Song Lyrics

I love to sing. I was probably making up new song lyrics to familiar tunes before I hit my teens. Making up my own songs? I'm not sure. There was one which went "Rain is wet, rain is wet, I'm not a betting man but I'll make you a bet: I think you'll find that rain is wet." I was singing that to the rain when I was 15. I was 18 before I wrote it down, adding new stanzas— but a lot of such songs never got written down. And most that were, were scribbled or typed out on scraps of paper that I seem to have lost.

 

From 1966 to about 1975, though, I kept song lyric notebooks—and I used them. A surprising number of the songs included snatches of text and melody which I had quite literally dreamed. Everything had a tune, but I only recorded the lyrics. They are embarrassingly florid; clumsily angsty; painfully wiseass. Over the years, though, I would go back through them and still feel connected to a few; some I left as they were, some I strove to "rescue."

 

The song lyrics preserved here will go up in batches: 1966-1970; 1971-1975; etc. There are big gaps in my records, years where I kept no records, or I can't find my files.

 

I'm archiving some of the texts I have found. (I hope to unearth more later.) I've chosen from among those I remain fond of (or at least interested in) and which I don't mind posting publicly. A collection of song lyrics, I feel, reading my own, can constitute the most embarrassingly frank autobiography. My hope is that the selection here presented does still convey some sense of who I have been and how I have changed; but not too confessional a sense!

 

I'll asterisk songs where for one reason or another the tune matters to me. E.g. because I think it fits perfectly; or because I wrote it first and set the lyrics to it later; or because in a dream John Lennon wrote it and sang it to me. (See "Peel a Radish," in the first folder, "Blistered Feet.")