Re: Love and Anger

[aruss@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (Andrew Russ)]

	I have a love-hate relationship with the lyrics to "Love and Anger".
The music is great.  But the lyrics are very vague, and seem like a number
of cliches strung together.  The song seems to be about someone who has some
kind of urgent problem she (or maybe he) needs to talk about, but doesn't know
how and is afraid to, so instead she drops off veiled clues, and even makes
strong suggestions to the listener to come out and reveal his (or her) secrets.
Listening to the song & reading the lyrics i can't decide whether KaTe just
decided to string a bunch of cliches together because she couldn't think
of anything better (and more definite) to say or if she deliberately did it
to create a less-than-reliable narrator (she's hiding something from us, and
she's so emotionally attached to it that she can't reveal it but can only
talk obliquely).  The latter possibility smacks of genius, if you think about
it.  The lyrics in the rest of TSW kind of fall either way for me, depending
on the song.
	I have the same ambivalence to Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away", where
the cliches are even more broadly evident ("Love is all there is, Love and only
Love, it can't be denied".  The Nashville Skyline album was the nadir of his
career (not counting the Self-Portrait outtakes that were released to black-
mail him back to Columbia).  On the other hand the Hard Rain live version reeks
an anthematic sense of conviction, and i wonder if the cliches in Nashville
Skyline were not an attempt to self-consciously quote country music idioms.

	Well, enough of this.  Of course everything here is IMHO.

				andrew