18 August

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see that a lot, people call the person who writes the words to a song a songwriter. I totally appreciate how words and music can go together to make something special, but it’s la la land to call lyric writing song writing. Everybody remembers Mozart wrote The Magic Flute, nobody remembers who wrote the libretto. The ‘deep’ lyrics of most songs are greeting card philosophy at best. The emotional response from the music gives the ideas in the song a feeling of profundity they usually just don’t have. Like Imagine, as one example, people worship that song. The lyrics would get you a fail in any junior high school essay on history, it’s sentimental rubbish.