by Paul Zollo
But as with any playground, a structure is necessary. Just as an architect can be creative in the creation of a building, he still must rely on the basic principles of structure—of building a firm foundation, etc.—so that the creation does not collapse. The use of rhyme is a foundational form in the structure of a song.
I asked Simon—half-expecting him not to be able to answer—how one can distinguish between discovery and invention. Don’t they overlap, I asked? But Simon did have an answer, and a good one. “Yes, they do [overlap],” he said. “You just have no idea that that’s a thought that you had. It surprises you. It can make me laugh, or make me emotional. When it happens and I’m the audience and I react, I have faith in that because I’m already reacting. I don’t have to question it. I’ve already been the audience. But if I make it up, knowing where it’s going, it’s not as much fun. It may be just as good, but it’s more fun to discover it.”
Many songwriters have told me they feel more like receivers of songs than creators. Felix Cavaliere, who wrote “Groovin’” and “It’s A Beautiful Morning” said, “I really believe that we are all sort of like beacons from another source. It’s the same thing as the radio stations that are going through this room at this point. Yet until we turn on a tuner, we’re not aware that KXJ or whatever station is going through. I feel some of us as human beings are tuners to this vibration that comes through us. What we have to do is train the basic fundamentals of music so that it has a way to come out and speak.”
And Paul Simon put it this way: “You don’t really possess it. That’s the feeling that it comes through, that you’re a transmitter. It comes through you. But you don’t possess it. You can’t control it or dictate to it. You’re just waiting… You’re just waiting… Waiting for the show to begin.”
True Rhymes vs. False Rhymes
This book contains only true, or perfect, rhymes, and not false, or imperfect rhymes. A true rhyme is one in which both the vowel sound of a word and the ending consonants match. For example, “corn” and “born” are perfect, true rhymes. “Corn” and “storm” are false, or imperfect, rhymes because the ending consonants do not match.
Rhymes can be multisyllabic; this book contains one-, two-, and three-syllable rhymes. A two-syllable example of a true rhyme would be “after” and “laughter.” A false rhyme with two syllables would be “after” with “factor.” Close, but not quite. As the famous and funny line from the movie The Sunshine Boys goes, “‘Lady’ he rhymes with ‘baby’! No wonder he’s dead!”
Carolyn Leigh, who wrote all the lyrics for Peter Pan and many famous songs such as “Witchcraft” and “Young At Heart,” used to lecture on writing lyrics and was well-known for her distress over false rhymes. “…‘home’ and ‘alone’ don’t rhyme,” she said, “‘time’ and ‘mine’ don’t rhyme, and ‘friend’ and ‘again’ rhyme only in the area bounded by Nashville and God knows what.”
And George Gershwin’s brother Ira, who wrote most of the great lyrics to George’s melodies, once commented on a record of one of their songs that he felt was rather offensive, as the singer had changed some of the words to the extent that Ira’s perfect rhymes became imperfect. “It changes tense and sense,” he said, “and suddenly rhyme doesn’t chime.”
As mentioned, previous generations of songwriters cared much more about perfect rhymes—and the use of rhymes in general—than do the generations of songwriters since the era of rock ‘n’ roll. Irving Gordon, who wrote the words and music of the classic song “Unforgettable,” told me that he was always ashamed of one of his rhymes in this song which is his most famous, and which was made popular by Nat King Cole’s rendition:
“That’s why, darling, it’s incredible
That someone so unforgettable
Thinks that I am unforgettable, too…”
—“Unforgettable” by Irving Gordon
Gordon, who spoke to me over a lunch of apple sauce (I don’t think he was feeling too great that day), said that rhyming ‘unforgettable’ with ‘incredible’ was bad writing—that one has a ‘t’ sound, while one has a ‘d’ rhyme. Truth is, as I told him, rhyming ‘incredible’ and ‘unforgettable’ would be a good rhyme for most songwriters today. Many subscribe to the attitude that Jackson Browne expressed to me. Jackson, who is a great songwriter and a gifted purveyor of rhymes, said that he now feels the direct expression of content should take priority over the use of perfect rhymes. “You can only rhyme ‘world’ with ‘unfurled’ so many times,” he said. Many songwriters today agree that a perfect rhyme is not as important as what the song says. In the past, of course, a professional songwriter’s life was far different—songwriters wrote songs for others to perform and needed to impress a publisher with a song to get it pitched to a singer. But when the era of the singer-songwriter arrived, sparked by Dylan and The Beatles and the rest, all of this changed. Time was when a songwriter kept every line in perfect meter and rhyme so that a song would sell. But when a songwriter knows that their song will already be “sold,” essentially, because they themselves will perform it, the requirements of song-craft and form diminished. The goal of the songwriter shifted—achieving a perfect rhyme was pushed far down on the list of lyrical requirements, underneath truth, conversational expression, poetic expression, intimacy, and even irony. There are many songwriters who still strive to create perfect rhymes, but there are many more who don’t.
“I don’t think it’s important to rhyme perfectly,” Jackson told me. “I used to be pretty obsessed with it. I didn’t even want to rhyme a singular with a plural. So it would be perfect. I would go to great lengths to change the line so that it would be. So that it would rhyme with ‘time’ instead of ‘times.’ But I’d say that most great music is just fine without that kind of obsessive detail. And I tried to get beyond that.”
I asked him if there was something that happened that caused him to change his mind about the need for a perfect rhyme.
“No one thing,” he said. “Just appreciating a lot of songs that don’t necessarily rhyme very exactly at all—especially blues. And there are songs you don’t have to rhyme at all. They don’t have to rhyme. It’s just something we do. It’s almost like a crutch. A song will sound fine if it rhymes, even though it doesn’t say a thing. That’s the thing about songs. There’s a lot of forgiveness in the medium because people are used to hearing stuff that doesn’t necessarily mean anything or make a lot of sense. It doesn’t have to… You can open up the whole structure and form by choosing to rhyme less often. Sometimes, when I’ve been writing a song and am kind of aware that I didn’t know what the hell I was writing about, I tend to rhyme way too much. Sort of like a stepping stone—like you’re going from rhyme to rhyme trying to get something going.”
It’s not my intention here to suggest that Jackson is wrong. He’s a great and legendary songwriter with good reason—he’s written countless classic songs. So obviously he’s in a good position in which to have ideas on this subject. And many great songwriters—including The Beatles and Dylan—have employed false rhymes repeatedly. Dylan has on occasion used false rhymes over and again even in famous songs. In “Shelter From The Storm,” for example, which is one of the many songs he’s written in which each verse ends with the title, and so is predicated on the use of a set-up rhyme before the title, uses several false rhymes to set up “storm.” Like many of his songs, and my song “What Jesus Meant” that I quoted earlier, “Shelter From The Storm” sets up the title in different ways each time. And Dylan, who is one of the great rhymers of our time, does use real rhymes often to set it up, as in this first verse:
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm…
—“Shelter From The Storm” by Bob Dylan
That is masterful writing—“a creature void of form” is classic Dylan language—as he told me, his lyrics have a “gallantry,” and it’s true. They resonate with the timeless beauty of g
reat poetry, and are empowered by an elegant use of language. In the next verse, he also uses a real rhyme:
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm
Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.
—“Shelter From the Storm” by Bob Dylan
But by the next verse, he ventures outside of the realm of real rhymes, to match “corn” with “storm.” Which works, of course, quite well in terms of meaning and content, but it’s not technically a true rhyme:
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn
Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.
—“Shelter From the Storm” by Bob Dylan
Don’t get me wrong—I’m using this example only to show that the world’s greatest songwriters do use false rhymes. I don’t mean to imply for a second that this isn’t a great song—it is. The final lines, though they once again employ a false rhyme, are resonant and beautiful:
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born
Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.
—“Shelter From The Storm” by Bob Dylan
It was hearing The Beatles’ use of a false rhyme when I was a kid that made me feel that being a songwriter wasn’t such a hard thing to do. It was one of their early songs and one that I loved, “Eight Days A Week.” The verse is this:
Love you every day, girl
Always on my mind,
One thing I can say girl,
Love you all the time.
—“Eight Days A Week” by Lennon and McCartney
I felt that if The Beatles—the ultimate group—could get away with the use of false or almost-rhymes (in this case, rhyming “mind” with “time”), then concocting a song wouldn’t be that tough. (Of course, it should be pointed out that on the unstressed lines—the first and third lines of this quatrain—that Lennon and McCartney did have perfect rhymes: “day, girl” with “say, girl.”)
But as I started writing songs, I became compelled, as Jackson Browne originally was, and as Sammy Cahn was, to use only perfect rhymes. When Jackson spoke about going to great lengths to avoid rhyming a singular with a plural, I understood, as these are the lengths to which I go everyday. It’s a lot of work, it isn’t easy, but as Paul Simon said to me, “Whoever said songwriting was easy?” I understand well all the reasons why perfect rhymes aren’t obligatory. But I like them. I feel they give a song polish. It holds together better. And I subscribe strongly to Van Dyke Parks’ philosophy, which he explained to me: “A song should be sturdy. A song shouldn’t fall apart like a cheap watch on the street.” I agree. And one sure way of ensuring that sturdiness, that solidity, is by constructing a song with true rhymes. By constructing a song that has, as Sammy Cahn put it, “solid architecture.”
Sammy, who wrote his own rhyming dictionary, was a great lyricist who penned some 87 songs that were recorded by Sinatra, as he was proud to inform anyone who would listen. I went over to his Beverly Hills home and was very happy to listen, which was fortunate, as Sammy was much more interested in telling stories than answering questions, as is evident in my interview with him. He was born in 1913 on the lower East Side of Manhattan. (“So low,” he liked to say, “that one step backwards would have landed me in the East River.) Sammy wrote the words to countless songs that have since become standards, including “High Hopes,” “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is),” “Love and Marriage,” “Come Fly With Me,” and many others. Sammy was a great rhymer who thought and spoke often in rhymes, and sometime silly ones—when I came into his office, he said, “There’s Paul, got a beard, looks a little weird.” When he inscribed his songbook to me, he wrote, “Here’s one for Paul, a book of songs your parents will recall.”
Sammy always strove to use real rhymes. He stressed his opinion that songs must rhyme correctly, because they are meant to be sung, and only a real rhyme sounds right when sung. “Poems are poems,” he said. “They read to the eye, to the heart, to the mind. Lyrics you have to sing. They sing to the ear, to the mind, to the heart. There’s a difference. You can read a poem but you can’t sing some poems. Like my joke is that Shakespeare would have been a lousy lyric writer. ‘Love can laugh at locksmiths’? You can’t sing ‘locksmiths.’ ‘Locksmiths?’ Forget it.”
I mentioned to him that many songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, tried to incorporate poetry into their lyrics. He would have none of it.
“You see,” he said, “most of those writers have no sense of architecture…They don’t understand it. Those who write today rhyme sounds. You know what a pure rhyme is against an impure rhyme? ‘Mind’ and ‘time’ is impure. ‘Dime’ and ‘time,’ pure. ‘Wine’ and ‘fine,’ pure. ‘Wine’ and ‘time,’ impure.” He then went on to suggest that his need to secure a pure, or true, rhyme at all times was perhaps detrimental to creating the best song he could create. He admitted it was a bit of an unnecessary obsession, but that he was a craftsman with a certain standard and he always rose to that standard. As an example, he mentioned the Number One song in the country at that moment in 1991, which was “Wind Beneath My Wings,” sung by Bette Midler and written by Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar. “It’s a song beyond,” he said. “The meaning and the thought of that song is all so encompassing, it doesn’t matter what the words or notes are. I wish I’d written it. But the point is, if I’d written it, I’d probably neaten it up, maybe spoil it.”
So even Sammy Cahn, who considered himself a “lyrist” and not a “lyricist” because Oscar Hammerstein did, and who was one of the most adamant lyrical purists who ever wrote a song, admitted that perfect—or pure or true—rhymes are not always necessary. And they’re not. But they do go a long way in securing that solidity of which I previously wrote.
It’s long been funny and a tad ironic to me that so many songwriters of Sammy’s generation who always bemoaned the lack of craft generated by the advent of rock ‘n’ roll and the evolution of the singer-songwriter, would insist on real rhymes, yet often fudge and twist the language to create these real rhymes. When I told Sammy that I was from Chicago, for example, he said, “Chicago? I know all the rhymes for Chicago-embargo, Wells Fargo…” I said, “Sammy, you’ve got to be from Brooklyn for those rhymes to work.” In his heavy New York accent, which doesn’t pronounce Rs, those rhymes are true. He said, “Chic-ah-go, em-bah-go, Wells Fah-go.”
There are countless examples of lyricists of the Tin Pan Alley days concocting funny words to ensure a perfect rhyme. One of my favorite examples is from the classic Rodgers and Hart standard “To Keep My Love Alive.” The great Larry Hart, who is an astounding rhymer, wrote a brilliant lyric for this song, replete with many clever and original inner rhymes. But even Hart would play around with words sometimes to make his rhyme schemes succeed, still clinging to what was considered a “perfect rhyme”:
Sir Atherton indulged in fratricide,
He killed his dad and that was patricide
One night I stabbed him by my mattress-side
To keep my love alive
—“To Keep My Love Alive”
Lyrics by Lorenz Hart and music by Richard Rodgers
“Mattress-side”? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s funny, and it does rhyme perfectly with “fratricide” and “patricide.” But it’s exactly the kind of language play that the great lyricists of the Tin Pan Alley era used to solidify their songs. Sure, they employed perfect rhymes. But they often did it in a sneaky way.
Of course, this is an art in itself—toying with the language to effect funny and clever rhymes. The poet Odgen Nash was a master at it, and frequently invented rhyming words for comic effect, as in this famous example from his poem: “Further Reflections on Parsley”:
Parsley
Is Gharsley.
—“Further Reflections on Parsley” by Ogden Nash
Another great example is this one:
A bit of talcum
Is always walcum.
�
�“Ode To A Baby” by Ogden Nash
A lyricist who used this method frequently was the legendary E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote all the lyrics to Harold Arlen’s melodies for the songs in The Wizard Of Oz, as well as writing the lyrics for standards such as “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime” (music by Jay Gorney), “(It’s Only A) Paper Moon,” (music by Arlen), and “April In Paris” (music by Vernon Duke). Harburg was also quite masterful and entertaining in his use of self-invented and twisted words to create a perfect rhyme. A great example is in the famous song performed by Ray Bolger in The Wizard Of Oz, “If I Only Had A Brain”:
I’d unravel every riddle
For any individle
In trouble or in pain…
—“If I Only Had A Brain” by E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen
Even the esteemed Stephen Sondheim has been known to bend words—relying on a New York dialect for example—to effect as rhyme. One of the best and funniest examples of a Sondheim twist is from one of his earliest efforts, In the comic song “Officer Krupke,” one of the first songs that informed the Broadway audience of this young man’s genius with wordplay, he rhymes ‘honor’ with ‘marijuana.’ And it works:
