Jackson Browne performing at the Unsung Heroes tribute to Eleni Mandell, January 2017. Photo: Justin Higuchi. CC BY 2.0

I was thinking about how, amid all our serious reading and warnings today of imperilled futures—from the renewed prospect of nuclear war to the possibility of AI takeover—we seem to have lost the ability to let a good lyric, or a fine line, simply hang in the air, or to savour the magnificence, and even the munificence, of words freely given, and to allow a phrase sometimes of perfection to ease our tension, if we have any, and on a good day illuminate the dark and make us feel a whole lot better.

“How strange the change from major to minor,” as Cole Porter sang in Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, sounding almost like a throwaway piece of sophistication: emotion explained, if you like, through music theory. But parked inside that old, well-worn lyric is something rather larger. Porter is putting words to a change the listener may already have felt without ever knowing its name—the mysterious power of music to alter our emotional state beneath the level of conscious thought. Though Porter is not normally one’s first port of call here, there is definite cosmic sense to it. A lyric can know more than it seems to know, and music can reach further into us than we realise: it can even lower cortisol and perceived stress.

Any thinking about lyrics inevitably leads us to Blind Boy Grunt. (A name that Bob Dylan once recorded under.) “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” the former Bobfather sang in My Back Pages, pulling off one of the great back-flips on maturity, as though certainty makes us old while doubt can make us young. “I was born here and I’ll die here,” he sang in Not Dark Yet. This is mortality without ornamentation. The sheer plainness of it makes it frightening. A writer friend was recently ironing a white t-shirt listening to Street-Legal at volume. He said he thought of an old friend. Song does that. Then on Rough and Rowdy Ways, “I contain multitudes,” Whitman’s phrase, which the Minnesota Kid repurposes as part of his lifelong refusal to remain one person. And

I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again

These are yet more plain words opening somehow onto the infinite. Perhaps that’s what the best lyrics do: they get past our intellectual defences before we quite realise how much they contain. Science, in a rather less lyrical way, has caught up with something songwriters have long understood: music engages the brain’s reward circuitry. A good song doesn’t just tell us something. Somewhere beneath thought, it happens to us as well.

With Leonard Cohen, I still think of “Did you ever go clear?” from “Famous Blue Raincoat.” An extraordinarily ambiguous question. Did he mean healed, escaped, enlightened, absolved? It turns out it was written at a time when he dabbled with Scientology. Or the lines:

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried…

That is devastating. The gratitude is tangled up with self-defeat. Cohen is effectively thanking another man for relieving a woman’s sadness—something he himself had stopped believing possible. He mistakes her unhappiness for something permanent, perhaps intrinsic to her, when his own passivity might have been helping preserve it all along. And perhaps that’s another great thing lyrics can do: not merely identify an emotion, but understand something about it that the person feeling it may not yet understand himself or herself yet.

Let’s not forget Cohen’s fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell—we’ll come to Neil Young later—and her desiring line “I could drink a case of you,” with love or lust imagined at once as nourishment, intoxication and dangerous excess. “I really don’t know life at all,” she admits almost grandly in Both Sides, Now—wisdom arriving not as knowledge but as an admission of ignorance. But she croons later on Hejira, “There’s comfort in melancholy,” where presumably sadness has become a habitat, somewhere strangely consoling to live. Mitchell understood that we don’t always want rescuing from our sorrow. Sometimes we settle into it, even cherish it, and a great lyric can make us recognise the pleasure hidden inside an emotion that we thought we were supposed to escape.

For some reason I’ve always liked shame in song, too, especially when expressed conversationally rather than dramatically. One astonishing line from someone very young when he wrote it was Jackson Browne’s “Don’t confront me with my failures,” on These Days, “I had not forgotten them”. He was 16 years old, it was around 1965, and he was still a high-school student in Fullerton, California. Even his “How long have I been sleeping?” in Late for the Sky carries terror—the sweeping terror of an ending that reveals not just what happened to a relationship, but one’s absence from it. Maybe that’s why such lyrics matter when we hear them young. Someone has already found words for the thing we thought was happening only to us. The sweet bird of youth. Experience suggests that this sense of recognition can reduce feelings of loneliness and strengthen social connection: the private, burrowing shame, once sung, is private no more. The worm has turned.

More viper-tongued is Patti Smith’s “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” in Gloria: a single snarl establishing an entire artistic identity—defiance, sexuality, religion, poetry and rock ’n’ roll. Smith often used to make the sacred feel feral. She turned rock ’n’ roll into a place again where poetry sweated, howled, prayed and misbehaved. Yet in Wing we find what may be her gentlest line: “I was a wing in heaven blue.” Not I had wings, or even I flew, but I was a wing. So simple and weightless that the self seems almost to disappear into flight—like being held by the sky.

When you need time-out, Adrianne Lenker or Big Thief work for me. “I don’t wanna talk about anything,” from Lenker’s anything, is a beautiful definition of intimacy. It’s as though the desire is not to explain yourself but simply to exist beside somebody. “Not a lot, just forever” is funny, frightening and enormously romantic—an impossible demand made to sound almost modest. Lenker has that rare gift of making devotion sound less like a declaration of love and more like a private thought uttered accidentally. And perhaps melody is what allows such apparently casual words to lodge so deeply. Strange that something sung almost under one’s breath can remain in the memory long after an ordinary conversation has disappeared.

The artist in the house says she can’t do without Dublin-born CMAT at the moment: “I wanna be a cowboy, baby” is a line from her song of the same name, maybe her most famous—a comic fantasy working as an escape hatch from the humiliations of ordinary adulthood. Even better may be her poignant

Oh, I’ve been having a horrible time
Of late, I get none of your sympathy
But all of the pain hits and the fog lifts
And then it’s too much for therapy

in Take a Sexy Picture of Me. The outrageous but increasingly plausible claim is that CMAT may be one of our greatest living lyricists. Few writers can make a line so funny, wounded and conversational that you barely notice its precision until it has already broken your heart.

The 30-year-old recently sang her Where Are Your Kids Tonight? with acerbic American John Grant, whose own declaration, “I am the greatest motherfucker that you’re ever gonna meet”, in GMF is pure grandiosity weaponised against self-loathing. It is a hilarious song until you realise just how sad it is. Or take his “Why don’t you take it out on somebody else?” in Queen of Denmark. That’s probably Grant’s speciality: psychological wreckage suddenly becoming viciously or mordantly funny.

And a refined shout-out to Patsy Cline too. Cline is slightly different: she was one of the supreme interpreters of songs rather than their writer. In Crazy, written by Willie Nelson, the central insight is almost brutally simple: knowing that love is hopeless does absolutely nothing to stop you loving someone. And her I Fall to Pieces, by Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard, understands heartbreak as a conflict between intellect and body. The mind knows the relationship is over. The rest of you simply refuses to accept it.

And rap. Rap deserves more than a footnote for its unique compression, jokes, internal rhyme, misdirection and double meanings. “I never sleep ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” fires off Nas in N.Y. State of Mind. Paranoia transformed into a proverb. Or The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Birthdays was the worst days” in Juicy: an entire childhood squeezed into a single line.

I love “I’ll probably die anonymous” by Kendrick Lamar in FEAR. Beneath extraordinary ambition lies one of the oldest human fears: disappearing without mattering. Or MF DOOM’s “Rappers screaming all in our ears like we’re deaf” in Rapp Snitch Knishes. Funny, irritated and rhythmically immaculate observational writing. Then there’s “Why did one straw break the camel’s back?” from Mos Def’s Mathematics. A familiar proverb transformed into a political question. In short: stop examining the final straw and start examining the accumulated weight.

What connects them all? Well, the greatest lyricists rarely give us tidy wisdom. They discover contradictions. Cohen discovers that brokenness can make for illumination. Dylan discovers that growing wiser can mean becoming less certain. (And richer.) Mitchell discovers that understanding love offers virtually no protection against it. Browne discovers that regret can begin while you’re still young. Kendrick Lamar discovers that understanding yourself is not the same thing as forgiving yourself. Lenker makes forever sound simultaneously tiny and terrifying. CMAT is, well, CMAT. John Grant turns self-loathing into comedy, then lets the comedy collapse back into pain. And André 3000 notices that “forever” changes meaning once you’ve lived long enough to understand what the word costs.

There is also the question of what lyrics are being asked to carry now. Songs are being written and sung out of Ukraine, Venezuela and Sudan: Antytila singing of the fortress of Bakhmut, Danny Ocean of the Venezuela that people have left behind, Wd Alzain calling for the Sudanese to become “one hand”. In Hind’s Hall, American rapper Macklemore—who recently blamed New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for getting him booted off Ed Sheeran’s tour—voices solidarity with Palestinians.

I just heard this again from Neil Young on Barstool Blues:

And I saw you in my nightmares
But I’ll see you in my dreams
And I might live a thousand years
Before I know what that means…

Four lines—twenty-seven words—about love or loss remaining emotionally vivid while refusing to become intellectually clear. Even the shift from nightmares to dreams promises a resolution it never quite grants. The feeling changes shape, but its meaning remains out of reach. A thousand years may not be long enough to understand what the heart already feels.

That gap between experiencing something deeply and understanding it is what gives so many fine lines their ache. Great lyrics seldom close the gap. They inhabit it. They give shape and rhythm to things we recognise before we can explain them, and sometimes make the mystery feel more exact than any explanation ever could.

And I probably like a fine line just as much as any ache.