The prob­lem I’ve had with Bryan Adams is that I always expect more of him.

This is out of respect for his abil­ity, but usu­ally he deliv­ers just enough to whet the appetite. So, it was a relief to go to his August 21 con­cert at Empire Field as a spec­ta­tor not a critic. He and his band seemed to be hav­ing fun and, under the sun of a hot after­noon, there was more spon­tane­ity than a few years ago at GM Place.

The prob­lem I referred to is that Adams will take the easy way as a lyri­cist, arriv­ing at state­ments that are cliched, trite or pat. He is more intel­li­gent than that but a deep thinker he evi­dently is not or he won’t be pushed.

This didn’t bother me at Empire Field. I looked at 23,000 peo­ple enjoy­ing them­selves, often singing along. His songs meant some­thing impor­tant to them, they con­nected. That was the sig­nif­i­cant thing. Also, if you just heard the music, Adams has a facil­ity with melody that has to be admired. You give in to the sen­ti­ments of Sum­mer Of 69, the chant of Cuts Like A Knife, the buoy­ancy of Can’t Stop This Thing We Started. He doesn’t write above the head of his audi­ence. Nei­ther does he write down to it. There­fore he is one with the audi­ence. To the audi­ence he is a reg­u­lar guy, singing its song.

This isn’t a whole­sale approval as it wouldn’t hurt Adams to dig a lit­tle deeper. How­ever, his aim is true and it’s bet­ter than pass­ing off an obscure verse as poetry.

To me, obscu­rity is a big cover up. The writer is try­ing to avoid look­ing vul­ner­a­ble or is being clever. They do this by writ­ing lyrics that are impen­e­tra­ble. Most of it is gib­ber­ish and pos­si­bly comes from the inse­cu­rity of being young. So the lyric only has mean­ing to the per­son who wrote it. That goes against the idea of pop, as in pop­u­lar, music.

Not that any­one has asked me, or I’d be suited to the job, but I often day­dream that if I were a pro­ducer, one of the first things I’d do is demand that the lyri­cist tell me the mean­ing of the songs. If they can’t explain a song in a few easy to com­pre­hend words, I’d get them to rewrite the song in sim­ple language.

The the­ory isn’t com­pli­cated. The songs that stick tend to strike a uni­ver­sal chord. The lis­tener thinks, I can relate to this. I can iden­tify with that. The writer is think­ing, I’m going through this right now and is ask­ing the audi­ence if it feel the same way, too.

There are a lot of rea­sons why bands don’t last any­more and pos­si­bly one of them is that they don’t speak to the audi­ence through their songs. Why would the audi­ence be loyal to some­one it doesn’t under­stand? It owes the band noth­ing. This is not to say there is no room for poetic expres­sion in pop music.

In Lumpy, the band for whom I sing, we’ve been doing Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages for years. In all that time, I’ve never fully under­stood the verses. How­ever, Dylan’s cho­rus — I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now — tells me what the song is about. I get the gist of the verses. Plus the images are fan­tas­tic. Sim­i­larly, the early REM vocals were delib­er­ately buried because lyri­cist Michael Stipe wasn’t choos­ing words for their mean­ing but for their mood. A lot of his lyrics were non­sense but his tone became impor­tant and that con­veyed meaning.

Thus the lyrics don’t have to be lit­eral. Lit­er­ate would be nice and some­times that seems to be ask­ing too much. When asked, Robert Plant answered that his lyrics for Led Zep­pelin were “deep and mean­ing­less.” They appear to be say­ing some­thing pro­found but aren’t actu­ally. That might explain the pop­u­lar­ity of Bryan Adams: offer­ing some­thing to think about with­out the bur­den of intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing it.