Pedestrian Verse

I’ve been listening obsessively to Frightened Rabbit. This is my standard mode of musical engagement: fall hopelessly in love with an artist, composer, or band; listen to them and only them for an extended period; and then move on, as limerence gives way to durable affection. I am a serial monogamist of song.

One of the frustrations of musical illiteracy is that it’s difficult to articulate what’s moving me in the music I love. I suppose that’s why I feel the urge to make others listen—see below!—where I might use words to say what charms or fascinates me in a book. But even when music is accompanied by lyrics, I worry that words fail.

I’m sure this has been written about by others—I welcome reading suggestions—but beside the interaction of words with music, whose description turns on the literacy I lack, there’s the difficulty that the power of lyrics can depend on saying plainly, without poetry, what we feel. Music gives simplicity a force it rarely attains on the page. There is less …