“There’s not an awful lot of happy songs”: the artist David Gilmour called the only happy songwriter
Some of the best songwriters of all time refuse to get pigeonholed in one style for too long. No one wanted The Beatles to write the same love songs every time they played, and no matter how much people loved the idea of Jimmy Page writing classic blues riffs with Led Zeppelin, it’s understandable why Robert Plant wanted to move as far away from his old band as he could once John Bonham passed away. While David Gilmour had a more distinctive sound when working with Pink Floyd, he knew that certain pieces were a part of every songwriter’s arsenal, whether they knew it or not.
Before telling a story in their song, though, any audience member will want to hear what their favourite bands have to offer as a character. You have to fall in love with the person singing the song long before you can understand their pain, and that’s what makes some of the greatest breakup songs work, whether it’s Robert Smith losing his other half in ‘Just Like Heaven’ or Eric Clapton knowing that he doesn’t belong in paradise on ‘Tears in Heaven’.
But there’s another common thread about both topics previously mentioned. There are a lot of times when people like to talk about traditional love songs, but the greatest songs in rock history usually come from a place of pain. Whether it’s talking about someone being angry with people putting them down or losing the love of their life, all good music is based on overcoming that kind of misery.
For instance, it’s easy for people to bypass something like ‘Walking on Sunshine’ on principle if they’re in a bad mood. That doesn’t mean that KC and the Sunshine Band made a bad song, but it does hit differently when it sounds like a tune is being sung by someone who has never experienced any kind of pain in their life. But in the age of the singer-songwriter, there was a lot more than abject pain behind the scenes.
“People who sing about bleak moments can strike a sympathetic chord with people who are going through those things and hopefully make them feel a bit better.”
David Gilmour
Carole King was known for some of the greatest tunes of her generation, and James Taylor took on the kind of serious topics that most people would have been too afraid to put in a pop song, but John Denver was one of the few who seemed genuinely sincere every time he sang. Anyone could tell the shape of someone’s heart in song, but you can practically hear Denver smiling through everything he sang, whether that’s pure romance on ‘Annie’s Song’ or ‘Take Me Home Country Road’.
And for Gilmour, Denver was the only person that seemed to feasibly put happiness into his songs and make it work, saying, “The sadder emotions tend to be the more powerful ones, and people who sing about bleak moments can strike a sympathetic chord with people who are going through those things and hopefully make them feel a bit better. It’s general throughout rock music, isn’t it? Most people who are writing about relationships are writing about broken ones. If you look at the work of most reasonably good lyric writers, there’s not an awful lot of happy songs, although John Denver tried his best.”
But going through a lot of Gilmour’s contributions to Floyd, there are more than a few nods to Denver’s style of songwriting in the way he plays. It’s hard to find that kind of happiness in Roger Waters’s cynical approach to lyrics, but a tune like ‘Fat Old Sun’ remains one of the sunniest tracks that the band ever made, complete with Gilmour rocking the acoustic guitar and strumming away like Denver used to.
While one person isn’t enough to turn the entire scope of songwriting, Denver is at least a good way to see a decent perspective in pop music. After all, no one can talk about bleak subjects forever, so when everyone gets to that point where they sound too cynical when they write, tunes like ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy’ and ‘Annie’s Song’ will be waiting.
