'Crane Song'

A Song Not About Cranes At All

As I keep writing here, it's hard enough writing any song, let alone about love. Writing about the first kiss is an impossibly delicate task. You have to temper it with a sense of distance and yet capture the overwhelming rush of hormones without being prosaic, nor overly poetic. Naturalism and hyperbole are both extremes you want to eschew as you sneak up on the topic. Sometimes the hunt takes years. Fortunately songs can afford to wait. It is utterly unlike the challenges of capturing that moment in front of the lens with actors standing in and having to direct them to the perfect moment on film.

If your song writing fraternity consists of Arts faculty graduates, the task gets even more self-conscious in an attempt to stamp out lines that betray your base instincts to the Freudian critic, while presenting the right kind of archetypes for the Jungian to find. Then you have to go and find the objective correlative - or so I've been told - that fits the mood and nuance perfectly and portray that as a kind of transference of meaning.
Yeah right.

At least, those were the kinds of obstacles we had to negotiate in order to write the somewhat abstract kinds of songs we used to write where by nobody understood what the hell it was about in the first listen. And maybe that was good way back when.

This is not that song.



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