The nonsense lyrics at the centre of Cocteau Twins’ best songs
Scottish-born band Cocteau Twins pioneered dreampop in the 1980s, fusing lush, delicate instrumentation with Elizabeth Fraser’s distinctive vocals. Aside from being revered for their impact on the dreampop genre, Cocteau Twins’ legacy has often been dominated by discussion of their lyricism, or lack thereof. Fraser’s words are often unintelligible, blending into the ambience of their production.
Featuring on their 1986 album Victorialand, ‘Whales Tails’ captures Cocteau Twins at their most ethereal and unintelligible, with swirling soundscapes made up of reverberant, echoing guitars that sound like synths. Floating above, Fraser’s heavenly vocals sing meaningless, incomprehensible words. Their nonsense only adds to the ambience, as Fraser’s voice almost becomes another instrument. Blending with the synthy guitars, her voice fits in seamlessly with the atmosphere.
In an interview with 1FM Radio, Fraser shared how she created the lyrics for the track, stating, “The lyrics are words that I found by going through books and dictionaries written in languages that I don’t understand.” Fraser reads the opening words to the song before admitting, “I have no idea what it means.” She can’t even remember where she pulled them from, just citing unnamed foreign language books.
Fraser declares: “The words don’t have any meaning at all until they’re sung until I sing them.” Though many jokes have been made around the incomprehensibility of the Cocteau Twins’ lyrics, it’s true that their meaning comes from Fraser’s delivery of them. The lyrics to ‘Whales Tails’ may be a nonsense collage of foreign words, but when Fraser takes them on, they become indisputably airy and angelic.
The technique also provided Fraser with a newfound freedom in her songwriting: “The music and the singing and the words created the feeling, and I had a freedom doing this that I didn’t have singing English.”
Since ‘Whales Tails’ and Victorialand were released in 1986, Fraser’s songwriting style has changed as she’s gained confidence in her abilities. She recalls using the nonsense style as a coping skill to keep her anxieties surrounding songwriting at bay: “I just didn’t have the courage to sing English. I felt like I was shark bait. I felt inadequate. I didn’t feel adequate as a lyricist.”
On Cocteau Twins’ 1990 release Heaven or Las Vegas, often considered their magnum opus, the band still retained some of this style. Fraser notes, “I mean, there was still a bit of this kind of stuff going on then, you know, sound rather than meaning.” The record seems to mark a turning point, combining lyrics for sound and lyrics for meaning. On the opening track ‘Cherry-Coloured Funk’, for example, Fraser sings the nonsense line “Beatles and eggs and blues and bells and eggs and then blued”, as well as the heartfelt, “You’ll hang the hearts black and dull as the night”.
As her anxiety slipped away, Fraser increasingly found that the style stopped working for her, noting, “I wasn’t singing from my gut anymore. I just had to move on, and so I began to sing lyrics again that people would understand.”
By the time Cocteau Twins released their seventh album Four-Calendar Café, Fraser’s lyrics were far more accessible to the average listener. As their musical style pivoted to include more pop influences, the change made sense sonically and aligned with Fraser’s growing confidence. Whether explicit or ambiguous, Fraser’s lyrics and soprano tones only enhance the Cocteau Twins’ sound and have become a defining aspect of their brand.
