Editing Love Songs for Sense and Style

When an author finishes a novel, typically the publisher then employs an Editor to go right through it, blowtorch together any gaping plot flaws, hammer out infelicities and shore up the more rickety of the metaphors. The novel’s then published, and despite this attention to detail, will probably be read by a few thousand people at best.

Songs produced by recording artistes, some of them destined for the orifices of millions, get slapped out into the market, their weakly thought-through lyrics preserved in all their inconsistencies and inadequacies for all of us to cherish. Why are there no editors in the recording business?

For instance, when John Farnham wrote his lumbering 80s pop anthem ‘The Voice’, why wasn’t there someone on hand to point out that ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it’ sounds an awful lot like ‘You’re the voice, dumbass, try and wrap your misfiring synapses around the concept, if it isn’t too much TROUBLE.’

And only lack of an editor meant Band Aid could get away with giving Bono the line ‘And tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you’. Unedited subtext: ‘Millions are starving in Africa. On the plus side, at least it’s not you or me, eh? Cup of tea? Slice of cake?’

Editors could also recommend that writers of love songs avoid on principle references to nesting birds as, like it or not, doves play only a very minimal part in people’s lives, and not nearly enough to justify their regular appearance in the bespattered streets and fetid public squares of Love Song Land. Doves: you only got the gig because you rhymed with something. If mankind had turned out differently, and enjoyed songs about say, kitchens, rather than love, you’d be nowhere, and we’d all have a thing about pigeons instead.

Altogether now: ‘I adore you as any man would his kitchen/Outside on the window ledge, there’s a ruddy great pigeon.’ Which is why this is a blog, and not a song.

Next week: why gloves aren’t any good as a metaphor, either.