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Originally Posted by dissention
I think that the big reason I'm not a big fan of a lot of her later work is because, for me, something about her writing started to awry in the late eighties and the songs became much less relatable than they were before. I think she's at her best when there's a large sense of ambiguity to her songs. When she started to write songs like "Ghosts," "Two Kinds of Love," "That Made Me Stronger," "Sweet Girl," "Silver Girl," "Welcome to the Room Sara," and others along those lines, the songs became less universal and too personal in detail for me to enjoy very much. I know that I, personally, really have no desire to know how Stevie's depends on her music like a husband or how she talked to her famous friend last night. I don't know the woman, and never will, so it just strikes me as TMI and it begins to cloy. Others like that stuff and more power to them if they enjoy it, but I enjoy her work that doesn't explicitly refer to herself and her career and her dinners with friends about her songwriting. I can't get into them because I have a hard time relating. I like Silver Girl because it's quite vivid, but I don't enjoy it on the same level as something like Sable On Blonde because I'm not a girly-girl, I'm not lost in a hardcore world, and I don't have or look like a million bucks. It may just be me, but I listen to those songs and really don't give a fiddler's fig. Unfortunately, that's the turn her writing took and I don't enjoy it as much as I did before. I think she's a master at taking incredibly personal feelings and emotions and writing them into songs everyone can relate to, but I think she lost a bit of that over the years. Doesn't mean she can't be good when she wants to be because she can still knock her material out of the park, but I think it's come to point where for every fabulous song she records, she records a stinker to go along with it. Maybe she's run out of ideas or maybe I'm just a cold prick with no empathy or emotion, who knows. But those are the reasons I, personally, don't enjoy her new material that much.  |
I can totally understand that. I don't necessarily relate to some of the songs either... no famous friends here!
Though, as I've said, I definitely relate to "Ghosts," and the idea of depending on music for the comfort a husband would normally provide.
But I don't really have to relate to a song to love it. I don't relate to Madonna's "Promise To Try," which is about her mother dying when Mo was a little girl, but I still love it.
Don't get me wrong, I see where you're coming from... the songs that you relate to, or that are more ambiguous and open for interpretation, are the ones that you enjoy more. It makes it more personal for you. That's true for me too.
But I do also love those moments when the song or lyric is like an uncensored page from Stevie's diary, and I get a glimpse into the loneliness of a middle-aged woman isolated by her fame. Even if there's no way I could ever relate to that.
Maybe it's the voyeur in me!
