What's so wrong with writing in the third person?

[Cristian]

Originally Posted By Carne Vaca
I would say that "maybe," "now" and "could" are superfluous words. Stevie should have pushed herself and come up with a more elegant way to convey the message

I don't agree with Carne's analysis of that first verse of "Thrown Down" which led him to think that the lyrics were not good, or were badly-edited. In poetry (or in songwriting, for that matter), there's always the recurse of using words that could reforce the meaning of what's one trying to say. And those words are helping to making that message strong... let's see:

"Thrown down, like a barricade
Maybe now he could prove to her
That he could be good for her
And that they should be together"

The narrator is seeing a relationship, like watching it on a TV, or from a different perspective. She is not living the situation, or dealing with her (that's when the use of the third person form becomes more relevant), she's only an observator. But she knows that the situation (that meeting of two old lovers) has no apparent meaning. At least it does not mean something that they could live in the future, something concrete. It is very vague. The future is dark with that person, as was the past. Again, it's not her the one who's living the experience , therefore the third person is an excellent resource. We know she is, but only because we know the story. A badly-informed listener would say that this is a nice story. And if he has good ears (or eyes to read the lyric booklet), he'd read that verse like this:

"Thrown down, like a barricade
Maybe now he could prove to her
That he could be good for her
And that they should be together"

because the intention is to leave one with the doubt. What's going to happen in the future? Who knows. Who cares even. The future is so dark that the words are stressing that point. And those become very important in that proces. By no means "superflous", in my humble opinion.

In the third person discussion, there is of course a thing about different songwriting styles, which, as Carne so elloquently put, is a matter where there's no "right" or "wrong". Let me put it this way. In their early years, The Beatles wrote songs "for their fans", as they expressed in their Anthology book... their songs were written in first person because they liked to put themselves in the ficticious stories that they told whilst doing the songwriting process. That, the youth and the first attempts on songwriting led to results such as:

Love, love me do
You know I love you

which of course made their point. They made an total change when (in their own words) realized that it was more "interesting" to say "she loves you" instead of "I love you", and they built a very sophisticated lyric (for the time, and for their ages) whilst writing a third-part story:

She says you hurt her so
She almost lost her mind
But now she says she knows
You're not the hurting kind
She says she loves you

This song would lose all the impact if written in first person ("I love you")... But that's a particular case. Paul McCartney in particular, stayed with this style of writing stories about other people ("Eleanor Rigby", "Rocky Raccoon", "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Another Day" are perfect examples)... John Lennon never liked the style, even though he used techniques of changing songwriting manners. For instance, he had, in the very confessional Plastic Ono Band album, a song called "I Found Out", about his own childhood traumas and stuff. He had this verse:

I heard something 'bout your ma and your pa
They didn't want you so they made me a star

but later on as it was going to become a "confessional" song, the change made it finally appear as:

I heard something 'bout my ma and my pa
They didn't want me so they made me a star

and it was more "impactant". Like that, in the first person.

So basically, it's everything about styles applied to certain songs. In the case of "Thrown Down", to me, it works. But yet Stevie can be very reiterative in the use of that way of writing, so I understand the fact that it can upset some people.

Interesting discussion.


Song of the moment - Jane