"Divorced from a song, words on a page look like poetry—usually bad poetry. 'Lyrics just don't hold up without the music,' says Billy Collins, professor and former poet laureate. When his students argue that the lines by their favorite rock stars should be assessed as literature, he demurs: 'I assure them that Jim Morrison is not a poet in any sense of the word.'"
My favorite excerpt from an incredibly long piece about songwriters today, and their relationship, if any, to the great tunesmiths of the past (i.e. the giants of Tin Pan Alley). I kinda wished they had went more in this direction and teased out the difference between poems and song lyrics.
The whole thing is, in any event, worth reading, for even if it doesn't tell you much you don't know (as in my case), it reminds you that there's one aspect of music production that hasn't been Auto-Tuned out of existence. I half expect robots, or monkeys banging on typewriters, to write songs eventually, however.
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