It has always been a bad habit of mine to overcomplicate lyrics - using five words where one will do in the fear that people won't get what I'm trying to say - and yet in most lyrics, economy is key. Besides, we need only look at SongMeanings.com to see that fans love an obscure lyric - some of the debates on there get pretty vicious! So I put pen to paper and wrote a fairly sparse lyric very quickly.
Stretched out in the sun
You are here
We are one
Safe in your arms
With the trees as our witness
Lie in the grass
My husband to silence
In our house of earth
No one can hurt us
We hide from the world
And bury our secrets
My love
The ground is taking our shape
In the dying light
You held me so tight
As usually happens when I ditch the self-conciousness component of my writing - a few clichés crept in. In fact I've written close to twenty songs since I first started writing and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've used the word "love" in any of them. With that in mind, I suppose it's time I let myself off the hook. After all, in the words of the legendary Tim Minchin:
"The weirdest thing about a mind
Is that every answer that you find
Is the basis of a brand new cliché."
I suppose that at some point, phrases like "we are one" and "hold you in my arms" were genuinely original at some point in history - someone had to be the first to write that down. And I guess that in the end, clichés are all about context - one line saying "we are one" is fine as long as it doesn't sit in the same verse as "you make me complete," or the creatively suicidal rhyme of "fire" with "desire" or "higher." Or, the classic: "down on my knees, beggin' you please"...
So, there you go. For one song only, I am embracing the cliché. So I shall stick my radio on, hope the DJ plays my favourite song, and keep dancing... all night long.
Did I mention that it's Wednesday night and I'm feelin' alright?
S.
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