Reprinted from the liner notes to the song-poem compilation CD, I’m Just The Other Woman (Carnage Press).

I hereby state my case, of which I am certain: “song-poem” music is one of the richest motherlodes of pure unfiltered glorious wrongness to be found in any field of human endeavor. I believe in that statement so firmly that I am willing to die for it.

By now most of you are familiar with what this “song-poem” thing is all about. For the benefit of those who are not, I will briefly explain (the rest of you can just skip ahead):

Unwitting “dupes” are solicited, via tiny ads in pulp magazines, to have a poem they’ve written set to music. Almost everybody in the world has written at least one poem in their life — check your own kitchen junk drawer, there’s probably one or two sitting at the bottom of it right now. So there’s clearly a vast market of unpublished poets out there. The advertisers imply there’s a realistic chance that your poem, which they will turn into a song (hence the phrase “song-poem”), might actually make it up the pop charts, and you can then settle into a life of ease and plenty. Remember, these song-poets are the same people who habitually play the lottery (in fact, there’s a number of song-poems about playing the lottery), so getting rich quick is definitely in their life’s plan.

But, needless to say, this song-poem thing is nothing more than a shuck. Although he will turn your poem into music just like he said he would, the advertiser knows full well that to try to actually market the song is a complete waste of time. All they’ll do — in fact, all they ever promised to do, and if you had read the contract carefully you’d know that — is to take your words, set them to music, and press up a few copies of the finished song. That’s it. The awful truth is that your song — your baby which you’ve loved and nurtured and which is a part of you — is ground through a musical production mill so quickly and with such detachment that the workers might as well be screwing caps onto tubes of toothpaste. “Music by the pound,” they used to call it, or, more rancorously, “song sharking.” In exchange for this modest service, you’ve paid in the neighborhood of $100 bucks — sometimes less, sometimes a lot more.

The curious part of this transaction is that, in spite of the prostituted origins of the song-poem recording, a surprising lot of them are quite listenable. Many, in fact, are stupendous! At its best, there is something lousy with possibilities in the anonymous collaboration between an untrained Jane or Joe Lunchpail who writes the words, and the Makers of Smooth Music — generally quite talented professionals, but forced to work under austere conditions — who are hired to get those song-poems to resemble something like music. It’s an unnatural admixture, and a recipe for either disaster or majesty, or both at the same time. The selections on this album represent some of the grandest examples of the song-poem form.