The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.

He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.

I thought that was going to be a good song, too, and then they went and rhymed “time” and “Rhine,” and spoiled everything. <small>p. 24</small>

Well, I think it is accidental. It’s just something I started doing naturally and it had a lot to do with reading. I think that Dylan Thomas, his prose and poetry, was a big influence on me. Just his use of words… He would use so many odd words: like these three- and four-syllable words that you just don’t normally hear. And they’re not used in a manner that sets the text apart from the reader. Rather they’re drawing the reader in. It’s entirely based on the alliteration of the word itself—onomatopoeia and things like that. I feel like a lot of the words I use don’t stick out in the song because they keep the feel of the song in mind. The rhythm—that’s the primary thing. They’re put in there for rhythm and alliteration as much as they are for meaning. And as long as they are not used extraneously, they’re real lightning rods for people listening to the lyrics. If the words are really helping out the rhythm of the song then all they’re going to do is draw the listener in even more

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

He who makes songs without feeling
Spoils both his words and his music.

Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervour that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any.

We are a part of this take-down culture where people are trying to twist your words.

Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking. And this has held me ever since.

he can make every word he speaks draw blood,

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!