Reading through this thread got me thinking about what it means for a song to be lyrically well-written. I spent a lot of time wrestling with the problem that there are multiple dimensions across which lyric writing can express meaning, and listing them all out would feel tantamount to saying nothing useful at all, so I decided I should focus on just one quality I value in songwriting to get a thread started. I was pleased to see a few of my popular favourite writers already mentioned in the elder thread, so I listed them out to see what I thought they might all have in common.

Searching for a common, vital ingredient that ties together the work of my favourite songwriters across time and genre, the answer I've come up with is: humour.

I'm not talking about comedy lyrics here - I very rarely enjoy joke songs (since a joke is usually only truly funny the first time, while a great song should bear endless relistening) - but rather lyric writing with a sense of irony. A great songwriter explores the interplay between layers of meaning and depths of feeling, and is comfortable with juxtaposition of opposites existing in tension without clean resolution. Someone with a sense of humour can laugh through pain and spot the absurdities in mundane situations. That's what I mean by 'humour' here.

To illustrate my point I'll go through my own picks from the other thread:

dami lists John Darnielle and Tom Waits - the former is, for me, the king of underground folk for his work in the 90s through early 00s. Darnielle is constantly staring the worst impulses of humanity in the face and flicking them away with an offhand remark. His work often has a literary flare, casting historical and mythological figures in absurd/modern situations, or just exploring strange psychology on its own terms. I'd recommend checking out some live performances of Mountain Goats songs, since John often manages to bring the humour out of even their darkest material on stage with his wink-and-smile delivery. My pick: Going to Scotland

Waits shares a lot of DNA with John Darnielle, also being inspired by the experiences of people on the fringes of society - or the fringes of sanity. His humour is often more mean-spirited though; it can often seem like kicking someone when they're down. Nevertheless, if you squint, you can see the heart in it. My pick: Misery is the River of the World

Pidge mentions Everything Everything - a maximalist band if there ever was one, and their lyrics deliver by turning absurdism to the max without losing a pop-ish sense for flow and rhyming hooks. Much like their music, the moment you think it's getting too serious they'll hit you with a wild left-turn that's so over the top you've just got to smile as you dance your brains out. My pick: Hapsburg Lippp

Kevin brings up Radiohead, and I know I'm going to get some sideways glances from people who consider their output a fountain of undiluted angst, but I've got to disagree - Thom Yorke's writing is not (always) humourless. He is a highly neurotic guy with a mean, caustic sense of humour that comes through in a lot of Radiohead's best work. Kevin shouts out Airbag, a song that's positively whimsical by Radiohead's standards, but the standout moment for what I'm getting at comes on the following track Paranoid Android

when, at the end of the bridge section juxtaposing imagery of industrial slaughter with urban middle classes yukking it up at a high-end bar, he sneers the 'punchline' - "God loves his children, yeeeaaah". Some of us get to enjoy far more of the Almighty's favour than we would seem to be owed, while others might as well pack themselves into the ovens for all He's concerned. It's arch gallows humour, and Radiohead's work is full of similarly acerbic lines delivered with a sneer.

blower brings up Animal Collective - if there's one constant in their work it's a sense of playfulness. My favourite lyrics of theirs match childlike naivety with an undercurrent of old-soul yearning. My pick: Mouth Wooed Her

Also from blower: It's no secret that Cameron Winter is a funny guy on stage & in interviews but I think his songwriting doesn't get enough credit for its subtler sense of irony than you'd expect based on his over-the-top wisecracking public persona. Geese's latest album is full of lines that express an overflow of conflicting feelings by playing with contradiction, like "I should burn in hell / But I don't deserve this", "You can stay with me / And just pretend I'm not there", and "I have no idea where I'm going / Here I come!" (I could go on). One of my favourite recent lyrical/musical moments though comes from $0

off his solo album, a lovelorn anthem at the climax of which he breaks into a fit of full-on religious ecstasy, wailing "God is real! God is real! I'm not kidding, God is real! I wouldn't joke about this, God is actually real!" over and over until the mania wears off. In interviews he's mentioned moments at concerts where new fans can't seem to tell if this is part of the song or he's just having a breakdown on stage. Some find it hilarious, others are brought to tears, and I think that's the greatest possible achievement of literary irony - leaving you unsure if you should laugh or cry.

* * *

Now here's my shortlist of great modern songwriter ironists who didn't get a mention in the other thread: Leonard Cohen; Father John Misty; Andrew Bird; Fiona Apple; David Berman; Isaac Wood; Tim Smith; most honourablest mention to Stephin Merritt - I sang The Book of Love

at my wedding.

It's always worthwhile to think of a few objections to your own thesis in order to keep yourself humble, and I did come up with some counterexamples of popular lyricists whose work I admire but don't generally find humorous at all: Joanna Newsom and Sufjan Stevens. Both can be light-hearted, even whimsical, but I've never felt l like I share a sense of humour with either of them. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I love both their work all the same in all its earnestness.

* * *

Now I want to know what great songwriting means to other BotBrs. What qualities do your favourite lyricists have in common?

More of an addendum than a contribution here: One domain Large Language Models seem to consistently struggle with compared to human writers is comedy - they just don't seem to have a sense of humour at all. LLMs still can't generate original jokes, just remixes of established formats, and I'm yet to read AI-generated text that I'd consider amusing on its own terms. I'm not discounting that this may be another "AI can't render hands" situation, but at least for now, a through-line of humour is one of the last reliable signals that a piece of text was authored by a human.

What does this mean for a songwriter? If you want your work to stand out from the tsunami of AI-written slop that's already swamping the creative arts, show off your sense of humour.

Wow, roz. This is so eloquently written out.

The common thread of my own preferences often seems to be that I seem to remember and love music that I connect with either through recognition or through discomfort. "Recognition" to me means sort of a lining up of the neurons in which I say "hey, I know that feeling or experience or thought you're describing. I've had that one too." This doesn't need to be profound, but it results in a kind of a I'm-not-alone-in-the-universe sense.

"Discomfort" for me might be similar to how roz is describing music with humor. This is the stuff I connect with because it put me in touch with some challenging, difficult, painful, or even just more meaningfully emotional subject matter, with the end effect being it helps me sort of contrast and unpack the emotional things in my own life, regardless of whether these two things are closely related. I mentioned the Bright Eyes song Road to Joy specifically because it made me uncomfortable when I first heard it. It challenged my sort of ambivalent attitude towards war and societal problems when I was younger, and caused me to think. Another song on this album, Poison Oak,

is different in subject matter in dealing with trauma but has a line that brings it back to the same introspective sense, "I was young enough, I still believed in war."

This latter category doesn't necessarily mean I need to feel something intensely or be really brooding or anything, it's just that if there is some contrast of feelings between the music and myself, it's likely to make me think, and I love the feeling of being driven to reflect. Some of my favorite films are ones that are thought-provoking for me and make me think for days.

I sort of connect with non-lyrical music in similar senses, I think I just tend to do a bit more neural ad-libbing to fill in the blanks of the words being shared in those cases.

I also think there's a vein of music lyrics that I connect with for reasons completely unknown. This category is more, uh, mystical? It's something my mind and body responds well to, but which I couldn't describe as anything deeper than "I don't know, I love it."

The blend of ambiguous lines and thick 90s alt guitar in Hum's Ms. Lazarus

were an example of this. I think I get more what I like about this song now, but when a friend first introduced it to me in junior high I kept thinking about the words even though I didn't really get what the hell it could be talking about. Maybe this is just a sneakier version of my more thoughtful category I described earlier, where my subconscious self is beating my conscious self to the punch.