Review Summary: If I met John K. Samson...
My favorite songwriter is a man named John K. Samson. I would like to say that he is the greatest songwriter of my generation, but who am I to make such a claim? Samson is a master of imagery and metaphor, among other things. He writes songs with nouns and verbs, mostly. The nouns are compared to other nouns, and the verbs are action verbs. He writes about people I’ve never met, doing things I’d never go out of my way to do. They aren’t exciting things. Yet these are people I know, fictitious people, but people more real than almost any pair of eyes I’ve ever encountered.
If I were to meet Samson I wouldn’t ask him how to write like he does. To write on his level cannot be taught. I would ask him how to see the world as he sees it. How does one learn to see things as they make one feel? How does one think of the “
batteries we stole from smoke alarms” and know that that phrase,
that phrase, is youth? It’s every little emotion, memory, and blissful naivete of youth summed up into six little words! How does one one understand people enough to know that the “
little boy under a table with cake in his hair staring at the grown up feet as they dance and sway” represents the separation between children and adults perfectly? I would like for Samson to teach me to appreciate all of the trivial situations and objects around me that
imply meaning, the things that only have the meanings we’ve unintentionally given them. And at some point in our conversation, I would like to thank him for exposing a few.
