lyrics

Before I first ask my good woman for ‘a date’ I don’t really know her. I see her pass my window at work. I ask a work colleague from her team what she’s like. She’s all class, he says. I thank him for confirming what I think I see in her from a distance.

Later, when my good woman and I have established a relationship, he asks if song lyrics have assumed deep significance for me. It’s his test of how smitten a man might be. He decrees me far gone. Not so long ago I send him an SMS, tell him song lyrics still get me.

Music’s not my thing. I’m listening and singing along now as I type these words, but music isn’t front and central to my existence; it’s background. At a gig in Adelaide recently I grizzle like an old man that I can’t hear the lyrics for the music. I care about the stories.

Paul Kelly, master wordsmith, tells eloquent stories with the fewest words. Musician to some, he’s a poet and storyteller to me. Kelly himself knows better: the words and music are inseparable, he says. The music is kinder to some lines than is the page alone, obscuring the weak ones and charging the good ones. Oh so many good ones.

No song touches my soul like Deeper water; it stands the hairs up on my neck, tears my eyes, every time. I have no spouse who died, but the image of a man gently carrying a child over the breakers to where the water is calm is of me bringing up my kids. I want them one day to listen to that song and know what it means to me. 

A difficult woman, Kelly sings, needs a special kind of man. Is my good woman a difficult woman, who doesn’t know how to trust herself so it’s hard for her to trust at all?

Yes, she is. Am I special enough to deal with her? 

Not right now.