These are a Few of my Favourite Lyrics

2024 has been a thin year for this blog. Here is an entirely subjective, highly arbitrary, somewhat dubious list of ten of my favourite lyrics.

First, a little about the methodology. I’ve focused on theatrical or theatre-adjacent songs. I’ve tried to avoid anything screamingly obvious. I generally have a preference for colloquial language over anything poetic (more on this later). And I’ve tried to select examples that, for me, highlight different ingredients that go into a kickass lyric.

There are glaring omissions. I’ve culled songwriting titans for many reasons – because they’re too well-known, or because their work is so flawless and natural that it ceases to be recognisably theirs, or because I just wanted to highlight someone else. There’s a skew towards the contemporary. Also, no personal connections. I have friends and mentors who’ve written lyrics I find miraculous, but I’ve left them off the list – except in one case.

(1) The Character Establishment Lyric — from “It All Comes Back” (Fun Home)

Where better place to start than with an opening number?

I saw Fun Home at the Young Vic in 2018. The run was entirely sold-out, but I phoned the box office and by chance they had a last-minute return: back of the balcony, partial vision, £15. Quite literally the best £15 I’ve ever spent.

It’s an utterly remarkable musical. Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori weave together dialogue and song snippets to devastating effect. Musical motifs are integrated into the script; reality melds with fantasy. In an age of “by the playbook” musicals, Fun Home radiates originality, almost as if it came from a parallel universe whose theatrical conventions had evolved differently. (Instead of an “I Want” song, we get a “He Wants” song; instead of a single actor playing multiple parts, we get three playing the same character, albeit at different ages.)

At the beginning of the musical, middle-aged cartoonist Alison Bechdel is trying to piece together her memoir. She recalls a moment from her childhood when her father, Bruce, took her through a box of “junk” that he’d picked up from a neighbour’s barn. We witness the memory unfold onstage. The contents of the box seem worthless, until Bruce comes across a treasure and sings to her:

Linen.
This is linen.
Gorgeous Irish linen.
See how I can tell?
Right here, this floating thread, you see —
That’s what makes it damask.

I’m no great expert on linen. I have a very hazy idea of what a floating thread is, an even hazier one about damask, and no clue as to how the two relate. Even after reading the lines, I’m not much the wiser. But I do suddenly know a lot more about Bruce Bechdel:

• He knows a ton about fabric – its quality, its provenance etc. He speaks with the vocabulary of a specialist.

• Not only does he know about it, he cares about it (“gorgeous”). He recognises and values class.

• He also cares about educating his young daughter. Rather than pushing her away, he invites her to share in his haul, his delight, his expertise. He wants to instil his values in her. (He seems to like her, at least in moments like these.)

• (Inference) He’s not rich. Rather than buying high-end linen at market price, he combs refuse from his neighbour’s barns for hidden gems.

• (Inference) He’s not like the other dads. He recognises qualities that elude others. His personality may even be borderline obsessive.

All this from so little. Lisa Kron brilliantly demonstrates that it often doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t understand exactly what a character is talking about. The important thing is that the character understands. And then we can better understand them.

(2)  The Funny Lyric – from “A Little Upset” (Cry-Baby)

Musicals should be funny! Not just witty or cute or clever; the audience should repeatedly laugh out loud, en masse. (I’d contend that every single first-rate musical achieves this.)

So how to select just one lyric? Throw a dart at the score of shows like Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, Legally Blonde, The Music Man etc., and you’ll land on a great joke. Let me offer up an example from a criminally underrated show, Cry-Baby.

Ruder, funnier and darker than its cousin Hairspray, Cry-Baby is a smorgasbord of fantastic lyrics. (The first line, embodying the peppy, preppy sensibilities of 1950s Baltimore: “It’s a beautiful day for an anti-polio picnic!”)

At this point in the show, hero Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker has been wrongfully imprisoned and is beginning a dance-number-turned-escape. The tone is menacing. Backed up by his gang, he sings to the prison guards:

You say I’ll get out early if I show you some repentance
But I ain’t never been too good at finishing a… (he trails off, distracted)

Jokes die on the operating table, but notice how much is going on here: a fab (implied) rhyme, an ingenious pun, and an unexpected gag to top it off. They say humour requires a dose of surprise — and this line has three.

(3)  The Virtuosic Lyric – from “Right Hand Man” (Hamilton)

Say what you like about Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man can spin a zingy lyric.

I wanted to go for something a bit less well-known than Hamilton. There are, of course, amazing lines in In the Heights (I’ve always loved “Let me get an amaretto sour for this ghetto flower”) and Bring It On (“What, are you all scared? Y’all think cheerin’ is feminine? / Then I’m a feminist swimmin’ in women, gentlemen”). And 21 Chump Street is an underappreciated gem.

But take this, from “Right Hand Man”:

Now I’m the model of a modern major general,
The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all
Lining up to put me upon a pedestal […]

It’s hardly an insight to point out that Lin is consciously building upon – and improving – a rhyme of Gilbert & Sullivan. (The original: “I am the very model of a modern major general. / I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral.”)

Notice how much he achieves – not just theatrically but meta-theatrically – in this one line. He acknowledges a (white, European, semi-operatic) ancestor of contemporary musical theatre. It’s an ancestor that valorises perfect rhyme but, in this case, doesn’t quite achieve it. Lin corrects the rhyme by substituting in the right vowel: “mineral” becomes “men are all”. And suddenly the rhyme is mosaic (i.e. spread across multiple words), underlining its newfound ingenuity. 

And consider the rhythm. The first line, as in The Pirates of Penzance, is square; it’s patter. The second – Lin’s addition – is syncopated, throwing the emphasis on unexpected beats; it’s rap. Together, they form a microcosm of an art form evolving.

Lin isn’t just nodding to the repertory. He’s announcing that he can go toe-to-toe with the masters and beat them at their own game – while signalling that it’s a game he intends to change.

He does a similar thing at the beginning of In The Heights. The show opens with a son clave – a rhythm played on a pair of claves that’s the essence of Afro-Cuban music and associated with Latin music in general. 

Bernstein and Sondheim’s “America” from West Side Story begins the same way. That song is the result of two white New Yorkers (to be clear, geniuses) writing Puerto Rican-inspired music, to be sung by Puerto Rican characters, offering a Puerto Rican perspective on mainland America – although, as Sondheim confessed, they had never met a Puerto Rican. (Also a song in which the character sings, inaccurately: “Puerto Rico / You ugly island, / Island of tropic diseases”.)

Suffice it to say, I suspect the beginning of In The Heights is more than just a homage; it’s a reclamation. That’s not to imply any hostility; Lin famously had a loving relationship with Sondheim, characterised by warmth and mutual respect. At the same time, he has often talked about how the only parts available to him, as a young Puerto Rican actor, were the gangsters of West Side Story – and how he consequently felt the need to write himself and his compatriots onstage.

(4)  The Subtextual Lyric – from “Unexpected Complications” (album Ahead of My Heart by Steven Lutvak)

 Steve Lutvak was a dear friend and mentor to me. I’ll never forget the day he sat at the piano and played this song in class. We knew him as the soigné composer-lyricist of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder – a pastiche-stuffed, hilarious, campy musical that won the Tony in 2014. (He and I had bonded over British vs. American rhymes.) But this was our first time hearing his true voice.

The first chorus runs:

And you say that I’m an unexpected complication,
And you smile when you say it, and I say, “So are you for me.”
Is anybody simple? Well, no-one at this table.
But here you are,
And here am I,
Nothing more to say except “We’ll see”.

A cardinal rule of writing a theatrical love song is that it can’t contain the words “I love you”. Instead, a character has to find a way of expressing that feeling in their own way. (Hence Henry Higgins’s “I’ve grown accustomed to her face”, in which we see a crotchety old man attempting, and failing, to resist inner growth.)

Steve’s solution is terrific. The setting is a second date. The singer and the man he’s interested in are at a restaurant, and it’s going well. Neither of them is new to the game, and yet they’re surprised and thrilled at how much they like each other. But it’s early days, and they know the ropes, and they obviously can’t say “I love you”. So instead they say “You’re an unexpected complication”.

I love the indirectness of the line – the tentativeness, the vulnerability, the gradual emergence of dormant emotions. We learned afterwards that the song is based on a true story. Art imitating life.

(5)  The Economical Lyric – from “Being Alive” (Company)

Yes, it’s screamingly obvious. What am I meant to do? Leave Sondheim off the list?

Of course, the real difficulty lies in picking a single Sondheim song. How do you choose between “Finishing the Hat”, “Children Will Listen”, “Sunday”, “Losing My Mind”, “Not a Day Goes By”, and two dozen more of the subtlest and most profound songs ever written?

Here’s the final section of “Being Alive”:

Somebody crowd me with love.
Somebody force me to care.
Somebody make me come through.
I'll always be there,
As frightened as you,

To help us survive
Being alive
Being alive
Being alive.

“Help us survive / Being alive” – it’s as good as a lyric gets. The cynicism, the prayer, the longing for love, the recognition that marriage is not a panacea – all in eight syllables. Not just the craft but the ambivalent emotions behind it are typically Sondheim.

 The great man annotates this song in Finishing the Hat with the following comment:

‘Chekhov wrote, “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” Luckily I didn’t come across that quote till long after Company had been produced. Chekhov said in seven words what took George and me two years and two and a half hours to say less profoundly.’

The Chekhov line is fab. But Sondheim compresses both cynicism and desperate hope into five words. And he makes it rhyme.

(6)  The Pastiche Lyric – from “’Allo, Bonjour Monsieur” (album Charm Offensive by Fascinating Aida)

Fascinating Aida are a British national treasure. For decades now, they’ve lit up the cabaret circuit with their filthy and fabulous songs (more than one of which has gone viral).

I grew up listening to these kinds of witty, stand-alone songs (Flanders & Swann, Tom Lehrer etc.) and I take inspiration from them in my own writing. One song from Come Dine With Me was a minor homage to a Fascinating Aida song titled “’Allo, Bonjour Monsieur”.

“’Allo, Bonjour Monsieur” is a perfect example of our national sport: poking fun at the French. The singer – une femme de la nuit – riffs with the audience (“Madame! Yes, you. Red top. I told you last night: zis is my patch!”). Then she launches in earnest into her song, a paean to the virtues of safe sex.

It’s a masterclass in working an audience – a pinch of Franglais, a feast of terrific jokes, a syrup of heavy Gallic accents. There’s a lovely running pun on the word “johnny”. One thing they do especially well is to circle around the subject matter, hinting at but never quite saying the dirty word – until, like a magician’s final flourish, they shatter the taboo and declaim it triumphantly.

 The whole song is great but here’s my favourite bit:

Where is your johnny now, Johnny?
Don’t be a tease.
Don’t blame me if I don’t want
A nasty disease.

It’s a good tactic,
Just one prophylactic
In your pocket, just for luck.

So if for me you’re desirous
Remember zee virus
Before you come… unstuck.

“Unstuck” is genius.

(7)  The Lyric that Makes You Think – from “Seeing You” (Groundhog Day)

A hill I will die on is that Groundhog Day is one of the smartest, funniest, most moving musicals in the canon. Tim Minchin is at the peak of his powers, stitching together rock ’n’ roll riffs, folky small-town chorales and zesty pop numbers into a superb “theme and variations” score.

It’s also a tour de force of slant rhyme (about which I have thoughts). It’s easy to use slant rhyme the same way you might use perfect rhyme, and the effect can be underwhelming. But what songwriters like Tim Minchin and Anaïs Mitchell do so wonderfully is to teach the audience to listen in a different way.

Still, the lyric I want to highlight isn’t memorable for its rhyming but its construction. It comes from “Seeing You” (another absolute belter of a finale). 

I thought I’d seen it all,
Was sure by now I knew this place.
I swear that I knew every hair,
Each line upon your face.

I thought the only way to better days was through tomorrow.
But I know now that I know nothing.

 For my money, this is how a lyric can most effectively be “poetic” – not by using elevated language or dense imagery, but by throwing up unexpected ideas and insights that linger long in the mind.

“I thought the only way to better days was through tomorrow”: it doesn’t just beautifully distil a complex emotion we’ve all felt, it also tells us something about the singer. He’s grown; he now knows better; he’s gained some self-awareness.

Sometimes lyricists give implausibly clever or wise lyrics to characters who would never naturally say them. (Witness Sondheim on “I Feel Pretty”.) But in this case, the wisdom is the point – of the song, the character arc, the show.

(8)  The Lyric that Tells the Truth – from “Julia, Julia” (album The Bridge by Benjamin Scheuer & The Escapist Papers)

This whole song is so plain and perfect that it feels churlish to single out any one line. Listen to the whole thing.

Notice how simple it is. There’s no hook. There are no multisyllabic rhymes; in fact, not too many rhymes at all. The melody follows a similar contour again and again (until it breaks the pattern on “Follow your heart and your head”, just like the breaking of a lover’s voice and heart).

Isn’t it a miracle? It tells a story; it tells the truth. Steve Lutvak used to say that lyricists have to “mean it”. It’s the simplest thing to do, and the hardest.

(9)  The Lyric that Conceals its Message – from “I Can Do Better than That” (The Last Five Years)

The Last Five Years is a fan favourite, but I think this number goes underappreciated. For me, it’s maybe the most heart-wrenching song in the canon.

It doesn’t seem so at first. On the face of it, “I Can Do Better than That” is a bright story song in which Cathy recounts her romantic misadventures over a jaunty groove. She doesn’t regret any of these false starts; she always knew she could do better. 

Then the song shifts into the present tense and she starts singing to Jamie, the person she thinks is her soulmate. She’s cynical no longer; now she’s bouncing with excitement and infatuation and hope. And at the very end of this five-minute song, she finally lays her cards on the table:

Think about what you wanted.
Think about what could be.
Think about how I love you.
Say you'll move in with me.
Think of what's great about me and you,
Think of the bullshit we've both been through,
Think of what's past because we can do better — we can do better than that!

And suddenly we understand. The whole reason she’s singing isn’t just to regale him with stories of old flames; she’s trying to pluck up the courage to ask him to move in with her.

And the effect is heartbreaking because we know her hope is utterly misplaced. Their love is doomed. We’ve just witnessed Jamie in bed with another woman. But, in the show’s non-linear structure, Cathy is at the beginning of her story, and hasn’t yet undergone the disappointments, humiliations and heartbreak that await her.

So the song conceals its message twice over. In the first place, Cathy takes a deceptively circuitous route to saying what she wants to say. Yet, more fundamentally, the song’s subtext actively undercuts its ostensible message. The tragic truth is that Cathy won’t do better, at least not this time.

(By the way, if your left ear ever wants a 90-minute masterclass in theatrical songwriting, Jason Robert Brown talks about this line, and much more, in this video. I watch it every year or two. There’s a ton of – how to put it? – unsugarcoated wisdom there.)

(10)  The Beautiful Lyric – from “Something Right” (album The Sweet Spot)

This is probably my favourite lyric of all time. It’s witty, economical, truthful – but its real power goes beyond craft. I love it because, in so few words, it evokes such a warm and generous sense of life itself. 

I thought that I could do nothing wrong
Until I did something right.

How much is contained in those two lines? An entire arc. A young person living a big, reckless, shallow life – until, almost by accident, they stumble across something of real value. It’s the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood. Suddenly they have something to lose, something to ground them.

It’s made all the more profoundly moving when you know the story of the songwriter, Fergus O’Farrell. (I learned about this from a former professor, who also introduced me to the song.) O’Farrell was an Irish singer-songwriter who led the band Interference. His songs were the basis of the movie, and later musical, Once.

He also suffered from muscular dystrophy and died at 48. “Something Right” was one of the last songs he ever wrote. It was released after his death.

Listen to his singing voice. You can detect the effects of his illness (which was degenerative and restricted his breathing). But you can also hear the love.

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