What’s Your Song Perspective?

One of my former colleagues, who had been a pop/rock music critic at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., shared this meme that’s going around on social media:

Reading it blew my mind. I’ll hear “Piano Man” differently from now on.

It also reminded me of the reality:

How we hear songs depends just as much on the person listening as it does on the performer and writer who created them.

For example, when it comes to Piano Man, I’d never thought of the brilliant concept of Billy being a clueless, heterosexual piano player at a gay piano bar.

I will say I considered quite a while ago about Paul the real estate novelist and Davey the sailor both being gay. Whether Joel as the songwriter intended that is almost irrelevant.

The reality is that I, as a listener, brought that life experience and awareness of the closet and coded language for gay men to the stories of Paul and Davey, and that’s what they became for me.

I’ve had that experience with other songs, too.

I think I shared over at Stereogum how I heard the 1984 hit What About Me by Kenny Rogers, Kim Carnes, and James Ingram.

My take was not at all what I assume was the intent of the writers or performers.

I think it had something to do with the song ending on Carnes’ singing, “What about me?”

I’m guessing in the original storyline: she is the woman asserting her right to her own destiny and romantic journey rather than being the object of a tug-of-war between two male suitors.

In the story I’m hearing: she is the woman wondering where to go, after the two men with whom she’s been involved realize they have more in common with each other than with her.

Similarly, decades before Barry Manilow came out, his performances on Even Now and This One’s for You struck me as odes to a male lover.

This One’s for You has no reference to the object of the performance being a woman, something I realized as a listener in the late ‘70s years before I knew I was gay.

Even Now resonates with me as the story of a bisexual man who committed to a female partner but knew there was something of his ex that still spoke to him.

I realize it’s equally (or even more) likely that the protagonist could be thinking of a female ex. It’s just not how I hear it.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to orientation.

In 1985, when Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days was a Top 10 hit, one of my colleagues on the student newspaper told me it cracked her up. Her last name was “Hayes,” and her sister’s name was “Laurie.” So she would tease her sister by singing along, “Laurie Hayes …”

To this day, it’s impossible for me to hear that song without thinking of a woman I’ve never met.

I have a similar issue, although I find it an irritant, with Rickie Lee Jones’ sole Top 10 hit.

Has this happened to you?

Has something in your life experience (even a silly anecdote) informed the way you heard a song, making it completely different from how others hear it?

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