The “innovative” songwriter Bono said everyone should bow to
According to Bono, every single songwriter eventually hits and wall – and that wall is shaped like a legend.
We talk a lot about the ways in which different idols still inspire being today. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen – these names are inescapable, as if their influence looms so large and colours so much that no musician, no matter how hard they might try, could possibly go through their career without being moulded by them in some way.
Leonard Cohen himself wrote of it beautifully as a kind of hierarchy, or a tower. “I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song,” he sang in a track where he imagines people like Hank Williams as his upstairs neighbour. The idea was that Cohen was forever a student, constantly learning his craft and doing his work, not only to improve but to essentially earn his keep and earn his title as an artist.
It’s a song that Bono loves, and an ethos he’s tried to adopt too, getting the privilege of singing the track with Cohen himself back in 2005, stating, “It’s really a masterpiece that song.”
However, if in Bono’s world, Cohen is the upstairs neighbour in the tower of song, he’s demanding that everyone realise that Roy Orbison is the walls, is the foundations, is everything, though he still doesn’t get his flowers.
“Roy Orbison, the singer, people talk about all of the time,” Bono said, adding, “Everybody curtsies to the voice, and so they should.” It’s a voice we all know well, immortalised on tracks like ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ and now forever held in cinematic history thanks to David Lynch’s love for ‘In Dreams’, using it greatly to soundtrack Blue Velvet.
But Bono wants people to pay more attention to the words he’s singing, as well as just how good he sounds singing them. “The thing people don’t talk about enough, as far as I’m concerned, is how innovative his music was,” Bono said, “how radical in terms of songwriting.”
Orbison sits on a strange line. He emerged in the mid 1950s as part of the Sun Records scene, but it was really in the 1960s were he found true success and was creating hits. But, as we know, the ‘60s moved fast. People were moving away from the crooners and into something trippier, so almost as quick as Orbison began, he was likely shrugged off as somewhat square by the countercultural crowd.
It’s led to a tainting of his legacy where modern rock artists likely don’t think they should study his discography and songwriting the same way they should study other legends. But, in Bono’s mind, Orbison is not only just as vital, but represents a limit to be broken through. “As I become more interested in songwriting, you hit a wall,” he said, speaking on behalf of all writers, it seems.
“You hit a wall where Roy Orbison is standing,” he said, laughing a little as he truly sees this 1960s artist as not only being in a league of his own, but being an impenetrable force who so dominated in his own vein that there is no moving him, no beating him – instead, artists can only hope to learn from him.
