If you trace your finger from high art to low, or from the dirtiest pop to the type of glistening thing that the horn rimmed glasses crowd adores, you recognize that it’s a mobius strip running along similar principles. Take, for example, Fergie’s current contribution to our understanding of the human condition, the insightful ode entitled London Bridge. Sure, it’s a crass ooze of hormones that probably sets back that whole “feminism” thing a couple of decades, but its use of metaphor and idiom is as aggressive as a pelvic thrust. Think about it- staid London Bridge as sexual image? Speech actually slurring in the middle of the song? The meaning may be coarse, but the execution is as as fine grained as a poem. The use of words is reminiscent, in someways, of Chingy and “Right Thurr”. Sure, none of us know exactly where “thurr” is, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t all sung along.
The catchiest pop song lyrics, the ones that last, have the courage to change the entire vocabulary that we use to think about things. They use metaphor without regard for how common or uncommon some analogy may be- the mandate for “No Scrubs” and hungry thirst for “Peaches” both operate on the conviction that their words mean something, but it’s the job of the song and the listener to figure out exactly what that is. It would be untrue to say that the following artist approved his music being compared to the likes of “London Bridge.” But with his lyrics, Ryan Lindsey takes some of the same poetic risks (with a little more art and a little less skin).
In fact, it’s probably especially ironic to compare Ryan and his self released album “White Paper Beds” to various symbols of the big bad wolf that some people call pop music. His bio page affirms that, as opposed to being like those deceptive stars, “he’s real.” And a quote from a review on another site mentions the very fact that Ryan’s not like those “famous” people because his music is more “real than pop success.” That’s both misleading and false. While most of Ryan’s songs start out with just him at the keyboard or guitar, hinting toward an introspective solo effort, they almost instantly flower out to complex and bright arrangements of other voices and instruments. And although he’s based in Oklahoma, hardly the epicenter of pop music, he uses a trendy loop pedal in performances and innovative production in the studio that creates a final product as polished as anything from the big boys.
And those lyrics have the confidence of a pop star- Ryan Lindsey uses words with the conviction that you’ll like the song enough to need to decipher each line. Listen to “My Place on the Hills”- when Lindsey sings that he’s been “unavail”, the shortened familiar use of the word is like talking to a friend. Yet at the same time, the way he utters it conveys all the pathos that the song explores later on. The words “London Bridge” have no direct and recorded sexual allusion, but when Fergie sings them they sound dirty. She could sing about the Pillsbury Doughboy and half the population would start blushing. And when Lindsey sings “unavail”, it sounds like an abbreviation made not for the sake of saving time, but for the sake of saving face.
“Weekend With You”, on Lindsey’s Myspace page, shows his other assets, which include a willingness to make love songs with a beat (recalling Kings of Convenience and other new folk leaders) while controlling his own phrasing with precision. A former choir boy, Lindsey knows how to sing instead of moan, and the distinction is clear in the way he controls the jerky pace of every line in “Future Unemployment”. During the course of the song he’s joined by an operatic chorus and sings about taking off his clothes- but a progression that seems jarring in text is, in practice, as natural as the way that Lindsey makes his breathing sound. Fortunately, in this case the lyrics don’t mean that he’s battling Fergie for her title as pin-up girl of the month.
Lindsey is a former band member as well as a solo artist, so he has a certain humility in his lyrics and music, but that in no way compromises the confidence in his songwriting. He makes sad songs that are fun, folk songs that are danceable, and love songs that have a pinch of irony on top. “My Place in the Hills” may be a long way from “London Bridge”, but after you hear them both are in the same place stuck in your head. With Lindsey, you don’t have to be ashamed he’s there. 
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