About Cole Porter’s Songs

This chapter considers how the lyrics and music of Cole Porter songs might be thought of in relation to one another in essentially musical and poetic structural terms. The goal is to describe what the lyrics and the music sound like together rather than what they mean or express together. The analysis focuses on three songs: “Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, ” “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and “You'd Be So Easy to Love.” These three songs and others suggest that Porter entirely confounds the notion of a song as a setting of a text and that his songs compel us to think of words and music in terms of one another and on an equal footing. This sharply subordinates any notion of the music “expressing” the meaning of the words, and thus throws analysis back onto those features of music and words that are shared—things like rhythm, pitch, syntax, and sound in the sense that creates assonance and rhyme. In these terms, Porter's songs, while being cast often in some variation of a conventional form, have their own dramatic shapes and in sometimes quite intricate ways lead the listener along a purposeful progression from beginning to middle to end.