cause that one wanted to devote an awful lot of energy to, even back then (not least because Keith could just, like, not go), and it’s not a song that has revealed hidden depths in the intervening years. The great Australian comedian Norman Gunston used to sing Liza Minnelli’s ‘I’m Liza with a Z’ and then profess himself mystified that more people didn’t cover it – perhaps Nils is just as bemused that ‘Keith Don’t Go’ hasn’t earned him the publishing royalties he’d anticipated.
    In the end, it’s the songs about love that endure the best. Songs about work are good. Also songs about rivers,or parents, or roads. Good songs about children are surprisingly rare (yes, it’s hard to write about the feelings one has for one’s child without nauseating people, but somehow songwriters manage to knock out perfectly decent, sometimes even breathtaking, songs about the airhead model they met in the toilet of a club without the same effect); songs about pets are best avoided. Songs about drugs – especially songs that purport to be about girls but are ‘really’ about drugs – don’t have the same appeal when you are no longer at school and there’s no one you can explain the hidden meaning to. And jokes never really stand the test of airtime. (I have always felt slightly ambivalent about Randy Newman’s work, brilliant though much of it is. How many times do you want to listen to a song satirizing bigotry, or the partiality of American congressional politics? Listening to Randy Newman over and over again is like reading The Grapes of Wrath twice a year: however much you care about the plight of America’s migrant workers in the 1930s, there is surely only a certain amount of your soul and mental energy you can devote to them.) But the truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it’s just that romance,with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself. Songs that are about complicated things – Canadian court orders, say, or the homosexual age of consent – draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is this guy singing? Why doesn’t he write a newspaper article, or talk to a phone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? But because it is the convention to write about affairs of the heart, the language seems to lose its awkwardness, to become transparent, and you can see straight through the words to the music. Lyrics about love become, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song. Maybe this is what gives ‘You Had Time’ the edge: our break-ups, in the end, have more melody to them than our work does.

12 ‘Born for Me’
– Paul Westerberg
    Actually, that’s a serious question: how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? In fact, how does