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Originally Posted by bombaysaffires
but this was my point-- her "coherent" songs are NOT exceptions. There are so many of them, as people have listed, that it is terribly unfair for journos and listeners to characterize her writing with a blanket statement that she is "abstract" or kooky in her lyrics. In fact so many of her songs are perfectly clear what they mean. Of course over the times of her life she will find different meanings in them for herself, as will her listeners. Landslide means something different to me now than it did when it came out, and those words mean something different to her at 68 than when she wrote them at like 26. That's perfectly natural and doesn't make her flakey.
Some of her other songs are more abstract or are not a single story but made up of pieces of different stories (for example Edge of 17). So what. So are a lot of songs.
Listen to the lyrics of many of the top male songwriters (including LB) and they aren't the most coherent either--- but Stevie makes an easy target for critics and others because of her appearance and her interviews etc.
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After 1978, I'm hard-pressed to find more than a few examples of her lyrics that have coherent or traditional narrative and grammatical structures. That's a lot of what I'm saying.