glyph theory

An emotional core?

JF: No. I want to be quite specific. I don’t think it’s a matter of having heart. If you talk to people who work on Broadway in musical comedy, they’re always saying, “The songs are really funny, but they’re good because they have heart. “ And I actually think that heart is completely overrated. I think Bertolt Brecht is a lot more interesting than a lot of musical comedies. I think he’s also more funny than a lot of things in musical comedies. I mean, Shakespeare’s funny. A lot of things are funny.

JC: You think Shakespeare doesn’t have heart?!

JF: I think anything that’s sharply written can have that kind of edge and still give up more stuff. And maybe it’s not about heart, but it’s about ideas, or making you hear something in a different way. There’s this idea in Bertolt Brecht called “V Effect.” Have you ever heard about this?

JC: No, I have no idea what that is.

JF: It’s an alienation effect. Like, in the middle of the performance, they’ll put something in to remind you that you’re just watching a show. And I think that idea echoes through a lot of contemporary songwriting. In our sensibility, where we will suddenly pull out the fourth wall and be like, “We’re right here.” I think a lot of the performance aspect of what we do is about that sharp shock of just finding out that there are different levels of what’s going on. There’s a communal level, a literary level, a personal level. I feel like this kind of writing and performing at its best gets at something that’s normally found more in prose. Nobody reads a novel, and thinks, “The guy who wrote this must be a serial killer,” although maybe David Mamet has screwed that up. They know that the author is working to push ideas to extremes. We talk a lot about unreliable narrators and trying to push the point of view beyond just first person singular singer-songwriter stuff. It can be done. The popular song is not over. It’s not like all the good songs have been written and we’re just going to write some more because we like songs. There’s a future there. And if you really think about it, you can do some good stuff.

JC: It’s hard, though. You have to work hard at it.

JF: It’s really hard.

JC: You have a very powerful bullshit detector as far as lyrics go. Part of the process I loved was that I’d send you a song, and you’d say, “This is good, but this line feels sort of phoned in” or “This line feels sort of outside of what’s going on,” and you were always right. You were always right. And I wouldn’t see it until you said it.

JF: I hope there are some superstar acts reading this, because I need to get some more work.

JC: All that stuff you just said about Brecht, I mean, I went to Yale and I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve obviously thought a lot about it, and it was great to be able to tap into that thing that you have.

JF: Well, that’s the function of a producer: to be your first audience. To be the guy who says, “You might not really understand how this is going to land, but just tweak this a little bit.” You can make it seem like it’s a really big thing, but it’s a lot more like being a tailor. I mean, I didn’t write those songs.

JC: You would say, “Take this word in this verse, and switch it with every occurrence of that word in that other verse.” And literally you suggested I do that in one song, and it was a brilliant piece of poetic mumbo-jumbo.

JF: It was a good day at the office.