The love song

I'm coming back to the love song, as singers so often do, oh I shied away from the love song when I first started writing lyrics. It wasn't just that fringe punk showing, I knew there were good love songs - great love songs - but odder conflagrations seemed more the order of the day.

While I liked orginal imagery in the music I listened to, my motive was more one of play; fiddling until you can get the thing to work.
When there is no restriction on what you write about, patterns still emerge. I'm sure there's a commonality in my song about stages (the kind you perform on) as there is to my songs with a theme of leaving. I wouldn't say I was setting out to subvert the idea behind a song so much as explore it poetically. I showed an old almost-girlfriend "Going Away Tomorrow" and mentioned that you could read it as not being specifically about the typical leaving of a lover. She shook her head but look:

I'm sheltering beneath and I'm travelling beyond
All of the places I've been coming from

This song isn't speaking about leaving anyone in particular it's about, simply, going away.

You can take down the photos
You can empty the room
Scratch out the name
They will carve on my tomb

My personal interpration is that this could be a boarding house. Remove the signs I've been here; I'm no longer important, if I ever was.

With "The Morning That She Left Me" I was writing a country song that started at the quarter acre block.

And I set off up the country
And I was lucky I struck gold
Now I'm into property
Fortune's taken hold
But I still remember fondly
The morning that she left me

"Leaving Through The Crowd" is urban leaving, shopping mall leaving but I didn't get the idea from seeking a variation on a theme. This is that cursing when you've failed to make an appointment or you've turned up late; a berating of the narrator's own screw up :

I work out each moment lost
Withdraw once more
And count the cost
cos she's leaving through the crowd

But my muse is particular and perhaps promising in my personals profile 'I'll Write You a Song' (well, shit, it sounded better than some of the other options) was rash. I couldn't be the Poet Laureate writing to order - unless the order had something I could sink my teeth into. Now I've got a girl whose asking me when I'm going to write her that love song. Apart from What If She Really Loves Me most of my songs have a darkish tinge and that's not really what ya want here. Does anybody have Barry Manilow's email? Maybe he could help me out.