by Paul Zollo
The songs of Aimee Mann, like those by Dylan, are excellent examples of our purpose here, which is to explore the use of rhymes in popular songs. Like Dylan, and like the songwriters of previous generations who went to great pains to avoid the use of a false rhyme, Mann will often use great rhymed couplets and quatrains that are ideal examples of the synthesis of craft and art. The opening to her famous song “Save Me” (used to great effect in the film Magnolia) is a couplet that could have come from Cole Porter or one of his peers, as it contains an engaging mix of cleverness, conversation, content, and rhyme:
You look like a perfect fit
for a girl in need of a tourniquet
—“Save Me” by Aimee Mann
This is a good example because, although it’s a clever rhyme and use of words, it’s the content of the couplet more than the perfect rhyme that matters. Using a perfect rhyme is not successful in a song if the content is not clearly and conversationally conveyed. It’s the same as with any of the other poetic craft elements that go into songwriting, such as the use of alliteration. Alliteration is effective in a lyric, as it adds a percussive element to a succession of words and also accents those words in a way that’s similar to the use of rhymes. But alliteration just for the sake of alliteration is useless in a song. The same thing holds true with a rhyme. The aim of a songwriter must always be to merge craft with artistry, to achieve a rhyme in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the rhyme itself, but to the intended meaning of the line.
That line—which rhymes “tourniquet” with “fit”—links a polysyllabic word with a monosyllabic word. It’s a technique that Mark Salerno referred to when discussing the use of rhymes in popular songs. “There are countless ways for a writer to achieve different effects with rhyme,” he said. “For example, I am always delighted by Smokey Robinson’s rhyming of a monosyllable with a polysyllable in ‘The Tracks of My Tears’: ‘Although she may be cute / She’s just a substitute… ’ The relatively big word ‘substitute’ delays the ‘-ute’ sound and in doing so creates a little anticipation, as does the leap from the one-syllable ‘cute’ to the more complicated three-syllable ‘substitute.’ That complicating word ‘substitute’—which normally receives its strongest accent on the first syllable, but here, due to the rhyme, gets an extra push on the third syllable as well—seems fitting, since the song is about the complicated and ambivalent emotions of being with one woman while desiring another.”
When I interviewed Dylan in 1991 (an interview he did precisely because my aim was to focus strictly on songs and songwriting), I took the opportunity to ask him about rhyming. As mentioned, Dylan’s certainly famous for the free-flowing, expansive, poetic, and often abstract nature of his lyrics. But he’s also a meticulous craftsman, who will work and rework his songs, even after some of them have been recorded. So I was especially interested to discover what he thought about this process of combining the craft of rhyming with the art of songwriting. Since his rhymes are so spacious and inspired, I started by asking him if rhyming was fun for him.
“Well, it can be,” he said, “but you know, it’s a game. You know, you sit around… it gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”
He then expounded on his method of combining the dictates of the craft with the spontaneity of this art. “My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is,” he said. “Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.”
I followed up on that, asking him if working backwards like that, in essence, was something he often did. “Oh, yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, a lot of times. That’s the only way you’re gonna finish something. That’s not uncommon, though.” This understanding is key to the conception and completion of a good song—one works backwards and forwards at the same time, much as a rhyme simultaneously propels the listener of a song backwards and forwards. To work forward towards the linear conclusion of a song constructed with rhymes, the only sensible way of doing it is to put rhymes in place first, and work backwards from there. A song is a puzzle of sorts, and creating one is not unlike constructing a crossword puzzle. As any cruciverbalist worth his weight in words will tell you, nobody creates a crossword puzzle by writing the questions first, and then assembling the answers together into an order. One must assemble the answers first, and work backwards and forwards simultaneously, and the same is true with the creation of a sturdy song.
When I spoke to Mark Salerno about the use of rhymes in poetry and songs, he spoke about this dynamic, and about the inherent power in the recurring sound of a rhyme—in the almost magical way rhymes connect lines. “The repeat is one of the oldest tricks in any artist’s magic bag,” he said. “Whenever something is repeated—whether it is a word or phrase in a written text, or a line or color in a visual text—the process of shaping begins. Rhyme is a repeated sound with variation. Once it is put into play, it establishes a pattern that gives form to a piece of writing. It also sets up a current of energy: We anticipate the coming rhyme and, when we hear it, we are reminded of, and sent back to, the preceding rhyme. Thus, the rhyme sound sends us forward and backward at the same time, effectively binding the text together. Rhyme lends a shape to writing through the use of sound effects and making sounds with words is what distinguishes poetry from prose.”
Stephen Sondheim, an avid user of rhyming dictionaries who brilliantly employs real rhymes to propel a narrative and to flesh out characters, wrote this in an e-mail to an author: “I use a rhyming dictionary, you know. It’s craft, nothing personal…” A careful scrutiny of his lyrics is beneficial for any student of songwriting. Though he’s now well established as both a legendary lyricist and composer of songs, his professional career started when he wrote only lyrics. Though he always yearned to do both, opportunities arose first for him to write the lyrics for the songs for West Side Story, for which Leonard Bernstein wrote the music, and then for Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne.
As early as West Side Story, his mastery of rhymes is evident. Keep in mind, however, that Sondheim is not attempting to write popular songs (though some of his songs, such as “Send In The Clowns,” from A Little Night Music, have become popular songs), he is writing songs for musicals, in which they are sung by characters and are intended to shed light into the characters of those who are singing. It’s one of Sondheim’s steadfast beliefs that the use of rhymes in his character songs speaks volumes about the character. In Sondheim’s creative universe, only an intelligent, erudite person would sing in rhyme. Of course, nobody sings his thoughts in real life—unless they’re crazy—so that any song in a musical necessarily relies on a suspension of disbelief, and an acceptance of this conceit that actual communication can occur in a song. Yet within this framework of the musical in which Sondheim works, this conceit is ever-present:
“You…have to know when and where to use rhyme,” Sondheim said in a 1972 interview with the Washington Post. “One function of rhyme is that it implies education. And one of the most embarrassing moments of my life was after a run-through of West Side, when some of my friends were out front. I asked Sheldon Harnick after the show what he thought, knowing full well that he was going to fall to his knees and lick the sidewalk. Instead he said, ‘There’s that lyric, ‘I Feel Pretty.’ I thought the lyric was terrific. I had spent the previous two years of my life rhyming ‘day’ and ‘way’ and ‘me’ and ‘be’ and with ‘I Feel Pretty’ I wanted to show that I could do inner rhymes, too. That’s why I had this uneducated Puerto Rican girl singing, ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel.’ You must know she would not be unwelcome in Noel Coward’s living room.’ …So there it is to this day embarrassing me every time it’s sung, because
it’s full of mistakes like that…”
It’s always striking to me that Sondheim considers that a mistake, as it’s a fine song, and does everything a song should do: It propels the narrative, it encompasses the character of the singer, and it has an effective marriage of lyric with melody. Yet he subscribes to this notion of a rhyme implying education, and he’s not alone in this perspective. But it does point to one of the many functions of rhymes in a song. And it points to the fact that Sondheim is one of the few songwriters carrying on the great tradition of the serious song craftsmen of the Broadway theater. Though Sondheim never got to meet Gershwin, he did get to meet another classic songwriter of that era, Cole Porter—and even had the opportunity to play him a song. Porter had been in a terrible horse-riding accident, and by this time both of his legs had been amputated; his butler would literally carry him from room to room. This was the year when Sondheim was writing lyrics for Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne. Notably, it was Sondheim’s ingenious use of rhyme that most impressed the elder songwriter, as Sondheim recalled in Meryle Secrest’s excellent biography of him:
“Cole was very depressed,” Sondheim says. “He was carried in like a sack of potatoes by a burly manservant. But he couldn’t have been more charming. On that line in ‘Together’—No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos, amigos’—he chortled, and I knew I got him. He didn’t see the last rhyme coming. It was a real Cole Porter rhyme — he inserts foreign words into lyrics — an homage to Cole Porter without meaning to be. He got such a moan of pleasure, it was absolutely sexual. It was a great moment!”
Spontaneous Creation
While this dictionary concerns itself primarily with the use of rhymes, by no means do I suggest to any songwriter or poet that the use of rhymes—an element of craft—is meant to take precedence over spontaneous, inspired writing—embracing inspiration. Songwriting, as I’ve written, is both an art and a craft—music, at its best, is inspirational. Good music can often inspire a lyric, as a good lyric can inspire a melody. It’s that fusion of art and craft again—of using the craft to shape the art, while allowing for an artistic usage of craft.
Almost all the songwriters I’ve interviewed, who belong to many generations and write songs in many genres, have said that songwriting is more an act of following than it is leading. The creator is moving in two directions at once, forward and backwards simultaneously. And the form itself, as Mark Salerno explained, will often lead one both forward to a new rhyme and backwards to link to the preceding one. It’s a process of following inspiration—of discovering where the song wants to go—as well as leading it. It’s not a new concept. Even the ancient philosopher Plato wrote that the truest poetry cannot be predetermined, but must follow inspiration. He contended that poetry came not from knowledge or reason but from inspiration—the muses that sing through us. Similarly, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth felt that the best poetry was inspired, not invented. “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he wrote. Interesting that he qualified this to ‘good’ poetry. Indeed, bad poetry can certainly be planned. Similarly, any experienced songwriter knows that it’s easy to sit down and write a song. But to write a great song—a song that will resound for years to come—a song that is inspirational and timeless—that is another matter altogether. It has to do with plugging into that electric current of creative inspiration. John Lennon said that he could easily craft a song any day of the week, but that writing a truly great song—and he wrote so many in his short lifetime—required a transcendent process, a process of bypassing concrete reality and connecting with the force of inspiration. Much of the greatness inherent in songs is outside of the songwriter’s hands in a sense—some of it comes from chance, perhaps, or from luck, or from a more spiritual source, maybe—a concept many songwriters have suggested. In an 1892 letter to Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens put it this way: “These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation.” Indeed there is a sense when writing songs often that you are not inventing something new, but finding something which already exists—imitating Providence, if you will. You are going backwards and forwards simultaneously. Backwards to find that essential truth of the form which already exists in time, and forward in time to set it down, to preserve it.
There are countless examples in songs that make it clear the songwriter is participating in a process in which he’s not altogether in charge. Look at The Beatles’ famous song “The Word.” The key line of the song contains a perfect inner rhyme: “Have you heard the word is love?” Certainly when Lennon and McCartney wrote “The Word” (and they did write it together, according to John, though, he said in 1980, “It’s mainly mine.”), they did not plan in advance that they could rhyme ‘heard’ and ‘word.’ It’s a happy circumstance that came from moving forward in the heady creation of a new song, inspired by music, collaboration, and the positive message of love itself, as well as moving backwards—from the sound of the word ‘word’ to the quick realization of linking it with ‘heard’ to create a musical question and its answer all in one simple rhymed line: “Have you heard the word is love?” Because not only does it contain that perfect inner rhyme, it also links up in a perfect couplet with the preceding line, using one of the very few rhymes for ‘love’ in English, the word ‘of: “Say the word I’m thinking of/Have you heard the word is love.” In this couplet, the word ‘word’ in the first line comes at the exact same spot—the third syllable of the line—as the word ‘heard’ in the next line, setting up yet another rhyming link. So in this one couplet Paul and John created not one but three perfect rhymes. And it’s fairly evident that the creation of those three rhymes came about not from a predetermined plan, but from being open to the artistic rush of inspiration fused with craft.
Paul Simon amplified this understanding of consciously embracing the unconscious when I interviewed him the first time. Like many songwriters, he has found ways of diverting the conscious mind, so that you can delve underneath the surface, underneath the pool of conscious, predetermined thoughts to discover something deeper, something richer, and, according to Simon, something that is more true. “As soon as your mind knows that it’s on,” he explained, “and it’s supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn’t or it produces things that are very predictable. And that’s why I say I’m not interested in writing something that I thought about. I’m interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up. It always picks up on something true. You’ll find out much more about what you’re thinking that way than you will if you’re determined to say something. What you’re determined to say is filled with all your rationalizations and your defenses and all of that. And as a lyricist, my job is to find out what it is that I’m thinking. Even if it’s something that I don’t want to be thinking.”
I’ve learned in writing lyrics for my own music, and in writing lyrics to fit a collaborator’s melody, the job of a good lyricist is not to impose lyrics onto a song, but to listen carefully to a melody and determine what lyrics are meant to be there. It brings up the old example of Michelangelo stating that a sculpture was inside a block of marble; his job was merely to cut away all the excess material. In the same way, a songwriter must discover the essential song that already exists in one sense—to hear the true song, and capture it—rather than to invent it. As Paul Simon told me that he is much more interested in lyrics that he discovers than lyrics that he invents. In a way, he said, he considers himself more of an editor of his songs than a writer.
“I don’t consciously think about what a song should say,” he said. “In fact, I consciously try not to think about what a song should say… Because I’m interested in what… I find, as opposed to… what I’m planting. I like to be the audience, too. I like to discover it rather than plot it out. So I let the songs go this way and that way and whatever way it is and basically what I do is be the editor: ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Never mind that, that’s not so interesting.
That’s good, that’s a good line.’And the most I can do is say, ‘There’s a good line, and the rhyming pattern, I don’t know, let me see how I will set up that line.”
What Simon is describing, with an insight and eloquence that is manifest in all of his lyrics, is that aforementioned need for a songwriter to be conscious while writing, while simultaneously reaching into the subconscious; to be a craftsman and an artist at the same time. To combine what my former teacher Jack Segal (lyricist of “When Sunny Gets Blue,” “Scarlet Ribbons,” and many other songs) used to describe as the intersection of “inspiration and perspiration.” And that’s an accurate way of describing it, as it is a fusion of work and play—one does not work music, after all—one plays music. Inherent in the act of making music is the sense of play, of joy, of creating pleasure. It’s serious play, as Laura Nyro explained to me, “… it’s like a playground,” she said. “I find it to be like that, that all these other responsibilities kind of drift away and you are really there with your essence. And you are really with delight. There can be delight there. There can be self-discovery. You can dance there. And there are swings, there are monkey bars, you can play. I think of it as a serious playground.”
