Circa 1985, a pretentious young teenager in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I painstakingly typed out, on a typewriter, the lyrics to a song by an obscure English punk band—“Outdoor Miner,” from Wire’s 1978 ...

The best love songs have the kind of poetic lyrics that one has to sit with to really get. And when it comes to the following three love songs, their lyrics manage to say “I love you” without ever ...

Kris Kristofferson’s plain-spoken poetry drew hundreds of artists, including Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, and The Grateful Dead ...

Because I use pop lyrics in my poems and review records for SPIN and elsewhere, people sometimes ask me whether I think of song lyrics as poetry. Looked at in certain ways, they obviously are; in ...

Bob Dylan has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The media has reported on this surprising choice by asking musicians, poets, and writers if Dylan’s songs are indeed “literature”. Irvine ...

K-pop has introduced a plethora of love songs over the decades, from cute rhymes hinting subtle confessions, to deep narratives that make you feel the love as you listen to the song. While catchy ...

Lyrics are often compared to poetry. Are they a form of "the poetic art?" Are they less "artistic?" Poetry has a romantic aura to it, whereas lyric writing seems rather plebeian (to borrow a word from ...

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, renewing an old debate: Are pop lyrics poetry? (Lex Van Lieshout/European Pressphoto Agency) Michael Lindgren is a frequent contributor to The ...