Soldier of Love, only her sixth album (and first in a decade), has the usual hallmarks – lushness and understatement, balanced by lyrics of surprising transparency, and few signs of engagement with the rest of the pop world.
It's usually a song whose chipper sound balances its lyrics: "For the tears that you boo-hoo-hoo, there can be no defense" is head-boppingly zippy.
Okereke has explained that the songs were crafted to balance dark lyrics with uplifting melodies.
Los Bunkers balanced their sometimes downhearted lyrics with tuneful new wave and Merseybeat.
The upbeat rhythm of the tune is balanced by its gloomy lyrics: "Cupid, please, have pity on me / and send me a love with no more misery".
MR: So where I'm going with this is that even though you're a "musician," it seems it's like you also appreciate the poetry of lyrics, balancing out the musical parts as if they were "speaking" like lyrics.
For him the goal has always been telling a strong, clear story, not being in vogue, and balancing music and lyrics so that orchestrations never overwhelm the story and its words.
After a peculiar, squawking debut album, Send Me a Lullaby ("Very 1981," says Forster, "which means it's probably highly in fashion now"), the Go-Betweens went on to make a string of remarkable guitar pop records throughout the 1980s, on which intelligent, literate lyrics were perfectly balanced by a gorgeous melodic sense.
Indeed, as orchestrated by the extraordinary Jonathan Tunick, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Sondheim's, the score seems forever balanced between wise-guy jauntiness and lyric gravity.
Lehman types out the lyrics in his email to "show how rhetorically balanced the first stanza is, each line divided into two clauses conjoined by 'when.'".
