The Garden EP & Rise Options

[tarduk]

I didnt like so much. It's not different from Alive. What do you think?

[sellingthdrama]

I am not sure he ever had a broad range of creativity - at least not after Throwing Copper. If you go back and read the lyrics to the entire Live catalog, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Ed always had limited abilities after he got Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper out of his system.

In fact, maybe it is being too generous to give him Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper. The ideas on Mental Jewelry were not his own - they belonged to Krishnamurti. Ed read a bunch of his books and tried to regurgitate the exact same concepts in lyrics on that album. I could have easily done that too. Throwing Copper is a little different and has a more socially subversive message, but it is not necessarily the most brilliant set of lyrics in the world. "The Weavers live up the street from me. The crack heads live down the street from me." "Come on baby leave some change behind. She was a bitch, but I don't care.... wore a funky barret in her hair." I mean seriously... what is that really?!?! How would "Everybody's here, puke stinks like beer" be received if it wasn't encapsulated in a decent song?

And it is clearly the music that saves some of that marginal stuff from suffering under its own mediocrity. And who can we credit for that? What happened to the msuic when CCP no longer had a hand in it? We got songs like: " In the country the farms and the orchards swell, with oranges and peaches, a little bit of truth as well" without the protection of any good music to help it out.

And now look at Ed. Left to his own devices, he writes redundant songs that all sound alike about Jesus and water and his urgent conversion message to non-believers. Meanwhile, CCP are writing diverse and interesting rock songs, as they always have, and now Kevin Martin and Chris Shinn are providing the vocals and the creative collaboration.

Was Ed always overrated in our mind? Helped out by the inflated opinion he received due to CCP's stellar contribution?

Maybe Ed was never all that we thought he was. I am not saying that is necessarily true. It is a reasonable thesis, though.

Wow, good points. I never thought of it like that... I'm serious, you have me re-thinking my evaluation of Ed on this one. I've always just assumed he provided his fair share or more of the Live power, but I'm re-considering that.

Though you did point out some examples of bad lyrics, especially that "puke stinks like beer" one - I never liked that. But you have to give him credit for AOY, I Alone, and some of the other hits from TC. I'm assuming here he wrote those, correct me if I'm wrong. And I have no idea what a lot of those lyrics mean, but they work really well. In fact, I've always assumed his lyrics were over my head - perhaps they're just bad.

But like you pointed out, how much of bad lyrics was covered by good music? I had just never broken it down like that and you provided good examples. Very interesting.

This post has been edited by sellingthdrama: Nov 7 2012, 2:04 pm