How Would You Feel If Someone Wrote A Song About You...?

Didn't Other Music in NYC do one? That's money well spent on promotion if you ask me.

Elton John everybody! Thank you and goodnight.

A pop song, I am inclined to think, is - or can be, or should be, or maybe can't not be - a kind of *fiction*. It's not as complex, detailed or elaborate as other kinds of fiction (I'm thinking mainly of prose fiction), but it involves something like the same relation between 'text' and 'world' - between 'art', if you can tolerate that word, and 'reality'. That is, the song is based on, or drawn from, or inspired by (in this instance) a real person: and you wouldn't write it without them. Yet the 'character' who appears in the song (if character is not too elaborate a word) is not really identical with the real person. How could it be? - it's just a figment of a few words, a few melodic effects. The pop song is, I reckon, a largely simple form: it isn't going to try and tell you the 'whole' of a person as Proust, James or Woolf seemed to bid to do. No, it must sketch, suggest an outline, a figure, in a few strokes. That figure won't equate to a real, living person: the most you can probably say is that it will be a kind of tribute to them; and that its richness comes from its borrowed thought of the real person, rather than from something in the song's words themselves.

The 'fictional' character of the pop song has not, I think, been discussed as fully or insightfully as it might. This may be because people think that to do so is to equate pop songs with pieces of prose fiction: which they either proceed to do, somewhat inappropriately, or understandably decline to do. The modality of a pop song's relation to what we call the real goes untheorized - no, make that unthought.

Dinner is ready

I'm not sure how I'd feel because it would obviously depend on what perspective they came from, though to call me a "paranoid introverted bastard" would probably me marginally truer than calling me "someone everyone likes". However I have written lines which could fit in songs about Tom (or at least somebody based on him), and likewise a few lines applying to David the Huntsman. But, as yet, the songs in which they would fit remain unwritten.

Not an Albini reference, but a Pussy Galore one (given what you listed as your current listenings). It's from "Yu Gung", which was a cover of a Neubauten song, which itself was a reference to a Japanese movie about the powers of the human mind.

Oddly, the album this is from, the Sugarshit Sharp EP, was the only one of the three Caroline releases reissued on Matador that wasn't recorded by Steve Albini.

I wrote a song about Dan from the C6, and he's never even commented on it. Probably cause he thinks it's about his stupid bassist... who has gone on and on about it. Probably because I go on and on about him. It's all crap. I wish I'd never done it, becuase it's all got so complicated.

It's a wonderful song, though.

I mean, all songs are about someone, aren't they? Very few people write songs in the abstract, and if they, they're usually CRAP.

He should feel complimented and flattered as hell. It wasn't intended in a creep, stalker way, it was just a "my god, I completely idolise you, and I don't think I'm cool enough to talk to you, so I'll write a song to break the ice" thing, but then it all went wrong.

WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

And it's our next bloody single, and I can't listen to the thing cause it makes me weep.

I can't write without a fucking muse. Who said I could write anyway? I'm just some nonsense drunk let loose on the internet afterhours.

"A beautiful boy has a thousand songs just hanging around His head all you gotta do is write 'em down"

Fucking crap blueheaded guitar bands for destroying the concept of the word, it's so lovely. As UVS once said in the Whore Of God, "her last John was peculiar, he moved in a mysterious way" and yes, muses move in mysterious ways, and pick fucking crap people to inhabit. Dear muse, I'm writing you this letter to suggest you take up residence in somebody better. Sick of longbrownhaired sideburned badlyshaved boys that look like Shaggy who inspire stupid spinning spacerock and the like, want it to stop, but it won't go away.

Enough, I have had far too much vodka.

Yeah, cheers.

Look, I'm sympathetic to the vodka situation, I really am, but you have to admit that that claim is piffle.

Hmm. I did this very recently. Sort of. The song doesn't reference this person specifically and there's no 'i love you baby' type bullshit in it but there is a latent romanticism about a shared experience in it that would be fairly obvious if they heard it. I have to say that I honestly think it's a pretty good song, but now I'm going back and forth on whether or not it's a good idea to actually send it to this person (it's someone I know already). I have no idea how they would react. I have no interest in sharing it with the general public so I'm either going to send it to them or no-one.
I find that this can bring out ideas you did not know you had, but whether it's a good idea or not to actually let that person hear the song I cannot say.