Confessional songs: just musical selfies? They're so much more than that.
EDITOR'S PICK: In an age of artifice and dishonesty, confessional songwriting is having a moment. But what is it? And where can we find it?
Sharon Van Etten
We’re used to ‘honesty’, though- we’re living through the age of the calculated over-share -the age of Reality TV, of Twitter, of selfies- where manufactured intimacy is the norm. We know what cereal Margaret Atwood eats, titter at Quentin Tarantino’s bedroom behaviour, coo at best-buddies Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s social media antics.
But are these figures telling the truth? No, probably not. This transparency, these public ‘confessions’ are doctored: genuine experiences upgraded to something slightly better, shinier, media-friendly.
All of this leaves the ‘confessional’ songwriter –a musician whose lyrics urgently attempt to lay bare some personal truth- in a peculiar position. After all, their trade is predicated on honest communication, enabled by music.
But you only have to listen to last year’s Sun Kil Moon album Benji to know that this tradition lives on. Hearing singer Mark Kozelek revisit schoolyard fights, family bereavements, and moments of teenage inspiration, it’s hard to be cynical. We’re left in little doubt that this an album which takes the possibility of lyrical authenticity as a given, and in listening to it, it’s likely that we will too.
Kozelek’s music, like that of any confessional songwriter, requires a contract between musician and listener. In his case, it is the specificity of his lyrics that demands our trust. On the clumsily-titled ‘I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same’, his lyrics drift from one memory to the next, touching on the death of his grandmother, a reunion with an old friend, and watching a Led Zeppelin movie as a young man. But at each juncture, Kozelek allows room for detail and digression, ranging from the apparently mundane to the plainly emotional; we learn not only that he watched the titular film at “a Canton, Ohio mall,” but that when his grandmother passed “the nervous tension [he’d] been feeling for months broke, and strangely [he] laughed.” Kozelek realises that in specificity lies the possibility of intimacy.
Although an outlier, Kozelek is by no means alone in championing the confessional tradition; Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There (also 2014) is no less trusting in music’s potential for honesty and authenticity. She is more sparing with detail than Kozelek; her songs rarely give a sense of time or place, but remain distinctly personal. As she deals with troubled relationships and self-doubt, her introspection registers itself in a series of startling images. Her music is so unrelenting in its introspection and self-laceration (“break my legs so I won't walk to you, cut my tongue so I can't talk to you”), that questions of performance or dishonesty fall by the wayside.
Broadly speaking, Kozelek and Van Etten are working in a singer-songwriter tradition, but it would be a mistake to assume that the confessional mode is genre-specific. In rap music, for instance, authenticity is a value that remains of central importance. Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) would be an obvious point of reference here. A personal chronicle about growing up in Compton, the album finds Kendrick as a young man riding “four deep in a white Toyota, a quarter tank of gas, one pistol, and orange soda,” and follows him as he deals candidly with the pressures of parents, gangs, and substance abuse.
Nor are lyrics the only means through which an artist can be confessional. Take Margaret Chardiet’s industrial-noise project Pharmakon. In 2013, Chardiet underwent surgery following the collapse of an internal organ. Out of this experience emerged Bestial Burden (2014), an album which begins with a burst of coruscating noise, and the sound of rapid hyperventilation. The lyricism is sparing, but the album is undeniably confessional; Chardiet uses noise to talk about the experience of illness, to convey the fragility of the human body and the fear which that engenders.
The confessional mode exists in the shadow of scepticism, but remains alive and well. Perhaps it even grows better in the shade; the more doubt that is cast on a musician’s ability to communicate honestly, the more they protest against it, risking (and gaining) more in the name of authenticity. Ultimately, we may never be sure of an artist’s honesty; we have to take it on trust. But surely this is part of what music can do; it allows us to trust in -and relate to- what we are hearing.
But are these figures telling the truth? No, probably not. This transparency, these public ‘confessions’ are doctored: genuine experiences upgraded to something slightly better, shinier, media-friendly.
All of this leaves the ‘confessional’ songwriter –a musician whose lyrics urgently attempt to lay bare some personal truth- in a peculiar position. After all, their trade is predicated on honest communication, enabled by music.
But you only have to listen to last year’s Sun Kil Moon album Benji to know that this tradition lives on. Hearing singer Mark Kozelek revisit schoolyard fights, family bereavements, and moments of teenage inspiration, it’s hard to be cynical. We’re left in little doubt that this an album which takes the possibility of lyrical authenticity as a given, and in listening to it, it’s likely that we will too.
Kozelek’s music, like that of any confessional songwriter, requires a contract between musician and listener. In his case, it is the specificity of his lyrics that demands our trust. On the clumsily-titled ‘I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same’, his lyrics drift from one memory to the next, touching on the death of his grandmother, a reunion with an old friend, and watching a Led Zeppelin movie as a young man. But at each juncture, Kozelek allows room for detail and digression, ranging from the apparently mundane to the plainly emotional; we learn not only that he watched the titular film at “a Canton, Ohio mall,” but that when his grandmother passed “the nervous tension [he’d] been feeling for months broke, and strangely [he] laughed.” Kozelek realises that in specificity lies the possibility of intimacy.
Although an outlier, Kozelek is by no means alone in championing the confessional tradition; Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There (also 2014) is no less trusting in music’s potential for honesty and authenticity. She is more sparing with detail than Kozelek; her songs rarely give a sense of time or place, but remain distinctly personal. As she deals with troubled relationships and self-doubt, her introspection registers itself in a series of startling images. Her music is so unrelenting in its introspection and self-laceration (“break my legs so I won't walk to you, cut my tongue so I can't talk to you”), that questions of performance or dishonesty fall by the wayside.
Broadly speaking, Kozelek and Van Etten are working in a singer-songwriter tradition, but it would be a mistake to assume that the confessional mode is genre-specific. In rap music, for instance, authenticity is a value that remains of central importance. Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) would be an obvious point of reference here. A personal chronicle about growing up in Compton, the album finds Kendrick as a young man riding “four deep in a white Toyota, a quarter tank of gas, one pistol, and orange soda,” and follows him as he deals candidly with the pressures of parents, gangs, and substance abuse.
Nor are lyrics the only means through which an artist can be confessional. Take Margaret Chardiet’s industrial-noise project Pharmakon. In 2013, Chardiet underwent surgery following the collapse of an internal organ. Out of this experience emerged Bestial Burden (2014), an album which begins with a burst of coruscating noise, and the sound of rapid hyperventilation. The lyricism is sparing, but the album is undeniably confessional; Chardiet uses noise to talk about the experience of illness, to convey the fragility of the human body and the fear which that engenders.
The confessional mode exists in the shadow of scepticism, but remains alive and well. Perhaps it even grows better in the shade; the more doubt that is cast on a musician’s ability to communicate honestly, the more they protest against it, risking (and gaining) more in the name of authenticity. Ultimately, we may never be sure of an artist’s honesty; we have to take it on trust. But surely this is part of what music can do; it allows us to trust in -and relate to- what we are hearing.
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