Given how prominent humor is in our culture, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear more often in music. With some exceptions, artists tend to steer clear of humor or use it sparingly.
Joni Mitchell covered the jazz tune “Twisted,” a humorous take on split personality that ends with the line “Two heads are better than one.” Others have used humor to make a point in songs that aren’t humorous per se. Tori Amos uses a line from an Eagles song in “Springtime of his Voodoo” and sings “Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and I’m quite sure I’m in the wrong song.” In “The Waitress” she sings “I want to kill this waitress,” then “but I believe in peace, bitch.” And who can forget the name of her ill-fated band, Y Kant Tori Read? (This calls to mind the ironic band names launched by the punk movement, such as Dead Kennedys, Chrome Dinette, and perhaps the best of all, The The). [Read more →]
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Whenever I hear Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters,” it’s suddenly fall of 1980 when I first moved to San Francisco. I see every detail of my studio apartment in a 1920s brownstone on the border of the Marina district: the honeycomb-patterned tile on the bathroom floor; the wall niche for the telephone; the space in the kitchen that once held the icebox. I relive the emotions of those early days in a new city, the excitement tinged with longings. “San Francisco show and tell.” Most songs don’t have this kind of emotional valence for me. But some do. Why is that? [Read more →]
The Royal Scam, Steely Dan’s fifth album, contained a song written years earlier but never professionally recorded that was radically re-worked for the album. In its demo and album versions, “Caves of Altamira” offers an instructive look at a musical “before” and “after” and how certain choices can strengthen a song. 
Considering the great number of popular songs that have been written, there are surprisingly few about music or musicians. I’ve compiled a list below, omitting those in which the song is really about something else or music is not the main point of the song (an example would be Led Zeppellin’s “Rock and Roll”). Undoubtedly, I’ve left something off, so I’ll update the list periodically. 
