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by dclowd9901 1146 days ago
Funny he pins Springsteen’s success on his lyricism when he was using a rhyming dictionary to write basically all of Welcome to Asbury Park and was obviously aping the blue collar poeticism of Bob Dylan.

I love Springsteen, but it’s mostly because the E Street band is absolutely bonkers good.

4 comments

Regarding your mention of rhyming dictionaries, it's perhaps not widely known, but they are not considered cheats by most songwriters, but rather essential tools of the trade, like code editors or inline docs for programmers.

If you pointedly refuse to use one you're not being more authentic, you're just making your job much harder.

At the risk of destroying the mystique of the craft, I will also say that they are not used in the way you might think. Instead of writing the second line of a verse and then looking for a rhyming word that somehow fits, it's common to compile lists of relevant rhymes to your starter material and theme, and work backwards, creating lines that connect to the rhymes. If you do this the other way around it's very hard to write meaningful verses without abandoning your rhyming scheme.

> he was using a rhyming dictionary

Apparently manual LLVMs were a thing back then.

What is LLVM here, 'large language vector models' (not a term I know)? Or a typo for LLM?
Most likely just a muscle memory typo: https://llvm.org/
Yeah, it's a typo. Not sure whether I was thinking of LVM (Logical Volume Manager) or LLVM...
Have you Read the lyrics to "For You" recently? It's not the rhymes that make them give me goosebumps
Listen to his Sessions Band recordings, particularly Live in Dublin.