A-Lyric.com

The New York Times ran a short piece about the then 16 year-old Gail Renard who snuck into the bed-in organised John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal in 1969. At one stage, she witnessed some 50 people sing “Give Peace a Chance”. Choirboys included Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg as well as Petula Clark. Lennon handed Renard a lyric sheet of the song when leaving, saying “one day they will be worth something”. At an upcoming auction, Sotheby’s has estimated the something to be in the region of $400-600,000. This is a hefty chunk. But it must be pointed out that at most auctions of this kind, lyrics only rarely meet the estimates. It’s the actual authors’ rights that bring in the money.

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If you’re a regular reader, you are probably aware that I have come to the conclusion that most anthems are dark, mean-spirited affairs. When they’re not calling for the spilling of blood (Ireland, France), they are stomping on other people (like the infamous sixth verse of “God Save the Queen”). It looks like someone in Florida actually sat down and looked at their state song again, and the result is not pretty.
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I sometimes wonder if there’s a large book with complaints one can make about Eurovision entries that people pull out every year. French MP Jacques Myard is complaining that France’s Eurovision is partly in English. Post-modern dandy Sebastien Tellier’s “Divine” is in English (of sorts). Almost predictably, a number of politicians have taken it upon themselves to chastise the television company and label for choosing it. Continue Reading »

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Britain’s Jarvis Cocker, formerly singer of Pulp, is to make an appearance at the Brighton festival on May 23. He is programmed to “explore the function of the lyric in popular song” (as it says on the website). Jarvis will start from the position that ’song lyrics don’t really matter’! From here he embarks on a celebration of his craft, putting his own lyrics under the microscope alongside firm favourites from Leonard Cohen and Pete Doherty to Hot Chocolate and Amy Winehouse. Including an in-depth analysis of Richard Berry’s notorious rock ‘n’ roll anthem “Louie Louie”. Trouble is, the event is sold out already.

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Here’s something that I have basically being saying for a good while: the lyric sites are by and large spam. You’ve probably checked sites for lyrics and noticed that they often same very basic level of information, a few words. There is very rarely any information about who wrote the songs, nor who the publisher is, nor (in general) who has covered the song, nor info about translations. So by Google’s standards, most are spam as they consist of automatically generated pages of copied information with no added value. Continue Reading »

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I can’t resist a plug for the TV series “Vermist/Missing”, taken from the film of the same name directed by Jan Verheyen. It will debut on Belgium’s VT4 channel every Tuesday from March 25 at 9.30pm. I wrote the track that plays out over the end, “Waiting”, with the series composer Steve Willaert. It’ll be available soon as a download. We also wrote a song for the episode called “Kika”.

For more about “Vermist” (one of the biggest grossing Belgian films last year), visit VT4.be. To buy the DVD collection of the TV series, visit Proxis.

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I can’t say that I was disappointed to hear that the song “Danny Boy” has been banned from an Irish pub in new York for the month of March in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day. Despite having a reputation as one of the quintessential Irish ballads, it’s another pure product of Tin Pan Alley.
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Visitors from Northern Ireland might want to check out the upcoming Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival when US and Irish writers will be hooking up between February 20 ad 24. Nashville’s Don Schlitz will perform several of his 24 #1 hit songs including, “When You Say Nothing At All”, “The Gambler” and “Forever and Ever Amen”. Pat Alger performs his hit songs and Kevin Gordon, Ralph Murphy, Victoria Banks, Eliza Lynn and Tony Kerr all make the journey from America. “Heart On My Sleeve” and “Breakaway” writer Benny Gallagher is coming as is Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue, Chris Difford of Squeeze, Swedish songwriter Tobias Froberg, John Power and Dougie Maclean (’Caledonia’). Visiting American artists will join local writers on stage to perform solo and ‘In The Round’ concerts. Ben Glover, Bap Kennedy, Cat Malojian, Anthony Toner, The Delawares, Charlie McGettigan, Wally Page, Janet Holmes, Kevin Doherty and Paul Casey are all taking part. For details, visit Belfast-Nashville.

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I had to sympathise with Beck’s record label. While preparing the layout of a deluxe edition of his album “Odelay”, someone pasted in lyrics to the track “The New Pollution” that they found on a website. So the line “she’s alone in the new pollution” was actually printed as “she’s alone in the new delusion”. As mistakes go, that one’s not too bad. But then they forgot to replace them with the real lyrics.



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I mentioned some time back that Avril Lavigne’s “I Wanna be Your Girlfriend” was the subject of a lawsuit by eighties band The Rubinoos who felt it was too close to a song of theirs with almost the exact same chorus, “I Wanna be Your Boyfriend”. At the time, people were claiming she “ripped them off”. But the writers recently “exonerated” Lavigne and her co-writer. So did she or did she not rip them off?
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