How To Be Hector

Story's End - Written on behalf of The Dead Man's Waltz for Glasgow Short Film Festival 2013

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:32:02 +0000

Here is what Francis Bacon had to say on death:

Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other … Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death.

The storyteller in particular is always hounded by death, as predictably as the ambulance is by the lawyer. Death lends to any narrative such a firm grip on an audience’s heartstrings that, although it continuously threatens cliché, it almost never gets turned away. Death, or the risk of death, is in every story, and always has been.

But if our stories are made largely of death, so the reverse is true. Death is made largely of stories. We know nothing of death – what it feels like, whether it hurts, what, if anything, happens afterwards – and so our concept of it is made entirely of stories we tell to each other. Heaven and Hell, the Grim Reaper, the light at the end of the tunnel… when it comes to death we all become story-tellers, and our imaginations have free reign - who is going to tell us we’re wrong?

You would think that, if we as humans were going to pour so much of ourselves into this symbiotic project, we would do so with a view to reconciling ourselves to our mortality. You would think we would want to comfort ourselves, and persuade ourselves that dying is perhaps not such a bad thing to have to face. There are some examples of this, in the Struldbrugs of Gulliver’s Travels, and in Highlander – but they are exceptions, and rather than trying to show us death as something we can and must embrace, both make the diluted case that one thing, and one thing alone is worse than death, and that is immortality.

Rather, we spend our time further disfiguring Death’s already monstrous visage. With every century that passes, and with every tale we tell, it grows another horn or a new wart. We create and re-design ceremonies and practices around death – be it Vanitas then, or Dignitas now – and each one serves to make death even more mysterious and unfaceable. Like Sex and Tesco, Death’s stock is always rising. Bacon’s example of over-ceremonialising death was the Stoics:

Certainly the Stoics bestowed too much cost upon death, and by their great preparations, made it appear more fearful. Better saith he qui finem vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae. It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other.

Rare to see death treated as naturally as birth in fiction. More common to see the storyteller who wants to avoid morbidity panicking, and turning instead to farce or erotica.

Bacon thought we could rid ourselves of our fear of death by stripping it of these myriad mythical characteristics and powers, and thereby gain a more peaceful, natural, less fearful attitude towards it during life.

But what would be the pay off in life, for a world in which death only appears on our screens or in our songs given the same quiet, warm and natural respect reserved for birth? No Dante’s Inferno? No Edgar Allen Poe? No Dario Argento?

Please. You’re killing me…

Desperados - written originally for Youth Music Forum Scotland

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:30:37 +0000

The New Yorker ran a great cartoon this week. The scene is a classic wild west saloon, scattered with bandits and deperados. A particularly mean looking character, who has just walked in through the swinging double doors, announces, “I’m looking for a couple of fast guns who ain’t afraid to lay down their life. There’s no pay, but it’ll be a great way to get your name out there.”

While this proposition never seems to get put before celluloid cowboys any more than it does before plumbers, shop assistants or hill farmers, it is one that we in music hear all the time. In fact, it’s not just a proposition we hear all the time, it represents an attitude that completely pervades our line of work.

I should show my true colours here and point out that I come from a background of indie and dance, and all the associated genres – you know, rock, pop, techno, crunk, post-garage… (The field is so diverse now that there isn’t even a word to cover it all. So rather than try to come up with a complicated and pretentious new term, I’ll do what everyone else does and just lazily refer to it all as pop.) I think the issues I want to write about are felt more acutely in these genres, although I can’t imagine that classically trained or jazz musicians are immune.

Anyway, as the cartoon nails so succinctly, at almost every level of pop music people’s creative efforts are framed in terms of self-sacrificial competition. Keep striking at the iron for no reward, and if you’re lucky you’ll get asked to join the big boys. At one end of the spectrum you have the X-Factor (worm-can-opener at the ready…),and at the other end you have the simpler “send us your demo for a chance to win this distortion pedal” type affairs, and the good old fashioned “Battle Of The Bands”.

In between are a whole host of other examples. How would you like your band to be featured in the new film by award winning director X? Three lucky winners will get a support slot for up and coming band Y that you are now obliged by politeness to tell everyone are great!

So far, so familiar. Naming and shaming those elements of the music industry that we don’t like is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll have your own favourites, and we don’t have space here to debate the examples. The important point is that pop music presents itself to those just starting out as just one enormous Battle of the Bands competition. Sonicbids, for example (ok, so I need one example), has established itself as one of the main marketplaces for finding work performing at concerts, festivals and on tours. The home screen of their website is a sea of “submissions”, “opportunities” and “deadlines”. Mentions of art, creativity, sharing of ideas or even simply of providing a great 60 minutes of musical entertainment? Very thin on the ground.

So how do we prepare young people to face this ferocious marketplace? Well, they’ll need business acumen, the ability to present an impressive demo, a solid understanding of what this global panel of judges are looking for when they download your Electronic Press Kit…

There are a lot of projects out there that offer young people the opportunity to brush up on this list by forcing them through competitive processes – and yes, in the short term at least, these things are needed. But if we just provide young people with these skills and then send them out to tackle a career in music, then aren’t we just ensuring that these are the terms on which they understand and think about their own music? Won’t they forever consider themselves as being in one of two categories – a winner, or a loser.

On top of that, the industry as it stands rewards the creative status quo, and if we train people up to seek out and achieve those rewards, then we encourage them to make the music that the industry wants, and not the music they want.

So, as well as preparing young people to face the industry, shouldn’t we also be encouraging them to do things differently?

Take “The Great Rock n Roll Swindle”, a project which ran at the St Magnus festival and at Glasgow’s City Halls. While the applicants were asked to submit demos, because there were limited places, there was no rating process, and no big prize. A host of young musicians and bands were offered mentoring, composition and arrangement masterclasses, and an opportunity to perform together. And when they did perform together, it was as equals. Or take Feisean nan Gaidheal’s “Ceilidh Trails” project – several young trad bands trained up over two weeks until they are ready to perform publicly – and then all offered a long, paid tour schedule of promoted concerts, ceilidhs and sessions.

Youth music provision in pop music might do well to learn from projects such as these that don’t rely on the model of entries, judges and prizes.

I know that there is a place for a Battle of the Bands contest every now and again – they are great fun, they really do encourage participation, and I am part of a group that will try to persuade my local high school to host their third one next year. But this approach needs to form one small part of our efforts. We want our young musicians to begin their careers concentrating on their instrumental skills, their ability to write interesting music and lyrics, and their desire to collaborate and share ideas with each other – not concentrating on beating each other to stardom.

Audio

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 22:11:57 +0100

Don't Shoot The Messenger Neil

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 07:19:00 +0100

So before Steve Jobs died, Neil Young had been spearheading a behind the scenes campaign aiming to get him to work on technologies that would allow us to stop listening to mp3s and start listening to “high quality” audio.

This article in Wired magazine discusses his position and goes on to outline the “better” alternatives to mp3s: “Lossless” compression formats, CD quality audio and “high resolution” WAV formats.

I’m sure Neil Young has a good set of ears on him, and is probably right that a lot of music being released today doesn’t sound as good as some major releases from the 70s – but some of his statement, and some of the WIRED article is based on pretty shaky facts, to steal a bad unintended pun… There are lots of reasons why today’s music might sound bad to Neil, but blaming the mp3 is shooting the messenger, not dealing with the problem.

(This sounds like it’s going to be a really boring and nerdy post, but I’m writing it anyway because I love good mp3s, I hated CDs, and if there’s one thing I agree with Neil about, it’s that having good quality sound going into our ears is important.)

Mp3s

If we start at the “low quality” end and work our way up – there are lots of different qualities of mp3. Basically the trade-off is that you lose a bit of sound quality and you get much smaller file in exchange. Whether or not that trade off is worth it for you is a personal thing, and there’s a very easy way for an iTunes owner to find out if the loss of data involved in shrinking the file size makes any difference to their enjoyment of the music.

1. Find a CD

2. Import the CD into iTunes with the import settings on one of the mp3 options

3. Listen to the CD and mp3 through the same speakers / headphones

Most people won’t be able to tell any difference once you’re past the 256kbps setting – I’d be interested to know what you find.

Once you’ve done this, you might want to try a second test – listen to the CD through in-ear headphones, and then see if you can borrow some bigger, better headphones off a friend and listen to the “low quality” 256kbps mp3 on them.

Which made the bigger difference – the change of format or the change of headphones? (If you can’t be bothered trying it, don’t worry, the answer is the headphones. I guarantee the mp3 will sound better through £ > 50 headphones than a CD ever could through “buds”, laptop speakers etc…)

FLAC / Apple Lossless Format

I’m not even engaging with this one – partly because you might not know what these are, but also because the people who think that transferring CDs to FLAC or Apple Lossless deteriorates the sound quality are just wrong. That’s like saying that you could put a word .doc in a .zip file and open it up to find some words missing, which never happens. Basically, the whole file is slightly smaller, but all the info is in there. End of part two.

CDs / WAV / AIFF

CDs and WAV or AIFF files are basically all the same – uncompressed digital audio information. Off the shelf CDs have a bit depth of 16 Bits and a sample rate of 44.1khz. In terms of listening to commercial music, this is really the bees knees – the stats are better than vinyl, cassette, ¼” tape etc., and yes if you only listen to music in a studio environment on really sweet speakers, better than mp3s.

This is where the anti-digital crowd (and the audiophile crowd) go off the rails – because they start discussing the “limitations” of CDs and WAVs, compared to higher resolutions (24bits) and higher sample rates (48khz, 96khz, 192khz), or compared to analogue formats like vinyl.

Surely a higher resolution and higher sample rates must better approximate the original analogue sound made by the instruments? The idea here, we have to assume, is that digitizing audio signals is like digitizing a photograph. We all know that higher image resolutions is really important to film and photography right? You can zoom further in… more detail… more clarity… So what could be wrong with asking for a higher resolution in our digital audio as well? We don’t want to hear no crumby pixelated digital sounding music.

Fortunately for us, that’s not how digital audio works.

A digital music player like a CD player or an iPod doesn’t present you with a digital approximation of an analogue waveform – it uses the digital information to recreate a completely perfect analogue waveform. If you got the digital photography un-analogy, then instead of thinking of digital audio like that, try thinking of it as like a vector graphic – a series of points which give you all the information you need to draw out perfect curves in between, no matter how far you “zoom in”.

So what are the limitations of CDs? What do the numbers 16 and 44.1 mean if they don’t tell us how much “detail” is being given?

Well – the 16 bits determine how low the noise floor is. Remember tapes? Remember that quiet hissing sound that went on in the background? Or the gentle humming on vinyl. That’s the noise floor. On tapes you could really hear it. Have you ever noticed it on a modern recorded CD or mp3? No? That’s because it’s really f***ing quiet. Much quieter than any analogue format, and more importantly, much more quiet than the ambient noise in almost any domestic listening environment like a living room or a kitchen. In fact, if you have heard a hiss or hum on a CD, it’s either because it is an old album that was recorded on tape, or because some smart-ass producer added hum to make it sound “authentic”.

The 44.1khz determines the range of frequencies that can be recreated successfully using the information available. Basically, you halve the sample rate to get the upper limit, so a CD can reconstruct any frequency from 0Hz to 22kHz. If you can’t remember off the top of your head what the limits of human hearing are – they are roughly 20Hz to 20kHz. If you’re an adult that’s probably more like 20Hz to 17kHz – anyway, it’s well inside what CDs are capable of recreating faithfully.

Unless you’re a studio engineer who’s actually recording and mixing music, the numbers don’t mean anything else – just how quiet the silence on the CD is, and whether all the audible frequencies are there. On both counts, a normal CD performs better than you need to know.

The bit at the end you can skip to if you can’t be bothered reading about CDs

So what are you supposed to make of people offering you really high quality audio – for example George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” remastered and released to the public at a stunning 24 Bit / 96 kHz resolution…? In short – it’s a con. You may – I repeat MAY – want to look more carefully at this if you are buying the cream of classical recordings and have some £20K listening set-up, but in short, there is nothing of any use to you on that release of “All Things Must Pass” that isn’t on the CD. On top of which – what are you worried about? Are you worried that you are not doing all you can to appreciate the genius of George Harrison? This is a man whose idea of a good time was to fill his boot with ukuleles and drive around all of his friends’ houses dropping them off “just in case”. You can learn a lot about how to enjoy music from a man like that, but not by buying pointlessly over-spec’ed re-releases of his albums.

I don’t want to be seen trying to give advice to Neil Young, but what the heck: Really, Neil – pick up a uke and calm down.

If you played the lute would you ever get up late at night and lick the strings?

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:06:33 +0100

If there is another way to play the lute, I’ve never heard of it.

Audio

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:34:21 +0100

Some more library/stock music from the archives!

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:22:00 +0100

Some more library/stock music from the archives!

Some library/stock music from the archives.

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:10:00 +0100

Some library/stock music from the archives.

A radio piece I put together for Cuillin FM’s Atlas Arts...

Tue, 22 May 2012 11:38:00 +0100

A radio piece I put together for Cuillin FM’s Atlas Arts Cafe - reflections from Skye-born artists on moving away from the island.

The Cosy Blow Mk 1 - Vintage Warmth - CLICK HERE

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:41:03 +0100

The Cosy Blow Mk 1 - Vintage Warmth - CLICK HERE:

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I was going to have a go at learning to make sample based software intruments in NI Kontakt: I appreciate this is a bad start to a blog entry, for most people. Anyway, there being no great shortage of badly made patches based on real musical instruments I went in search of some other source of oscillation and eventually settled on the little heating fan in my bedroom that makes a satisfying drone around A flat when resting on wooden floorboards. For those of you who are interested, it’s a Goldair Cosywarm:

I’ve sampled a low, medium and high velocity layer as well as some switch noises and the sound of the fan starting up and powering down for the attack and release of each note. Also, if you play it too hard the fan starts making a clackety sound, which is what happens in real life if you leave the heater on too long. I EQd the samples a wee bit to tease the note out of all the other noises it makes, but it’s 100% authentic cosywarm. On top of all this, it was sampled using my trusty Sony D50 so the heater is presented to you in glorious wide-image stereo.

It downloads as a zip file if you click on the link, with a .nki file, sample folder, instruction manual and example track. If you use it on a track that has major chart success - let me know!

A simple way to travel over water that does not work

Fri, 18 May 2012 19:33:00 +0100

Not very often, but sometimes, you come across somebody who argues that Skye is no longer an island, now that there is a bridge connecting it to the mainland. Like I say, it’s pretty rare, but I was reminded of it by flicking through Hamish Haswell-Smith’s enormous compendium of all the islands in Scotland, which pointedly excludes Skye on account of the bridge, before going on to include it anyway as a slightly patronising “appendix”. The argument is pretty standard. Somebody says Skye isn’t an island, you say it’s still an island, they say it’s not, you say it is… sooner or later somebody will try and bring the stalemate to an end by saying, “well it depends on how you define Island, but in my book it is/isn’t a real island.” Don’t be distracted by this! This has nothing to do with the definition of an island, which isn’t exactly rocket science: it’s a piece of land completely surrounded by water. Tell them the word they need to look up isn’t island – it’s bridge. A bridge, remind them, is a means of transporting things over a body of water, just like a ferry is. If Skye wasn’t still completely surrounded by water, then we wouldn’t need a bridge. Point out that their theory leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the very act of building a bridge removes the need for that bridge to exist in the first place. Politely suggest to them that when they can drive to Skye without a bridge, then it won’t be an island. And if they respond that it’s not a real island because the bridge makes a cultural difference – an inevitable paradigm shift in the mental states of the people that live there – then, and only then, you can just tell them to fuck off.

Footsteps on the scree and crossing a stream, descending Sgurr...

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:42:34 +0000

Footsteps on the scree and crossing a stream, descending Sgurr nan Gillean in the dark having climbed the pinnacle ridge.

here’s my design proposal for STV’s Scotland’s...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:36:54 +0000

here’s my design proposal for STV’s Scotland’s Greatest Album. I think it’ll really stand out and celebrates the vibrant musical culture that is so well represented on the disc.

Scotland's Greatest Hits album, as voted for by STV viewers...

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:51:26 +0000

Scotland's Greatest Hits album, as voted for by STV viewers...:

If I came across this in the compilations section of Fopp, I’d be like this:

“What the Fuck?”

Well, to cheer you up after the essay, here’s one of my...

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:15:00 +0000

Well, to cheer you up after the essay, here’s one of my favourite clips from that war time project from a couple of years ago…

Never Explain, Never Apologise

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:51:00 +0000

Last week, I read online an “Open Letter To Songwriters”, imploring them to be more willing to explain their lyrics. It would, the critic argues, make their music “more likeable”. The first time I read the article, even the second time, I warmly cheered this. There is something undeniably un-likeable about the wilful obfuscation and scattergun metaphor-ing of today’s songwriter. We’d all rather they made more sense to us.

As I flicked back to it again and again however, I became increasingly uncomfortable without quite knowing why. Then it dawned on me: I’m a songwriter. This letter is addressed to me. Seeing the situation from this new perspective I realised that while I agreed entirely with the author about the problem, I thought that the call to songwriters to stand up and explain themselves was not going to solve the problem, but take it in a new and crazy direction.

“When I first listen to a song, I don’t hear the lyrics, I hear the music. I hear the sounds, the melodies, the various instruments, the key changes, the harmonies. If the music merits repeated plays, I’ll inevitably start singing along as a matter of subconscious habit…”

The article is admirably frank (given that it is written by a music critic) about the repeated listens needed before it’s author begins to know or even care what the lyrics are. I have only praise for him for acknowledging this. But the fact that so many of us can relate to his attitude (on many occasions, myself included) shows us how devalued the lyrics have become. It is no longer the case that a song must have lyrics because that is the defining backbone of what a song is - it is more just that a song without lyrics would somehow be a little improper, therefore we always make and sure and “put some in”. Let’s say that for many songwriters, music fans, critics etc. a song should have lyrics in it for the same reasons that a trifle should have alcohol in it - to know or care what those lyrics actually are requires special attention of a new order of magnitude. It is a kind of expertise. To go beyond even that, and be willing to judge if they are good lyrics or bad is to dabble with elitism. (And who in their right mind would pour an 1840 Biscuit Dubouche cognac into a trifle anyway? Right?) And yet, although it would take three or four listens for most of us notice if the unclear vocalisations emanating from our laptop speakers were not words at all but a meaningless stream of gibberish, most (though by no means all) songwriters settle for the security of actually bothering to string a sentence together.

Last week, Jarvis Cocker set out promoting the publishing of his lyrics presented almost (though, he was keen to stress, NOT) like poetry by Faber and Faber. Now Jarvis Cocker has written some really awe-inspiring lyrics. I don’t know anyone who doubts that. Yet even he admitted that he only fell into lyric-writing because the band needed songs, and as he was the singer, everybody said it was his job. To return to my rather stale and increasingly spongey metaphor: just as each family-made meal will depend on some otherwise unemployed nephew or aunt to step up to the trifle bowl and become bravely lavish with somebody else’s liquor cabinet, so a band must find itself a volunteer whose spare time outweighs his or her pride to provide the dreaded but necessary lyrics.

This being the case for a lot of bands, it is little wonder that the lyricist, put upon to brick-up the gaps between crashing guitar intro and slightly funky bass and drums play-out, should attempt to make life easier for himself. This he can do by adopting a creative stance which will allow him to work quickly and to sidestep embarrassingly direct criticisms from his band-mates such as “stop wingeing”, or “I didn’t know you had the hots for Katherine!”. So much easier to deal with being told, “I have no idea what you’re on about,” or, “Gross… champagne supernova sounds like a deviant sex game.” So much easier, because there is so much less invested in it.

A related charge we can levy at the singer-songwriter (who only has themselves to blame for getting into this mess) is that their obfuscations are all too often an exercise in self-aggrandisement. Their “difficult” lyrics conspire with their use of the term “singer-songwriter” to place them on a plinth. A plinth built of mystique and obscurity, where only the open-minded and adequately literate may join them.

“It’s a song, not a fucking magic trick”.

It seems only fair that we ought to be able to say to these baffling lyricists - if you are going to write lyrics that require explanation, then it is incumbent upon you to provide one. As the “Open Letter…” points out very nicely, lyricists can be quick to jump to the defence that an explanation will degrade the sense of magic and mystery - it would, as we saw in the previous paragraph, go against the grain of reasoning that led them to be so opaque in the first place.

Dylan and Lennon often take the blame for inspiring this trend, but I think that misconstrues their projects. Projects which were, in the mid to late 60s, knowing experiments in sounding meaningful while deliberately avoiding sense. Projects inspired by beatnik cut and paste techniques in prose and poetry, by the mesmerising, druggy visions of Kubla Khan. At the extreme end of the spectrum, in the case of “Ballad of a Thin Man” we are dealing with a song whose meaningless was, in an ingeniously worked twist, the very point being made.

Likewise, Neil Young is a paradigm of goofy, pot-headed weirdness and deliberately sloppy word-smithing. But not only does he seem acutely aware of this (“I’m singing this borrowed tune / I took from the Rolling Stones / Alone in this empty room / Too wasted to write my own”), but he also has the incredible charm of a man who seems constantly bewildered by his own fame. He is not a songwriter who is trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

So who is to blame for the trend of hiding behind opaque lyrics and refusing to come out? Noel Gallagher? Coleridge? Trevor Horn? And how can we persuade these songwriters to chill out and open up? As the “Open Letter…” says, their refusal to do so is, well, “disappointing…” Myself, I blame THE PARENTS. And who are the parents of the songwriter? Are they his or her influences? His or her other interests in literature, film or art? No. These are the teachers and friends of the songwriter. The parent is You, The Listener, for it is You, The Listener that provides the world into which the songwriter is born.

Another quote from the article:

“Knowing what a song is about makes the song better for the listener. Why? Because you get into the singer’s thought processes.”

Really? Getting into the lyricist’s thought process is certainly one way of “knowing what a song is about”. But it is not the only way, and, I would like to argue, it is not actually a very good way. And why not? Primarily because it is a distraction from the song itself. Asking a songwriter to explain his or her thought processes strikes me as akin to asking the waiter over to your table in the middle of a delicious meal and pressing him to explain exactly how your dish was made. Or to use an old scientific adage, it is like asking somebody to explain wave mechanics using particle physics. It’s not wrong, or categorically impossible, it’s just inappropriate. It leap-frogs an important step in understanding.

While it is perfectly true that bad lyricists often misuse this argument as a subterfuge - to conceal their weaknesses - that only invalidates those songwriters. It doesn’t invalidate the argument.

Let’s study as a group all those songs we know that we consider difficult to understand. Down here in the murk, not only do we find empty lyrics that are merely trying their hand at sounding mysteriously intelligent, but also truly great experimental lyrical snippets by Throbbing Gristle and Radiohead, literary allusions by Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, celebratory pop nonsense by Prefab Sprout and Lady Gaga… Once we have in front of us this mixed pile of difficult-to-understand songs, we can easily start sorting them into those we think are good and those we think are bad (easy, that is, so long as we act alone). But how would you start dividing them into those you think ought to be further explained and those you didn’t? Would you demand of Dylan a blow-by-blow account of every single bizarre metaphor and pseudo-mythical character from “Like A Rolling Stone” or “The Changing of the Guards”? I doubt it, almost as much as I doubt he would oblige. You would, of course, be missing the point. Would you stand there jabbing your finger into Noel’s sternum saying, “Come on then, what the fuck is a Wonderwall?” Possibly… On the other hand, you might, like me, have grown up for years listening to “Wichita Lineman” without having the faintest idea what Wichita or a Lineman was. But that was part of the romance, part of the discovery. And if you wanted to find out, you wouldn’t exactly call up Glen Campbell to find out, would you? Likewise with Steely Dan’s “Home at Last”. You only need to Google “tied to the mast” for a broad landscape of allusion and narrative to unfold before you. So to compound our problems we may feel that the songwriter is not even the appropriate person to ask to explain their lyrics. After all, our culture is awash with baffling weirdness left in our hands by poets, songwriters and playwrights long since dead. But we don’t give up on understanding them. Far from it.

My guess is this: If you sit down and try - really try - to get something from songs you at first didn’t understand, something magical will happen. They will start sorting themselves. You will come across great lyrics which you can explore, and which reward you for exploring. Songs which open up new worlds to you and which encourage you to learn new things about yourself, about history, about humanity. You will also find yourself increasingly impatient with those songs which defy explanation but offer nothing to you in its place.

To put this process another way: just as it is your responsibility as a listener to judge whether you think a song is good or bad, so it is your responsibility to judge whether you understand it or not. But if not, it then becomes your responsibility to figure out why you don’t understand it. What’s missing? Is the songwriter making a literary allusion you are unaware of? Are they deliberately playing with words and metaphors in order to allow you to project yourself onto their voice? Or, and this is a very important question for you as a music fan, have they just written a shit song? A song that bears the same relationship to true meaning that an STV advert for “HappyLets” bears to responsible, compassionate property management.

Let me close this section by suggesting a slight re-wording: “Knowing what a song is about makes the song better for the listener. Why? Because you get into your own thought processes.”

“You gain a sense of context and place; you are able to separate metaphor and imagery from reality and fact; you can sing the words with a genuine understanding…”

This quote I have taken deliberately out of context - because I think doing so reveals a different, important truth: YOU can do these things. Don’t be afraid to love a song for your own reasons, and likewise don’t be afraid to delete it for your own reasons.

Consider this: on the one hand, song is not a format designed to be accompanied by an explanation, but on the other hand, the LYRICS are - as a matter of necessity - provided with an explanation: that is, the MUSIC. This song you’re having difficulty with - doesn’t the music provide you with clues, moods and details that the lyrics have cleverly left out in order to allow the music to speak? Are you sure? Ask yourself another question: Do you actually value lyrics? Maybe you don’t. That’s cool. That’s your prerogative - but if you decide that you do, then you will have to start rating your music collection accordingly, and it’s possible that some of you might suddenly discover the ground shifting a little beneath your feet as the tectonic plates of your iTunes collection realign themselves to this new paradigm. Learn how to tell the difference between good lyrics and bad, and respond to what you learn - and look bad lyrics square in the eye!

But please don’t do this: don’t ask songwriters to write a “York Notes” for their own work. By all means, come up with your own analyses and discuss them with others - this is part of your responsibility to critique - but unless the songwriter explicitly offers an explanation, don’t ask them to provide one. It might get you out of a fix, but in the long run it will lessen your relationship with the song.

And to my fellow songwriters, I would say this:

Never Explain, Never Apologise.

Think of a song you’ve written - have you had people come up to you and ask you what it is all about, as though in hearing it they were somehow left wanting? Maybe you are thinking of a song you’ve only just written - well, are you worried this is going to happen? Now ask yourself a question: How will you respond? Are you going to stand by your beautiful piece of handiwork, your immaculate musico-lyrical architecture that so effortlessly blends skill and creativity, knowing that it’s central ideas are built of steel and it’s facade is carved of stone? Or are you going to look left, then right, before frantically trying to prop up it’s straw walls before a harmless music fan’s questions puff the whole thing over? Are you ready? Are you really ready to present your song to the world?

It is possible you have actually convinced yourself that not only have you written a masterpiece of befuddlement, but that you yearn to get out there and start EXPLAINING it. Your song is actually better for the listener once you have had your chance to provide a Director’s Commentary. Well, you’re the songwriter - it’s your show. But in choosing to do this with your songs, I say you weaken the format. I say your song is a tent, not a building.

I stand by the cliched architectural metaphor. For a song should not be a tent, nor an electric car, nor a central heating system, nor a power tool - useless until we have been instructed or trained. It should be a building - and we all know intuitively what a building is for. We all know that a building is for going into - to be sheltered from the elements. And we all know that we can move on from this to decide if it is for working in, sleeping in, hiding in - or even for being kept out of. Likewise, we know intuitively what a song is for - it’s for listening to… and with that part of the act mastered, it’s for dancing to, or crying to, or driving to, or fucking to… Do people need to be told that your song can be danced to? Are you going to put a sticker on the front of your single saying: “Please don’t fuck with this on, I wrote it for my dog”?

Just like an architect, you had a purpose or message in mind, for sure - in which case you ought to have built the best song you can to fulfil that purpose, and that purpose or message will be intrinsic to it. You might have built a straight-forward 2-up, 2 down so that people can go straight in the front door and cosy down. You might have built a sprawling fortress of secret passageways and hidden doors. You might have built a Cathedral, a Parliament or a Flop-House. If you’ve done a good job, then be like an architect - build it, smile and wave when they cut the ribbon, then walk away.