Average Jane Leaves the Lyrics Alone

A couple weeks ago, one of the guys in my band had a couple of guests at practice. The first song we did while they were there was, "All Right Now" by Free. When the song ended, one of the visitors suggested, "You should change the words to, 'There he stood, in the street...'"

Then we did "Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet and I told him, "Now you know why there's no point in my changing any lyrics."

When you're a woman singing in a cover band, you quickly discover that you're spending a lot of time lyrically lusting after various fictional women. It's really impossible to avoid it. Like it or not, the majority of popular songs are written by men and a good percentage of them are laden with female pronouns.

A long time ago, I decided that it's way more trouble than it's worth to torturously rewrite every song to try to make it clear that I'm a straight woman. In fact, I have a column I wrote for a rock 'zine in the mid-1980s that's about this very subject. I'd already made up my mind by then.

Every song is written from the point of view of a character, and the singer's job is to embody that character for the 3-5 minutes that the song lasts. It shouldn't make any difference whether the character is a man, woman, animal or inanimate object.

Then again, maybe I'm just lazy...

Comments

[meesha.v]

the opposite happened when conway twitty was singing "slow hand" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6AZGDXL2Rs

[Donna W]

Good point; of course, I sing only for my own benefit. And I sing folk and country, which lend themselves to changing more easily than other genres. If it's easy to change "she" to "he", I do; if not, who cares. Nobody hears it anyhow!

[Christy]

Interesting post - like it that you've taken the point of view of the character.

[May]

Yay!