For the second consecutive week I’m focusing on Ashlee Simpson. I think that, while last week I did right by her themes and obsessions, I didn’t tell the story of her craftsmanship. And it’s in the craftsmanship—which allows her to stuff in gobs and gobs of personal and social detail without coming across as stilted and literary—that she makes her themes live. But “craftsmanship” raises a question that I’ll get to later on.
(As always, the words “Ashlee” and “she” actually stand for a collective of Ashlee Simpson, John Shanks, Kara DioGuardi and in this case Shelly Peiken, who’s listed with Shanks and Simpson in the writing credits for “Love Me for Me.” I have no good idea who contributed how much of what, but I do note that when Shanks et al. are writing for or with performers other than Ashlee, including Kara herself, a lot of the lyrical complexity vanishes.)
“Love Me for Me” opens:
It’s been three days
You come around here like you know me
Your stuff at my place
Next thing you know you’ll be using my toothpaste
There, in a couple of pen strokes, she’s not only created a situation but also given us her incipient attitude toward it: a guy—almost literally—moving in on her and the everyday social detail to signify the moving-in: “using my toothpaste.” “You come around here like you know me”; that is, you don’t know her yet, and now she’s going to teach you a few things. And “toothpaste” tells us we’re close to or in a sexual affair. We can understand all this even if we haven’t heard her sing it: a voice of mock outrage, “It’s been” [pause] “three days,” these body shots going bam-bam [pause] bam-bam; “you come around here like you know me,” a flurry of quick jabs. So words are being whipped out at us, not in some big weighty attempt to “watch the songwriter set the scene,” but just to take us into the situation and move us onward, dancing into the rest of the song, no big deal. Except I’ll make a big deal of it because if I could write openings this well—whether of news stories, songs, poems, plays, novels—I’d be chasing Pulitzers and editors would be pestering me nonstop with offers of work. I simply don’t see how those lines could be better. And what they set up is raucous comedy on subjects that Ashlee is deeply serious about (when watching her reality show I decided that Ashlee’s core false beliefs—as the cognitive psychotherapists would say—are that no guy is going to accept her for who she is in her entirety and that no record company is going to let her sing her song), whether a guy can just waltz in and take her love for granted, win her and just as easily discard her. Or whether she’s even going to have room to breathe.
My online pal Erika Villani says, “This is a song about herself and her guy, and the conflict between wanting him closer and wanting her space, from beginning to end.” But most songs with those issues would have lyrical platitudes that go, “Am I to be embraced and just thrown away?” or “When you’re near I feel so real/But when you stay I lose myself,” but this one instead just jams you into its story, gives you the exuberantly funny lines I quoted in last week’s column: “Shut up/Come back/No, I didn’t really mean to say that/I’m mixed up/So what/Yeah you want me so you’re messed up, too.” And then ends triumphantly with, “And when you’re crawling over broken glass to get to me/That’s when I’ll let you stay.”
One other example. “Better Off” begins:
The sky is falling
And it’s early in the morning
But it’s okay somehow
I spilled my coffee
It went all over your clothes
I gotta wear mine now
And I’m always, always, always late
And my hair’s a mess even when it’s straight.
Don’t know if saying “the sky is falling” right off works as a metaphor for rain, though it foretells potential disaster, and by the end of the song it makes its point (even if the sky actually were falling, everything would be okay). But once again, Ashlee easily sets the scene, gets the action going with a small screw-up (spilling the coffee) that could be the last straw, but instead the spilling coffee takes us to a tangible fact that reveals the state of a love affair—this time a casual intermingling of clothes—and this happy fact means that her bad days are as good as her good ones, and this messy, distractible girl has found love.
Ashlee is putting a density of emotional and social detail into verse in a way that doesn’t feel dense or lose the song’s flavor as a song. I don’t know who else quite does this. Not that there aren’t a lot of good songwriters—especially in country music—who go for social and emotional exposition, and pile on the details. But country plays the details as social markers—waitresses, diners, pickup trucks, old Chevys, bus schedules, time clocks—whereas Ashlee’s have the feel of improvised life.
But now here’s my question. What difference does it make? Why does it matter that these song openings are well-written, that they casually pack in a lot of personal detail, that they tell a story well? There are plenty of good songs that don’t. Yes, it’s nice that Ashlee Simpson’s song lyrics give us toothpaste and coffee stains, so when you listen you feel the presence of human beings in those words. But so what?
Of course, I can answer back: “Why even bother to stay alive if you don’t care about such things! I mean, this is like asking why flower gardens should be pretty and why food should taste good, why pictures should be drawn well and why dance beats should be danceable.” But that’s just me affirming that it does matter—to me—without giving any explanation as to why. And anyway, food tastes good so that we’ll eat it, beats are danceable so that we can strut our stuff in our mating dances ... okay, that’s a bit simplistic; there’s a whole bunch of other sociocultural stuff involved in food and dance, just as there is with flower gardens (see, e.g., the economic history of the Netherlands).
But often in music—for instance, when I was 17 and listening to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde obsessively—I was getting new information, social stances that I hadn’t run across previously and other stances that I was arriving at for myself and hearing echoed back at me, an echo I needed. Or, an example similar to Ashlee, when I was 12 and discovering the early Beatles albums from the previous year or two, I was fixing my sights on the Lennon love songs, which were pain songs, lines like “If they’d seen you talkin’ that way, they’d laugh in my face” and “She’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool/When you say she’s looking good she acts as if it’s understood she’s cool.”
I wasn’t dating anyone yet, but I was walking every morning into a junior-high-school battlefield of ridicule, so “cool,” “feel a fool” and “laugh in my face” had immediate meaning. An interesting question would be why I’d want to hear of such ridicule in a song, given that I was hating the equivalent experiences in my life.
A quick answer would be that hearing them in a song confirmed that they were real (rhyme and rhythm give a presence to whatever they accompany), while conversely their presence in my life made the song feel real, too. Those are hardly adequate explanations—“confirmed” is an awfully wanky word—but then, what I wrote above about food and flowers wasn’t adequate, either.
Now, to bring it back to Ashlee, the storms of her late adolescence are engrossing to me, but they’re hardly new information; nor are toothpaste and coffee stains, which, though they help her storms feel real, are not hot-button items for me in the way that ridicule and feeling a fool once were. Yet Ashlee’s songs make me feel the mundane mattering of toothpaste and spilled coffee, put them into circumstances of wit and beauty. And my caring about them isn’t different in kind from my caring about food and flowers and about Dylan’s brooding and Lennon’s love wounds.
I haven’t really answered my question, have I?
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