It can be hard enough sometimes to find the right words to express yourself in your primary language – and it takes even more energy and courage to try doing it in a language you may have learned alongside, or much later in life than, acquiring your first. Harder still if you’re doing it in a form which might call upon you to make use of complicated metrical or rhythmical qualities of language, such as poetry — or songwriting.
Two of the greatest exemplars of this skill are Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA. Many of their songs contain brilliant, inspired rhyme pairings which feel like the product of outside ears listening attentively to the potential of how aspects of a less familiar language sound, as well as what they mean.
Take this cracking verse from “Lay All Your Love On Me”:
“I’ve had a few little love affairs
They didn’t last very long and they’ve been pretty scarce
I used to think that was sensible
It makes the truth even more incomprehensible”
That coupling of sensible and incomprehensible is just sublime – the gulf between the two states of feeling, the switch from past certainty to present confusion, all in the space of two lines, is magnificent. Ending the verse on a six-syllable word that picks up the three-syllable ending of the previous line feels like genius to me.
Cynics have tried to attribute ABBA’s lyrical skills to the influence of Sir Tim Rice, who collaborated with Björn and and Benny on musicals such as Chess – but they were clearly capable of doing perfectly well for themselves long before this collaboration even came about.
When they were working on musicals together, Björn would often write dummy lyrics to emphasise the beats he had written before handing the pieces over for Rice to write the actual lyrics. Rice said that these dummy lyrics were often “embarrassingly good” and so he would leave them in and simply write around them.
I had my own, far less successful, moment of inspired linguistic pairing back in 2000 when I was on my university placement year in eastern France. Over a dinner of raclette in the kitchen of a colleague’s parents, we got to talking about faux amis, words in another language which fool us into believing they mean the same as similar words in our own language. (Location, for example, means “rental” in French, whereas in English, it’s used to denote a place. The verb demander in French means “to ask”, quite far removed from the English usage of “demand.”)
This led to me causing everyone at the table to have a good laugh about my confusion of two French words which differ by just one letter but whose meaning is poles apart — Autriche, meaning Austria, and autruche, meaning ostrich…