Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…“Buckets of rain / Buckets of tears / Got all them buckets coming out of my ears.” I have been reading recently in the work of Stephen Sondheim and learning from Sondheim how to think about lyrics and poetry, and I’m not at the end of that period of study. I’ve felt for a long time that we made a mistake when we decided — and we decided this a hundred years ago or so — that poems were things we read on a page by ourselves silently, rather than poems were things we read around a fire to each other or recited after school in a pageant or sang with music and jesters. “Walking Down the Street” from my friend Robert Pinsky will point out that for most of the history of poetry, there was music and jesters, too, so that poetic language should be part of the pageantry of a rock concert makes perfect sense to me. “Visions of Johanna” would be my Dylan nomination, by the way. Sondheim, I think, reached a peak for integrating lyrics and rhythm in a way no earlier American popular composer had done. He thinks about it so hard. It sounds like you’ve studied it more than I have, and you’re ahead of me there.…

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