I recently sounded out a wise man of letters (and my friend) Jake Burnett about poetry as musical lyric, preoccupied as I have been in forecasting the headaches my poems would occasion a composer.
Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of his 2002 album. I figured that before analyzing the prosody I’d better listen to recordings, my favorite of which is Bruce Springteen‘s. He uses accordion and fiddle in an acoustic-ish version that gestures toward country more than Zevon’s own synthesizer-and-electric guitar orchestration does. Zevon’s rendering felt oddly like the sort of hymn you might hear in a megachurch (Zevon would hate that), what with the fourteeners he favors (pace Emily Dickinson). Given his references to the American west, where the poem is set, Springsteen’s choice makes good sense to me.
Not that it’s a my-wife-left-me-with-six children-and-my-truck-won’t-start whinge. Think mythic mashup with a half-dozen Biblical references (e.g., Jacob and the angel), a half-dozen popular culture references (e.g., John Wayne), and a half-dozen literary references (mostly name-dropping, though Shakespeare appears only in a silent nod. ‘Tis better so.). Zevon manages to turn this olla podrida into a meditation on death. We come to realize that the refrain—”My ride’s here”—refers to the speaker’s death and possible apotheosis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s waiting for a chariot, after all.
So as you see I started trying to break down Zevon’s lyrics into their constituent parts. I’m not there yet, but it’s an interesting and I hope fruitful exercise for someone aspiring to write lyrics for an art-song.