Sharp rambling about abstract lyrics writing

... there is this album called ‘The Art of Navigating by the Stars’, from ‘Sieges Even’, a German prog metal band.

I love it for what it makes me feel but I used to hate it for not been able to understand what they meant with their lyrics. They seemed to be nothing but random words.

That sucks because it brings to surface an old frustration with poetry. More exactly the hard times I had -and still have- trying to figure out what a certain analogy mean. Sometimes I felt tempted to believe they were just one of those traps when regular people want to sound sophisticated but end up just saying vague unusual words under the assumption that listeners will buy it without daring to dissect the phrases. Believe me when I say that poetry is especially annoying to deal with when you are an engineer willing to get into it and that would turn into a major catastrophe to realize that something supposed to be good poetry is nothing but a trap.

Only recently I found out something that sounded absurd at first glance just to reveal itself as genius a few seconds later into my train of thoughts: The fact that some musicians will write lyrics without something specific in mind. Yeah, they will listen to the melodies and write whatever come to their minds. This counterintuitive strategy allow music artists to create unique pieces of art. It is as if throwing accurate words or short phrases is a much more effective way to match the natural sensations attached to their meanings to the feelings brought by melody. Just like resonance amplifies oscillations when a given source and a given structure match their frequencies, sensations are enhanced when emotions sparked by the meanings in words match what melody insinuates.

That would be impossible (by ‘impossible’ I mean ‘very hard’) to articulate such effect under the tyranny of rhymes or, in worse cases, under the rules of a consistent meaningful monolog.

This is crazy, a little obvious too, but someone in position to judge me has to consider the child-like capabilities of engineer's brains to resolve art-related puzzles.

By the way, these German guys nailed it when they created The Art of Navigating by the Stars. The whole album is an abstract mess. A masterpiece of abstract lyrics writing, in my opinion.

That’s why, sometimes, I wish I was an artist. You know, people from tech fields have no idea feelings like catharsis exist and they have even less idea that such feelings are restricted to artists. As an engineer I am able to change people’s life in not more than homeopathic ways. People can’t even realize my work, whereas artists have the power to inebriate an entire crowd.

And this makes me feel jealous.

The -Premature- End

ps.: I just hope I didn’t get it wrong or this post would become a tragic anti-compliment to Sieges Even guys.