75

Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma

music and words by Melanie Safka

THE SONG IN THIS SONG is a metaphor for life – perhaps all songs are. But look what they’ve done to it!

In August 1969, aged twenty-two and not in the least bit famous, Melanie Safka – known simply as Melanie – played at the opening night of Woodstock (between Ravi Shankar and Arlo Guthrie). She only sang two songs, but the experience of performing to half a million people sitting in the rain and the dark, many of them holding candles, provided her with the inspiration for her first hit, ‘Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)’. This would become the title track of an album, released the following year, that also included ‘What Have They Done to My Song, Ma’, as it was called on the record cover. In fact, the song’s title has never been formally settled, but on her website in 2019 Melanie herself was referring to it as ‘Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma’.

Melanie’s actual ma was Polly Altomare, an actor and jazz singer, and it was through her that her daughter discovered a love of Lotte Lenya, Bessie Smith and Edith Piaf. The influence of the last is especially clear in ‘Look What They’ve Done’, from the accordion at the start of the song to the oompah/singalong style (not unlike that of Piaf’s ‘Milord’) to the verse in French to the raspy, world-weary voice. Safka’s songwriting would always be stylistically eclectic: compare this song to ‘Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)’ and ‘Brand New Key’.

She recorded ‘Look What They’ve Done’ in London with some of that city’s finest session musicians, the song proving an opportunity for them to show off their multiple skills. From verse to verse, instruments are added to the initial accordion and bass: a tambourine, a cymbal, a guitar, a honky-tonk piano, a glockenspiel, the colour always changing. The record might have been called ‘Look What I Can Do to My Song’.

The song has sometimes been thought of as a protest against the record industry, where a big label will take singers and their material, remaking them to suit the label’s needs. In the first verse Melanie complains that her song was the only thing she ‘could do half right / And it’s turning out all wrong’. The later French verse takes things farther: ‘Ils ont changé ma chanson’ (‘They’ve changed my song’). In between, she’s more melodramatic, claiming her brain has been ‘picked like a chicken bone’ and now she’s ‘half insane’, but that one day she might be rich if ‘the people are buying tears’.

The song was quite successful, though not in Melanie’s own version. It was a hit for Daliah Lavi (in German) and the New Seekers (in English), and when a song you’ve written is performed by artists as different as Ray Charles and Ray Coniff, Nina Simone and Jack Wild, Miley Cyrus and Arthur Fiedler with the Boston Pops, you can’t really complain about what they do to it. Admittedly there was a certain dark irony in the regular use of the song to advertise products from cars to porridge oats.

But songs are like children. They have lives of their own and you can’t protect them forever. The more successful a song – and this is true for any piece of music, and any work of art – the less the artist controls it. If you paint a picture of a woman with an enigmatic smile and eyes that follow you around the room, and it becomes the world’s most famous painting, sooner or later someone will draw a moustache on her.

There are those who find it a violation of a song to subject it to analysis in order to see how it works, though if any of them started reading the present book, they won’t have made it this far. Some people think we should let songs wash over us, reducing critical commentary to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Perhaps they want songs to retain their mystery. But this book has not been about liking or disliking individual songs. And we don’t imagine anything we’ve written here will affect the mystery we all feel on hearing a great song. Knowledge doesn’t destroy our ability to feel wonderment. On the contrary, the more we know – about the natural world, about the universe, about cookery or cricket – the more we are likely to feel amazed and enthralled.

Oddly, the concern that our appreciation of music will be ruined by close attention only seems to apply to pop music. Classical music and jazz have long been regarded as ‘proper’ subjects for analytical enquiry, but in academic circles pop music remains largely the domain of sociologists. In many university music departments, still, pop songs can be looked down upon. But the biggest objections to applying musical analysis to pop music always seems to come from the musicians themselves. John Lennon used to scoff at the London Times critic William Mann’s musical jargon as applied to Beatles songs. Lennon seems to have believed that because he didn’t know what a pandiatonic cluster or an aeolian cadence was, he couldn’t have used them in his songs. But he had.

In writing the present book, we’ve tried to avoid jargon wherever possible, but there really is nothing you can call a diminished chord except a diminished chord, and if you haven’t yet discovered it, you’ll find a glossary containing some explanations of terms like this just over the page.

Songs are all around us – we can’t avoid them. Most of us know hundreds of songs and can recognise thousands more. Knowing a little about their workings and something of the stories behind them, we believe, helps us better to appreciate these small parcels of music and words. But whatever we may have done to the seventy-five songs in this book – and it’s true that some of them, as Melanie complained, have been turned upside down – now is the time to put the book down, listen to them, sing them, and live them again.