What interests me most about writing pop songs is the relationship between the music and the lyrics which can be either symbiotic and complementary, or antagonistic and perverse or ironic. I mean to emphasize the distinction between a song with a perverse or ironic subject or topic, and one with a perverse or ironic relationship between the music and words. An example of the former might be “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Haaa,” by Napoleon XIV (aka Jerry Samuels), in which the narrator bemoans the loss of his sanity, which, we find out at the end of the last verse, was shattered when his dog left him. The music consists of the rhythmic chanting of the text with a growing manic lilt and heavy reverb, and a simple yet obsessively insistent percussive beat which effectively depicts the narrator’s growing mania. An example of the latter is Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy”, wherein the text describes an incorrigible youth whose exploits include rape, murder, and grave-robbery. The text is set to a bright, peppy, pop-rock tune replete with bouncy piano and sweet female backup singing. My writing tends to the perverse and ironic in both senses. My song “The Gift”, tells the story of a socially isolated character who desperately desires some connection, but is incapable of initiating contact, so he waits for something to come to him. When it does it’s not quite what he expected. “Save Yourself” starts out as a guitar-driven drinking song, but the chorus puts things in a different perspective, on of unenlightened, callous self-interest. The depiction of callous self-interest is also a theme of “Dirt”. An example of the antagonistic relationship between words and music is my song, “Psychological Warfare,” which consists of a pleasant tune with an easy jazz feel, while its subject matter is the daily, desperate battle for mental survival.