If you know me even slightly, you’ll know I’m a big music fan. So much so that a colleague introduced me to someone recently as “a huge music nerd” – which I took as great compliment, given the equally-huge musical nerdiness of the person making the introduction.
But beyond my occasionally nerdy tendencies when it comes to music, I firmly believe that music (and the Arts more generally) can teach us a lot about business.
Today’s article is about unsung heroes – the people without whom some of the best songs ever written would not exist. Yet their names aren’t (huge music nerds aside) on everybody’s lips – specifically the people who wrote the words to the songs we all know and love.
Think about it – we can hum along with a melody, of course. But we can only sing along if there are some lyrics alongside the music.
And even if we don’t get the words quite right (quick Boomer reference: “My ears are alight”…IYKYK) we still sing along regardless. Catchy tunes are always welcome, but it’s generally the words that make great songs great.
However, the names of people who wrote the words we sing along with are often all-but invisible, with the person who composed the music or the person who gave the iconic performance of the song are generally much better-known than the humble wordsmith who wrote the words we sing with.
As a simple test, with some very simple lyrics, try imagining “YMCA” without the words. It’s an iconic, hook-laden, joyous, danceable track that gets everyone up on the floor to do the dance moves. It’s still a great tune. But nobody is singing along…and they’re probably not even getting up from their chairs to dance.
And that’s just four letters of the alphabet. Imagine what a whole song can do when a great lyricist is involved, with the whole alphabet at their disposal.
Quick business aside – I’ll keep this brief. Almost anything worth doing in business is a multi-dimensional activity. It’s one reason most tech solutions fail – their programming is based entirely on surface-level logic, which assumes humans handle one activity at a time sequentially when, in fact, we handle dozens, if not hundreds, of simultaneous inputs in parallel, each of which we apply in a range of intensities which vary according to how we feel, minute-by-minute.
That’s something the world’s most powerful computers are unable to do. Or, in my view, will ever be able to do.
So it is with music. It’s not just the music, important though that is. It’s the words. It’s the musicians. It’s the backing singers. It’s the indefinable groove that great players bring to their playing – something that goes so far beyond reproducing the notes on a page, ordinary mortals can’t quite figure out how they’ve done it.
And so it is with your organisation. Whether you realise it or not, your organisation runs largely – perhaps almost entirely – on a range of unsung heroes without whom everything would fall apart. People whose names don’t make it into the board minutes, and who may be almost invisible on your organisation chart. Yet they are the glue which holds your organisation together.
If this article inspires you at all, I’d urge you to make it your business to find the unsung heroes in your organisation and make sure they know you couldn’t do it without them.
Lorenz Hart
This article was inspired by a Sammy Davis Jr performance I heard recently. He was singing “My Funny Valentine” – composed by Richard Rogers, with lyrics by my all-time favourite lyricist, Lorenz Hart.
Sammy Davis Jr, an immense talent in his own right, introduced his performance as “a song by Richard Rogers, one of our finest composers”. The second part of that is absolutely true – Richard Rogers is one of the finest composers who ever lived.
But the first part is not. Beautiful music though it is, Lorenz Hart wrote the words we sing along with, not Richard Rogers:
My funny Valentine
Sweet comic Valentine
You make me smile with my heart
The best-known song Lorenz Hart wrote the lyrics for is probably “The Lady Is A Tramp” – most famously performed by Frank Sinatra, but also recorded by just about everyone who is anyone. (I have a particular soft spot for the Tony Bennett/Lady Gaga version though).
Without an unsung hero in the shape of lyricist Lorenz Hart, we wouldn’t start singing along as soon as we hear “She gets too hungry for dinner at eight…” before we go through a series of Lorenz Hart’s bitingly-humorous lyrics which take the mickey out of New York’s “polite society” in the 1920s and 1930s.
(Fun fact: both “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine” – two songs almost as different from one another as it’s humanly possible to write – both come from the same musical: “Babes In Arms”. Rogers and Hart were a songwriting team par excellence, before Lorenz Hart’s untimely early death in 1943.)
Hal David
Not long after listening to Sammy Davis Jr’s introduction to “My Funny Valentine” I was watching a TV show based on, and I quote, “the songs of Burt Bacharach”.
While it’s absolutely true that Burt Bacharach wrote the music for some of the greatest songs of the 20th century, he didn’t write the words. Almost without exception, every Burt Bacharach song you can sing along to had its lyrics written by Hal David.
The Burt Bacharach/Hal David catalogue is so extensive I could probably write 50 articles just about that, but includes Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By”, Dusty Springfield’s “The Look Of Love”, and The Carpenters’ “Close To You”.
My favourite Hal David lyric is from another Dionne Warwick song, though, “Do You Know The Way To San Jose”:
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star
But weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars who never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas
Hal David’s wonderful storytelling chimes very much with the unsung heroes theme. He is writing about someone who went to Hollywood in the hope of becoming a movie star, but ended up moving back home to a dead-end job in a (then) quiet town in order to survive after the studio system spat them out.
How many people with immense talent might be hiding in your organisation, who most people only ever see as doing the equivalent of parking cars and pumping gas.
Bernie Taupin
Pretty much every Elton John song you know had its lyrics written by Bernie Taupin. Yet you could walk past Bernie Taupin in the street and not know who he is.
The chances of you walking past Elton John in the street and not knowing who he is are pretty much zero.
Bernie Taupin is the unsung hero behind Elton John’s breakthrough hit “Your Song” – written when Bernie was still a teenager. Those tender lyrics have stood the test of time more than just about any other song from that era.
He is also responsible for the lyrics of “Candle In The Wind”, originally about the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe’s life and, many years later, sensitively rewritten for the funeral of Princess Diana. That metaphor of a candle in the wind is a particularly haunting one for both those women. Almost 30 years later, the 1997 version of “Candle In The Wind” is still the UK’s best-selling single of all time.
There are very few more poignant lines in popular music than:
Goodbye, Norma Jean
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
Bernie Taupin wrote those lines while he was in his early 20s – words with a maturity and artistic sensitivity that most people 30 years older who have been writing songs for 30 years would struggle to match.
In Elton John’s case, we know how pivotal Bernie Taupin’s lyrics are. To give Elton John credit, he has often explained that their songwriting process is for Bernie Taupin to hand him a completed set of lyrics, to which Elton sets the music.
So, in a very real sense, without Bernie Taupin, we would never have had the songs most people describe as “Elton John songs”.
Purpose
The purpose of this article is two-fold (beyond giving me a thinly-disguised excuse to write about a nerdy fascination of mine):
- It’s to highlight that every successful endeavour has its unsung heroes. Their names might not be the ones in lights, but the results wouldn’t have been anything like so successful without them.
- And secondly, it’s to encourage you to seek out the unsung heroes in your organisation and nurture them. No organisation becomes great without great people, and often the greatest people you employ are hiding in plain sight, parking cars and pumping gas.