Musings lyrical, musical and moral on "It Was a Very Good Year" (as sung by Sinatra)

When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year
For small-town girls
And soft summer nights
We hid from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen

When I was twenty-one
It was a very good year
It was a very good year
For city girls
Who lived up the stair
With all that perfumed hair
And it came undone
When I was twenty-one

When I was thirty-five
It was a very good year
It was a very good year
For blue-blooded girls
Of independent means
We rode in limousines
Their chauffeurs would drive
When I was thirty-five

But now the days grow short
It’s the autumn of my year
And I look back on my life
As vintage years
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
It poured sweet and clear
It’s been a very good year

This is very nearly a perfect song. To begin with, what looks in print like a simple rhyme scheme at the end of each verse is broken up by the musical phrasing, which turns the lines into something more like this:

When I was seventeen it was a very good year
It was a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights
We hid from the lights on the village green
When I was seventeen

In other words, the music turns half of the obvious rhymes in the lyric into internal rhymes, the end of one line seeming to rhyme with the middle of the next line rather than its end. But the complexity of the rhyme scheme, which could have caused the listeners to have trouble sensing the structure, is offset by the extremely careful parallelism of each of the first three verses: the first four lines of each verse are the same in each verse except for the age of the man and the sophistication of the girls. The next three lines differ widely in each verse – but those are precisely the lines that are rigorously rhymed. And then the verse is rounded off by repeating the first line of the verse and by reinforcing the lyrical closure with musical closure, as for the first moment since the first line of the verse the melody settles on the tonic and the harmony resolves into a major.

But while the fourth verse follows the same musical pattern, the sense is quite different. If you are an incorrigible oenophile then perhaps you thought of a wine vintage the moment he first sang the phrase, “It was a very good year.” But most of us don’t think that way, and so now the lyricist makes explicit the metaphor that underlies all three verses. Yet by the time that he tells us that the original sixfold repetition of the line, “It was a very good year,” has been meant to compare the various literal individual years of his life to vintages of wine, he has already radically shifted the metaphor: now, in this verse, the “year” itself has become metaphorical. It is his whole life, now, that is fancifully expressed as a year; and thus the verdict that he has passed piecemeal on individual years of his life can now be reused as a retrospective verdict on his life as a whole: the individual very good years have added up to a very good life.

A complex structure like this, when done perfectly (as it is here), makes you immediately want to go back and hear the song again; it is a different song once you can see it as a whole than it is when you're passing through it for the first time. Furthermore, it's a song that repays repeated listening, as you almost certainly will notice something the third or fourth time through that you hadn't picked out before. A very remarkable song indeed, and it's certainly no shock that it was one of Sinatra's permanent personal favorites.

Now, I started by saying that this is an almost perfect song. If you’ve been trying to figure out what the weaknesses were, you probably have one of two candidates in mind. One is the fact that, in order to get the rhyme for “dregs,” the lyricist has represented the vintage “wines” of his life as being stored not in bottles or barrels, but in kegs – which can’t help but make us, at least momentarily, think of beer rather than wine. And if you noticed that and thought I’d consider it an imperfection, you’re right; well done – it’s the only moment in the song at which the lyric jars.

The other weakness? Well, if you know me, you’re probably wondering why I’m not complaining about the morality of the song. Certainly the Troika would be protesting, given that they find it unspeakably infuriating that on at least 75% of the hip-hop songs they try to listen to while we’re in the car, I demand a change of radio station because I refuse to listen to such lyrics. That’s a post of its own, of course; but the Troika don’t understand why, “But I don’t care about the words, I just like the music,” is not accepted by Papa as a valid reason to listen to lyrics such as, say:

Shawty want a thug.
It started with a hug.
And the rest went like this.
I gave her neck a kissy kiss.
She gave my neck a kiss back.
I said we could do it like a stack.
I mean we could do it like a G.
On the couch in V.I.P.
Shawty, we can get it on.
I’m like shout out to the D.J.
For playing this song.
Girl, we could act like two damn fools.
Have everybody think we doing a dance move.
Call me, so I can make it juicy for ya.
Meet me in the bathroom and you could be my secret lover, girl.
And it started with a hug but now we making love in this club.
And we not gonna stop just because the people in the crowd are watching us.
Cuz we don't give a damn what they say.

That particular song, by the way, comes to you courtesy of the pride of St. John’s Downtown Church. Ladies and gentlemen, your Beyonce Knowles! Wonder what Pastor Rudy thinks of that one? Still, it could be worse; the Li’l Wayne / Beyonce version is the version that Kinya tries to convince me is “the nice version,” in comparison to the Usher version that is also currently getting tons of airplay. Even Kinya admits that Usher’s version – set, nauseatingly, to a syrupy sweet romantic melody – is a bit much:

…I'll set you free,
Sexually, mentally, physically, emotionally,
I'll be like your medicine, you’ll take every dose of me.
It's goin’ down on aisle 3, I'll bag ya like some groceries.
And every time you think about it, you gonna want some more of me.
Bout to hit the club make a movie yea rated R.
…
Have you ever made love to a thug in a club with his sights on,
87 jeans and a fresh pair of nikes on.
On the couch, on the table, on the bar, on the floor.
You can meet me in the bathroom, yeah, you know I’m trained to go.

Oddly enough, Papa refuses to listen to such lyrics in the car with his teenage daughters, much to said daughters’ mystification. But then obviously we come back to “It Was a Very Good Year,” and as my Troika would be pointing out triumphantly if they were part of this discussion, you can’t deny that all those “very good years” clearly involved a string of girls and a lot of (however euphemistically implied) promiscuous sex, and a further implication that some trading up was going on – with all that that, in turn, implies about how much value the narrator placed on the “small town girls” whom he made use of at the age of seventeen simply because nothing better was handy. That means that there were, at the very least, a string of break-ups to go along with the string of affairs, and while Sinatra’s own personal life boasted a string of amicable former lovers, we all know perfectly well that’s not the way it ordinarily plays out. Plus, Papa is an evangelical Christian who thinks sex outside of marriage is bad, period – so how can he like this song?

It’s a very fair question. And my answer is simply this:

Listen to the song.

For when you actually listen to the music of the song, you realize that, despite the fact that the words are making the claim that the narrator has had “a very good year” (i.e., a very good life), the music itself gives the lie to the sentiment. The music is gorgeous, to be sure – if my daughters want to know why I think it’s an abuse of language to use the term “music” to refer to the mechanical and unimaginative repetitions of, say, “Rag Daddy,” then they need merely listen to the melody line of “It Was a Very Good Year,” which I think would be extremely effective even if sung a capella (though certainly it works in Sinatra’s lushly orchestrated version with the secondary melody that is never sung, only played by the orchestra in between verses). A lovely melody? All in all a musical piece that would stick in your head even if you didn’t know the lyrics? Absolutely.

But I’ll tell you this – music less like the Ode to Joy can hardly be imagined. It is gorgeous, yes, but it is mournful, haunting, melancholy, even elegiac. I can easily imagine my own parents looking back on their wonderful marriage and well-spent life and singing the Ode to Joy (at least if I gave them an English version to sing rather than the German version). And when they do look back on their past, I don’t think you’re going to get much melancholy out of ’em; whatever their life-song winds up being, it won’t sound much like, “It Was a Very Good Year.” But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sinatra himself, when summing up in song, on two separate occasions, his own life – a life which was, by the way, the closest you can possibly imagine anybody coming to living a life of sexual promiscuity with minimal emotional damage to self, lovers and children, an outlier of outliers in that respect – I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he gave us the melancholy of, “It Was a Very Good Year” and the narcissistic bombast of, “My Way,” rather than giving us any retrospective song that could reasonably be described as “joyful.” And of course most people who attempt the Sinatra lifestyle find it quite a bit more emotionally catastrophic than Ol’ Blue-Eyes himself did. In my father’s years as a pastor, preaching more funerals than I would care to count, “My Way” was one of the songs that most often showed up on the deceased’s list of Songs I Want Sung At My Funeral – and almost without exception, when “My Way” showed up on the list, the deceased was a sad-sack loser with a trail of disastrous personal relationships littering his life.

I have always liked the Jim Croce songs in which Croce creates a fool of a narrator who reveals his own stupidity to the listener, while clearly having no idea himself of what an idiot he is (“Working at the Car Wash Blues,” for example, or “Roller Derby Queen”). More interesting are songs in which you know that the narrator is a fool, but you’re not sure the singer has enough sense to have his tongue in his cheek – my impression is that Toby Keith, for example, has no idea that the main impression made by, “How Do You Like Me Now?” is that while the girl he’s singing to has made many mistakes in her life, she’s done at least one smart thing – she’s been careful to have nothing to do with Toby Keith. When you’re getting into the hip-hop genre you find that at least half the songs, especially the ones sung by males, absolutely revel in behavior that is reprehensible in every way – and the the singers clearly think that their self- and other-destructive behavior is something to be proud of. But by that time you’ve descended into such open brutality and obscenity that you can’t even laugh at it; it is foul pollution, in the original, numenous sense of the term.

I suspect that “It Was a Very Good Year” falls into the Toby Keith category: I doubt that Sinatra, at least, means the narrator to be taken as a fool, but while the lyrics do bespeak an immoral and fundamentally foolish narrator, they are neither brutal nor obscene. Great art does, however, have a habit of saying with power things its creator didn’t notice, because when art truly touches deep reality it may frequently capture accurately aspects of reality that the artist’s subconscious noted without his ever becoming consciously aware of them. And perhaps it’s even just an accident; perhaps the mood of the song didn’t seem “right” to Sinatra when he heard it and made it one of his first-tier signature pieces; perhaps he just thought, “Oh, that’s pretty.” At the very least he clearly didn’t say, “I like the words but the mood is all wrong,” of course. But in the end it doesn’t really matter much to me what is the precise history of the piece’s composition: as the composition stands, the music undercuts the sense of the lyrics and provides, at least for me, exactly the same sort of irony that the lyrics themselves provide in a song like “Working at the Car Wash Blues.”

In the end, “It Was a Very Good Year” winds up being what I think of as an “Ecclesiastes song.” You see, when you read the scriptural book of Ecclesiastes, you are struck very forcibly by how out of tune it is with all the rest of Scripture – it is a Biblical book written by a man who appears to have had little or no acquaintance with the God of the Bible. (It’s no coincidence that when the ultimately suicidal Ernest Hemingway found a book in the Bible that seemed to him to speak so directly to his situation that he rewrote it as a novel, that book was Ecclesiastes, or, in the Hemingway version, The Sun Also Rises. Try to imagine Hemingway rewriting the epistles of John in any form whatsoever – the very idea is absurd.) It is my personal opinion that God arranged for Ecclesiastes to be included in Scripture precisely so that godly Christians and Jews could see, incarnate in a powerful and worldly-wise but ultimately despair-ridden book, the limits of natural wisdom. I don’t think that this is at all the lesson that the author of Ecclesiastes, who seems to me to be as perfect a candidate for Limbo as one could very well imagine, intended to convey: he seems to me to be somebody who thinks he has everything figured out and he’s on a mission to share the bad news to all the people who aren’t blessed with his own intellectual prowess. But you can hardly convey what I think God’s real point is more effectively than by having somebody read, back to back, Ecclesiastes and then, say, the Johannine gospel and letters, or perhaps Ecclesiastes and then the Purgatorio and Paradiso.

In the same way, “It Was a Very Good Year” is, musically and lyrically, a practically perfect piece of craftmanship, but one that I think reveals rather more about the narrator than the craftsman intended to reveal, or even perceived himself. As someone who responds at a visceral level to irony, this, to me, greatly enriches and empowers what was already a remarkable song. And as far as the moral concerns – well, if you want to draw a moral lesson from it, then simply compare the haunting melancholy, however lovely, of the hedonist’s “very good year” to the soaring, transcendent, uncontainable ecstasy of the Ode to Joy. There’s a moral lesson in that, if you care to draw moral lessons from popular music – and it’s a moral lesson I’d be delighted for my children to learn.