Every story tells a picture

There are certain songwriters who are artists pretty much beyond categorization or imitation. They merge music and lyric to create something so beautiful, intriguing, compelling (or some other inadequate adjective), that all you can do is listen. The most obvious examples for me are the Beatles, Stevie Wonder (though not in a long time), some of the great figures in the American musical theater tradition like Cole Porter, Rogers & Hartenstein, or A.C. Jobim & J. Gilberto.

What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.

There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.

A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...

Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.

A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.