So Many Feelings, So Little Time

I’m always glad when albums come with printed lyrics if only because seeing the words gives an initial point of focus (“Ah, this is a sad song. Think sad thoughts”) when the music is still unfamiliar. But this album sounds better—subdued jazz and wistful pop—than the lyrics read. Lines that look in print like endless emotional vacillating sound more restrained and reflective when unreeled gradually over not-too-fast, pleasant tunes.

Not that this quietly likable album’s that great after all. Especially after Norah Jones, subdued jazz and wistful pop has been the next big thing for female singer-songwriters. The music’s not bad, but it’s a crowded field lately, so—barring breathtaking virtuosity—the lyrics need to say something. Sure, Fordham’s been doing it longer than her peers and she’s more Joni Mitchell (who, by the way, Fordham calls “my number one favorite icon”) self-expression than Jones generic, but that only counts for something if you’ve definitely got something to say.

The best songs come when Fordham eschews ambivalence for the expression of a clear feeling, whether that’s in the euphoric “Jump” or the wistful “Downhill Sunday”. She falters in trickier terrain like “I’m Sorry But…”, a kiss-off to a lover that she doesn’t know exactly why she’s leaving. “How the years fly by,” Fordham laments, “It’s Christmas then Fourth of July / It all becomes a travelogue, a jumble of occasions.” Which may happen all the time in life, but, in art, one demands more from climactic lines than “I had been clinging to that which changes / Caught in a never-ending, long, long chain of delusion.”

Contrast Fordham’s lyric with one from Kami Lyle, one of my favorite (and undeservedly obscure) female jazz-pop singer-songwriters. About the ambivalence of an exciting and meaningless fling, Lyle sings, “You’ll love me like I am a Christmas tree / Sparkling and pretty, a real fantasy / Then you’ll see through me / Won’t know what to do with me / Then you’ll be glad when I, / Won’t be too sad when I, / So glad the day I leave.”

In Lyle’s lyric, the metaphor—that she is a Christmas tree—develops throughout the verse, actually having its meaning expanded to mirror the expanding complexities Lyle reads into the literal one-nighter. Fordham’s metaphorical songs, meanwhile, can go from umbilical cords to seas to deserts to electrical currents (“Connecting) without settling down to make the clarified point that good metaphors are supposed to make. Lyle finds a good metaphor and sticks with it to enhance the meaning of what she’s actually trying to say (Though, in fairness, I love the extended movie metaphor of “That’s Life” that tells a departed lover she would have scripted things “more like Pretty Woman meets Misery; funny, regretful, and creepy at the same time).

One could argue that this confuses poetry with music, that music depends upon the immediately comprehensible flow of narrative over the nuances that can be picked out and apart on the written page. Not necessarily; good poems (in the traditional understanding that makes a fuss of similes and metaphors) can make good songs, but so can something as literal and surprising as this denouement from Joni Mitchell: “Last night, I heard the screen door slam / A big yellow taxi took away my old man.” Besides, if one argues that song lyrics depend upon immediately comprehensible meaning to define the continuous flow of sound, why use metaphor at all? After all, metaphors relate something to something it isn’t, forcing the listener to make a connection while the song keeps going on.

Which is fine if it works, especially since, if you’re hearing metaphors on an album you’ve bought, you’re probably hoping you’ll feel like hearing it again. One way that metaphor works is that, after getting it, you can play the song again and bask in its emotional shorthand of myriad meanings.

But when the metaphors are tossed left and right with no special insight, it’s just a hassle that detracts from the main thrust of the song. For instance, “She’s sweet like cotton candy” underlines a point. But following that with “She’s pretty as a painting” and then that with “She’s sharp as a box of nails” can get old real fast, unless, as with the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do”, it’s delivered humorously or with some final twist. Without being as hostile as this might sound (and while admitting that lots of other artists do it, too), it’s singer-songwriter disease that thinks shallow-oblique is better than shallow-clear. Valuing comprehensibility and economy of means, I’d argue shallow ponds are no more fascinating when muddied, that—title track aside—the best songs here tend to be the most straightforward. Muddiness merely gives one more reason to not approach within drinking distance, which means missing a person who is, finally, a fairly likable and reasonable singer-songwriter.

Though used copies of Kami Lyle’s Blue Cinderella are going for real cheap on Amazon or eBay.