The lyrics of “Elenore” by the sixties group the Turtles are good. Dumb but good. Good because they’re dumb but know it. As the chorus hits—the arrangement swelling, the melody soaring, an angelic choir bursting forth joyfully behind him—Howard Kaylan proclaims the virtues of his beloved: “Elenore, gee I think you’re swell, / And you really do me well. / You’re my pride and joy, et cetera.”  

“Gee”? “Swell”? This is the lingo of a cartoon mid–twentieth century teenager, a real Jughead or Eddie Haskell, and “pride and joy” a cliché long past its sell-by date: the sign of an exhausted songwriter disengaged from his subject. But then that “et cetera” arrives, and all is forgiven; all is understood. It is the rare song that uses the term “et cetera”—that fact alone lends the lyric freshness—but, most importantly, its presence reveals the singer’s awareness that he is relying on clichés, phrases so well-known and uniform in implication, a linguistic wallpaper, that he might as well abandon any pretense of effort and leave Elenore and us to imagine the innumerable other clichés that might complete his litany. The song is formulaic but not entirely so, since it subverts the very formula it employs by making fun of it.

Something similar happens in Ira Gershwin’s lyric for “But Not for Me.” The singer, moping about her unrequited love, would sound self-pitying if she didn’t sound so self-aware. “Hi ho alas and also lackaday,” she sings. The word “also” might seem a fumbling attempt to maintain the meter with a couple of empty syllables, but the syllables are, in fact, filled with wit; they communicate that the singer is not expressing despair so much as meticulously listing conventional exclamations of despair that one might find in the kind of song she is singing.

It is a breaking of the fourth wall, this admission by a song that it is not an act of spontaneous human expression but is, in fact, a song, and is therefore acting like one. Such lyrics disarm me; I am defenseless against the humor and surprise of them, so they enter my mind and stay there. The lyrics are intelligent, finally; that is what makes them persuasive. Intelligence, I suspect, is what makes any memorable lyric work for me—not merely cleverness (although that can have its charms) but a deep knowingness: a sense that behind the words is an alert human—someone sensitive to the ways the heart, mind, and imagination operate, and sensitive, too, to how songs work.