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Originally Posted by Johnny Stew
Again, I'm talking about my opinion regarding lyrics. The instrumentation and production that surrounds it is something altogether different for me. That can be polished. It fact, I prefer that it is, because I can't stand to listen to something that sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of kids in their neighbor's garage.
But I prefer the lyrics to be raw, emotional, and off the cuff as much as possible.
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Once you set those as virtues in & of themselves, where does it logically proceed? Why not be done with the "poetry" completely -- with even its minimal semblance of formalism, even in a Stevie Nicks song -- & just come out to California to drive the freeways. You'll hear plenty of raw, emotional, & off-the-cuff language from some of the other drivers.
Of course, we're all guilty of the fallacy of confusing the content with the process. We're all drawing the mostly unsupported conclusion that Stevie's "rawness" & emotionalism are the result of penning her words immediately or letting them spill from her pen, unfettered by revision or any additional attention whatsoever. But we don't have anywhere near a complete idea of her process. For all we know, she worked on the "Rhiannon" words for months, twisting & pulling & replacing & mulling over, etc. The appearance of "rawness" might be as carefully tooled as a jet engine. The aesthetic response we have from a poem can't automatically be applied to the poet's process willy-nilly. Ginsberg's "Howl" sure produces that sense of immediacy & rawness in a reader, but it would be a mistake to conclude from that response that the poet didn't revise thoroughly, that he didn't calculate that effect, because in fact he did.
(However, it's my personal view that Stevie generally just grabs lines from her journals & slaps them down, which is probably what creates the triteness, woolliness & deafness to idiom that I often see in those lyrics. My hunch is that she essentially just copy-pastes from her journals onto the lyric sheet, without bothering much to form a more coherent expression. Still, if I love "The Nightmare" -- & I definitely do -- I can't ipso facto conclude that it was written any differently. It may have been, but it may not have been.)