Music lyrics: a poetic and beautiful language-rich resource

Get the ‘gets’ from “Fast Car” (if you get my drift)

Photo by Bob Coyne on Unsplash

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

Have you reached that stage in your life when it becomes hard to keep up with pop culture?

As each year passes, do you find yourself saying “who?” more and more when actors or musicians hit it big?

One minute, you know all there is to know about the world of music and the next, you can’t even name a single Taylor Swift song.

I had a moment of confusion and felt like I was in a time warp recently. I saw that “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman was all over Twitter X and I thought, “Wow, people are just now discovering this terrific song? Isn’t it like 30 years old?”

I was even more perplexed when I saw that she had performed at the Grammy Awards. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why.

Then I saw her singing “Fast Car” in a duet with someone named Luke Combs. I thought, “Who is this guy?”

Some of you are now thinking, “What on earth is Daniel talking about?” and a few others are thinking, “Duh, Daniel, get with it, old man. Luke Combs is a massively popular country singer who covered ‘Fast Car’ and it was a huge hit last year!”

This is not a post about old age and nostalgia and losing touch with changing trends. This is a post about using music to improve your vocabulary and grammar, as well as your listening skills. After all, who doesn’t enjoy listening to music?

This is also a post about my special English teaching ‘relationship’ with Tracy Chapman and “Fast Car” and how this song made me think that I had a ‘future’ teaching English.

In addition, I’ll share some excerpts from a chapter in my forthcoming book that didn’t make the cut. We’ll start there, and then afterwards I’ll tell you more about “Fast Car.”

(The reason I deleted the chapter? To respect and play it safe with copyright laws. Quoting song lyrics without permission is a big no-no, and it’s a complicated process, not worth the hassle.)

Excerpts from the deleted chapter (much condensed)

Bringing in songs you love to the classroom and trying to get your students to appreciate great music can be a humbling experience.

We’re mainly talking kids and teenagers here. Adults have more of an appreciation for a teacher’s music, but I rarely play music for them. That’s a shame, because songs can be a wonderful learning tool.

With teenagers, it could be a generation thing. When you’re a decade (or two…or three) older than your students, then most of them are going to rubbish your taste in music. When I was young, inexperienced and full of beans, I would attempt to introduce my students to so-called classic music from my formative years and try to get them to love and appreciate it as much as I do.

(Learners, do you know the difference between classic and classical?)

“C’mon class, how can you not like the Stone Roses? Blur are fantastic, what kind of crap do you listen to? What’s wrong with The Cure and REM?”

Occasionally, a student or two might grudgingly admit to liking a song. One of my best students (and not only because of his fine musical taste), Yuri, a 16-year-old, even made me a mix tape of his favourite tracks as an end-of-year thank you present – and this was in the mid-2010s, proving that there was still a future for cassettes.

Songs in the classroom are meant to be fun, motivating, a reward, something cool to do and it is a nice way to kill two (or three) birds with one stone: improve listening skills, learn some new language and be introduced to some British or American culture. There is no shortage of songs out there with exploitable lyrics.

But students don’t always see it that way. After a while, you stop giving a shit and don’t take it too personally, and you give up trying to wow them with your cool – or not-so-cool – musical taste.

One of my favourite party tricks is to get them to critique a song on a scale from 1-10. Many teenagers look forward to my rating scales more than the actual songs, some of which they’ve chosen – “I can’t wait to see what crazy examples Daniel thought of this time!”

A few examples:

RATE THE SONG!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

10 = this is the greatest song in the world
1 = I would rather listen to a tramp playing a harmonica for a week (that’s tramp in the UK meaning, obviously)

10 = this is the greatest song in the world
1 = I would rather listen to babies crying on a 12-hour aeroplane flight

10 = this is the greatest song in the world
1 = I would rather bang my head against a wall for two hours until I have a terrible headache

10 = this is the greatest song in the world
1 = I would rather listen to the sound of chainsaws in my head

10 = this is the greatest song in the world
1 = I would rather listen to a cat being strangled

It’s been said that bagpipes sound like a cat being strangled. I’d prefer not to think about cats being strangled because that’s such a horrible thought, but I know bagpipes are popular with many people. I can’t stand them. When I was studying at Edinburgh, my halls of residence were on the Royal Mile at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, a very popular tourist destination. My window overlooked the street and for most of the year, I had a Scottish piper playing the same 5 or 6 songs over and over right outside. In the summer months, it started as early as 7am and it was impossible to get any work done. I should add a choice of ‘I’d rather listen to bagpipes all day and night’ to one of my song rating charts, but that could be confusing. (Here’s a joke: Do you know how to tune bagpipes? Well, neither does anyone else.)

Anyway, as I was saying, good old-fashioned music in the classroom can be a great learning opportunity. And this is how you sell it to your students.

“Alright class, so you don’t like my musical taste? Fine. We’re going to listen to music as a learning tool! Let’s do a gap fill to improve our listening skills! Let’s analyse the lyrics to pick out some great grammar and vocabulary!”

For any teaching professionals, you will no doubt know all about Scott Thornbury, one of the gurus of EFL Teaching. In one of his books, either Uncovering Grammar or How to Teach Grammar, he mentions “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls as an excellent language model, and he’s right. It’s also a fantastic song (the Spice Girls are/were a guilty pleasure).

As I want to respect copyright, I will only quote a handful of the lyrics here and afterwards your homework is to go and check out the lyrics in full for yourself. Or just listen to the songs and see if you can catch the range of grammar and vocabulary used. In “Wannabe,” pay attention mainly to the first conditional, and there are plenty of nice collocations too.

If you really want to have fun with music, have a look at Lyrics Training. Pick a song, choose your mode (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert), and go for it. This is not only wonderful listening practice, but also excellent for spelling and writing. Simply, if you misspell or miss the word, the song stops. Your task: do not let the song stop!

My classroom favourites

Pulp: “Common People” and “Something Changed”

I had some decent success with “Common People” in my early teaching years. In 2005 and 2006 there were quite a few teenagers, mainly Spanish and Italian, who loved the song. It was released in 1994 so it was well off their radar. But over the years…something changed (badoom-chah!).

“Common People” is one of the very best quintessentially British culture songs out there, chock full of beautiful vocabulary.

But for grammar purposes, “Something Changed” is tough to beat for past modal verbs for speculation and possibility:

“I could have stayed at home and gone to bed,
I could have gone to see a film instead…”

And then some mixed conditionals and some future possibilities in a variety of formats:

“…we’d change the way we were going,
Where would I be now…if we’d never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?

The Divine Comedy: “If”

When it comes to the second conditional (‘If I were an animal, I’d be a capybara’), take your pick. Every teacher has their favourites and there are loads to choose from. Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” is another splendid choice here.

But for the endearingly lovely nature of the lyrics, I have to go with The Divine Comedy. This is a very…different type of love song, where the talk is of “cleaning the crap out of a horse’s stable” and “feeding a dog leftover scraps of food from the table.”

Another lovely choice by the same band is “The Frog Princess.” For younger kids it fits in very well with the theme of fairy tales, but sadly most kids hate it and fail to appreciate the twisted and brilliant humour of the lyrics, with the frog being turned not into a prince, but a cow and the frog princess being decapitated in a “shining guillotine.” Go on, play it for your kids, see if they enjoy it.

The Beatles: “Norwegian Wood”

This is a tough one, and one in which I have to swallow my pride to do. I do it solely for nostalgia and for pure language reasons and no more.

Because I can’t stand the Beatles. But I can tolerate, just barely, this song.

(Don’t be upset with me, we all have those bands we dislike, for whatever reason.)

During my CELTA, this was the song our trainer played to show us how you can use songs in the classroom. It’s ideal for lower-level students, especially for the past simple. Depending on my mood on the day, I might tell the class how I truly feel about the Beatles, just to get their reaction (most of them are disappointed or angry with me).

Some of the lyrical highlights include:

“I once had a girl…she showed me her room…told me to sit…I looked around…I sat on a rug…started to laugh…crawled off to sleep…when I awoke, I was alone…so I lit a fire…”

It’s not only because of the past simple, but because of the sequence of verbs, which some languages don’t use in the same way: I decided to go, I started to laugh, etc.

Bloc Party: “This Modern Love”

For the sheer, rich variety of the vocabulary and the overwhelmingly powerful nostalgia this song evokes, this one is second-to-none. This song played a significant role in almost derailing my TEFL career and preventing me from going to Ukraine for the first time back in 2005. Every time I play it in the classroom, I reflect back on what-could-have-been (in my book, I have a lengthy autobiographical Epilogue where this song makes an appearance).

Have a look at the lyrics and you will no doubt see what a wide range of beautiful language you can pick through: phrasal verbs, collocations, colloquialisms, idiomatic language, idioms, lovely vocabulary, grammar structures…there’s a lot to take out of it.

I won’t share any lyrics here but will instead give you a vocabulary challenge for the song. See if you can listen and find the words or expressions that match these definitions:

• separated or detached
• so lost in thought that one does not realize what one is doing, what is happening
• to cause displeasure; irritate, annoy, or anger
• to refuse to yield or submit
• showing good judgment and understanding; a more positive way to say picky/choosy
• to do something to make time pass quickly
• unable to speak, as from shyness, embarrassment, or surprise
• to eat greedily

And now, for “Fast Car”, by Tracy Chapman

In my first year of teaching, in Lviv, where I barely knew what I was doing, we had limited resources. It was pretty much a coursebook, a teachers’ resource book, a handful of supplementary books with extra activities, and a cassette player.

Thinking back to my CELTA just a few months prior, and the example of “Norwegian Wood,” I was eager to play some music. But I had no cassettes with me and most people were using CDs at this point.

I was having a chat with David, my boss. This guy was a tremendous resource, and I wouldn’t have survived without his guidance. We were talking about the most versatile and frequently used words in English, and he mentioned his favourite, get. It’s not only his favourite – it’s the English language’s, based on how often it’s used. There used to be some dictionaries – the old-fashioned kind – that had pages and pages with collocations, phrases and phrasal verbs with get. It can mean so many things, both as a verb on its own, in collocations and with prepositions and adverbs as a phrasal verb. Look at just a few different functions:

You can…get an email…get a new job…get tired…get hungry…get arrested…get caught…get into trouble…get away with something…get over a bad breakup…get up to something (naughty, perhaps)…get good news…get old (sorry)…And look, it’s getting dark…this book is getting interesting…And, you’ve…got a job…got to do something…And, you…get home…get to work…get to university…get to know someone…

I could go on forever with get – I think you get the idea by now (honestly, tell me the truth – do you get my drift?). This post is getting long (as usual), so let me get on with it and get to the end (I know, I know, it takes me forever to get to the point).

When talking about get with David, I was lamenting the fact I didn’t have readily accessible music to play. Because the first song that came to mind was “Fast Car.” And though I couldn’t at the time perfectly recall the lyrics, I remembered not only all the uses of get, but plenty of other great language examples. This is probably the first song I ever thought of as being a language tool in the classroom, to be exploited for its lyrics and not just used a time-killing gap-fill to keep teenagers quiet for a few minutes.

(You may remember David, and the invaluable advice he gave me just before I started teaching in Lviv, from this post: This advice will change your life)

But I couldn’t play it.

But then I could – and this is the ‘eureka!’ moment where I thought I might have a half decent future in this industry, and where I thought, “Hey, great minds think alike!”

I’m sure there are some teachers out there who know exactly what I’m getting at. A few weeks later, there I was planning some lessons in my Headway Upper-Intermediate coursebook, and I came to the page focusing on all the wide and wonderful uses of get. And on the page were the lyrics to “Fast Car!” And the cassette accompanying the coursebook had the song! I was ecstatic!

Some of the coursebooks we use[d] in the classroom had to feature cover versions to get round copyright laws. I truly can’t remember if that was a cover version or the real thing. Let my nostalgia tell me it was the original. Or maybe there’s a certain irony in not being able to remember, since this post was inspired by a new cover version of “Fast Car.” Whatever – it’s a great song, with a powerful and inspiring message as well, and need I say one more time, it’s chock full of splendid language. Go on, listen to it, not only for all the uses of get, but for whatever else you notice (on Lyrics Training, for example).

And if you don’t want to listen to any music? Then go back and reread this post to pick out all the different uses of get.

Do you have any good examples of songs with cool lyrics? Please share in the comments below. I’ll definitely check them out.

As always, thanks for reading. For those of you who have made it this far and are eagerly awaiting my book, I hope this has whetted your appetite somewhat and has given you something constructive to think about in your language learning journey.

Or it was just a way of procrastinating when you should’ve been doing something else instead!

“Use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel his time has been wasted.”
Kurt Vonnegut

Postscript

I have another story, for another time, about get and how it actually almost sabotaged my teaching career. I’ll leave you in suspense for now, and share it later.