Boy, does this feel like a long time between posts or what?!
An insane week at work. Busy early mornings. A week of fascinating blog posts t0 read from all my usual haunts (ha ha, no pun intended) — generally yours. Little to no spare time at night. It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya. A conspiracy.
I’ll be back tomorrow for a real post — the usual end-of-week whiskey-river-inspired rambling. And then at some point over the weekend, I hope to finally (!) put up Part 2 of the What’s in a Song entry on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Working on the latter has proved to be a lot harder than usual (and that’s saying something). I have almost too much information to draw on (at least if I’m to stay below the 2,000-word absolute maximum length I’ve set). One fascinating little nugget has turned out to be something of a mystery, but really just a side issue from the central topic; I thought I’d turn it over to RAMH readers for help — especially any of you who know something about songwriting and/or music at more than just a listener level.
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and numerous other popular songs, as it happens, apparently are considered examples of verseless songs. Obviously, this term doesn’t mean that they lack lyrics. And just as obviously, my assumption that the word verse equates roughly to stanza is completely off the mark.
Can anybody explain for me what that means?
As background, one of the most complete explanations I’ve read is from a book called What to Listen for in Rock: A Stylistic Analysis, by Ken Stephenson. Although primarily concerned with rock, the book does refer to other genres, like show tunes, to illustrate and explain key concepts. In this case, it says (bleeping over a lot of jargon):
The portion [of “Over the Rainbow”] starting with [“Somewhere over the rainbow, Way up high”] is actually only the chorus of the song; the verse, not sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and thus largely ignored or forgotten, begins with the words “When all the world is a hopeless jumble.” Similarly, few of the millions who know Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas (1940) remember — or have ever heard — the verse, which begins with descriptions of the sunny weather and green grass of Southern California in December… Now, a chorus intended to be independent of a verse must have not only length but formal complexity as well… In many songs from this period, “Over the Rainbow” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” included, the chorus has taken on a multisectional form itself.
I don’t get it. Maybe in the case of “Over the Rainbow” — for which lyrics apparently exist for something called the “verse,” apart from the rest of the song — I can sorta kinda almost accept that “Somewhere over the rainbow/Way up high” is… something else. But what makes “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” verseless?
