[David]

Originally Posted by cbBen

Lindsey can work like a dog for two years but will never be able to do what Stevie can vocally. In five seconds, her vocal contribution to Little Lies made the song as much as the hours and hours and hours Lindsey slaved away in the studio crafting it.

We'll have to agree to disagree -- wildly disagree about these very subjective views. I'm trying to even remember Stevie's vocal on "Little Lies." I'm coming up blank.

She contributes her fair share to the band, even if Lindsey works ten times harder.

Let's take the "Tango" album as an example. Throw out her particular contributions & what have you got? An album that by & large sounds exactly like the album we already have. Now throw out his contributions & what have you got? Goodbye guitar work, goodbye sparkling & inventive track orchestration (praised by just about every major critic in 1987), goodbye engineering breakthroughs, goodbye vocals, goodbye, goodbye. I rest my case.

But Stevie is the star power -- not just in the public eye but also talent-wise, and Lindsey seems to turn a blind eye to this fact.

She's the better singer and--in the grand scheme of things--the better writer. What's The World Coming To is exactly what is wrong with Lindsey as a writer. The lone sane voice crying in the wilderness, the victim of what the world has become.

Good heavens. The words to "What's the World Coming To" are fantastic -- probably Lindsey's best lyrics ever. They're wry, waggish, self-aware, punning -- just about everything that made Warren Zevon such a good lyricist. "World" is Lindsey's most Zevonesque lyric.

My views on Stevie's lyric-writing are well known & widely spread here. No need for me to repeat.

I am enjoying our conversation, all the same.