A Better Place to Be
Harry Chapin tops my list of favorite writers. I know music aficionados out there are shaking your heads. No one who remembers this 20th century folk icon thinks of him as a writer first. They picture a singer, a guitarist, and a storyteller. But I’ll argue all day that Chapin’s use of tone and mood put him square in the writer category.
New writers often struggle with the basic terms. What’s the difference between the tone of a piece and the mood created? It’s simple to define—but sometimes hard to identify.
Tone is the author’s attitude about what they wrote and it’s aimed at the reader. Words like formal, angry, and humorous often describe the writer’s tone.
Mood is the feeling the reader gets when they read the author’s words. When reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
you might experience a mood described by words like whimsical, amusing, or fantastical.
Chapin used words, volume, tempo, and texture to deliver a distinctive tone and create a mood for his listeners…and he did it better than most. Look at the lyrics to Taxi or play the song here. Chapin’s tone is frustration—especially when he belts out the refrain, “I’ve got something inside me, to drive a princess blind…” But the mood he creates is nostalgic sadness. The listener warms at the story of past love but knows there’s no chance at reigniting it, especially after the line “Another man never would have let her go…I stashed the bill in my shirt.” 30,000 Pounds of Bananas blasts a tone of satire, but the mood created with changes in tempo (and Big John’s humorous inputs) is comedic horror as the listener perches on the edge of their seat waiting for the bottom of that hill.
A Better Place to Be captures Chapin’s talents best. (Warning: this is one of Chapin’s longest songs, so only keep reading and clicking links if you haven’t had enough Chapin for today—otherwise skip to the end of this blog) Written in 1972, this song remained Chapin’s favorite—a story about lonely people.
Chapin’s tone in this piece is sadness—a depressing sadness. The mood he creates is one of loneliness—the desperate need for human connection. To see how he uses his music for tone and mood, you can listen to the song here. Note his changes in musical tone between characters, his crescendos (…came back with my paper bag,) and tempo (shhhhh…I know just how you feel.)
But I’m a sucker for words and want to highlight some examples of how Chapin used them for tone and mood (full lyrics here):
– “an early morning bar room,” “started at his cups,” “fight her lonely nights,” and the little man not acknowledging the bar maid, all serve to create the sad and depressed tone Chapin intended.
– Nothing creates a mood of loneliness and despair like a dead-end job where “(sic) you watch the metal rusting and watch the time go by.” Later, we see a man so cynical about his chance for an emotional relationship that he’s given up on making a friend and settled on just making a play.“…but I decided to glide on over and give her one good try.”
– The man tries to turn on the light in the room but the woman asks him to leave it off. She can’t bear to see herself so low. But she needs someone or something as bad (or more) as the little man and says, “Anywhere’s a better place to be.” Desperate loneliness.
– Chapin ends his song in a more depressing tone than the beginning. The waitress is so sad about the man’s story and so sad about her own loneliness, she offers herself to him. And Chapin, the writer, slyly slips from sad to cynical as the little man “smiled a crooked grin,” and agreed to take her home.
I don’t consider myself a musician (sorry, Mr. Nelson—you did your best) and I haven’t done justice to how Chapin crafted his music (outside of his lyrics) to provide tone and mood. I feel it…I sense it…I just don’t know how to describe it. But I recognize good writing when I see it. You can get away with a non-literary line like “I did not want to share her, or dare to break the mood; So before she woke, I went out to buy us both some food,” if you have created tone and mood such that the reader/listener is hanging on your every word.
Harry Chapin did that for us with his stories. Thanks, Harry!
p.s. A link for everyone saying, “but you left out Cat’s in the Cradle…”