“I wrote so many verses”: The song that saw Noel Gallagher harness Bob Dylan
For all of Oasis‘ greatness, which they were never shy to remind the world of, their lyrics were positively average.
While the orator of those lyrics, Liam Gallagher, would be unwilling to concede an inch on that debate, his brother and the actual writer of the words would likely be willing to accept that. Noel was a master of songwriting in its arrangement form, penning chords that were on the surface simple but packed with emotional depth and constructed in a way that simply transcended music.
The chord progressions in ‘Champagne Supernova’ are enough to make a grown adult cry on their own, and so with that, Noel paid little mind to penning lyrics that doubled down on the damage. Like a kite in the wind, he would simply throw up heavy words that baselessly concocted some depth and let the song and his brother do the rest.
Before you Oasis fans come at me with pitchforks, allow me to divert you to a quote Noel gave about that very song in question: “I don’t know what it means. I don’t care what it means. It must mean something, though, because I play it to a sea of people every night and they seem to understand it.”
But when the power of Oasis was stripped away, he had to change tact; his solo career started out slow, continuing in the same vein as Oasis’ damp latter years by rehashing the broken formula, but in 2017 he altered the trajectory of his artistry and delivered Who Built The Moon? an album that showcased the true breadth of his capabilities, once unshackled from the expectancy of Britpop.
While ‘Fort Knox’ and ‘Holy Mountain’ served as obvious diversions from the Oasis formula, it was the trippy ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ that really caught the attention of left field music fans, and that attention was largely garnered for its compositional similarity to The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’.
But when asked about the track, it wasn’t The Beatles or Lennon that Gallagher cited as an influence. It was another, more lyrically led genius who was taking the moody rock legend into a more poetically considered place.
“The first two verses are a message to my children,” he began, “About being careful, chasing fame, money, drugs, that sort of thing. David said, just put it out there, just write as many verses as you can, like [Bob] Dylan. I wrote so many verses for that song.”
Despite the obvious connotations to The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’, this track was a refreshing evolution from Gallagher and one he was willing to accept. In solodom, no longer was he playing down the effort required to pivot and instead, prepared to shed his skin.
“It’s gonna challenge perceptions of what it is I do,” he said, “The challenge for me is on the tour, how do we get ‘Be Careful what You Wish For’ and ‘Half The World Away’, that couldn’t be more different, to work in the same night and everyone goes home happy?”
Maybe some people didn’t go home happy, but that’s par for the course when it comes to artistic evolution. Particularly with Oasis fans, who spent 25 years stuck in the mud, waiting for Noel to eventually come back home and sing lyrics that he self-described as nonsense.
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