Frank Turner Talked About His Lyrics

Life is too short to live without poetry
If you’ve got soul, darling, now come on and show it to me
(Poetry of the Deed ~ Frank Turner, 2009)

By now it should be pretty obvious that I’m a huge fan of Frank Turner. It seems like 50% of my posts by now are about his music or anything else Frank related ;-) When I first came across his music last year, it was the unique folk-rock/punk sound that caught my attention, but once I listened to / looked at his lyrics a bit closer I was completely hooked and have stayed that way.
I can’t quite put into works why his lyrics mean so much to me. One key element is, that I can relate to a lot of things he writes about. Or if I can’t relate personally, I can still empathize with what he’s writing about. His songs just seem to hit the right nerve with me, if that makes any sense. But I think I wrote about that often enough here in this space.

When I found out Frank would be talking about his lyrics and his songs and song writing in Cologne on the night before the actual concert, I knew I just HAD to be there. With the help of ebay I managed to score two tickets to the sold out event and last night I dragged my best friend along to Cologne. She’s not a fan and doesn’t even know much of his music, but afterwards she assured me that she had a great time just as well. I think anyone who loves music in general and is interested in the song writing process would have had a great time.

Frank Turner - LitCologne 01

I know I tend to recap all kinds of event in detail, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it with this one, because there was so much interesting stuff and things I didn’t know about him and the songs. The songs he chose to play (yes, of course he sung some songs as well) and talk about, weren’t necessarily my favourites, but it was very interesting to hear more about them regardless. Because even though I know a lot of the lyrics by heart now, there are still things I hadn’t noticed before. Probably because Frank sometimes just puts so many words into one single song, that it’s difficult to keep track of all the (hidden) meanings.

I might actually try to jot down some of the stuff he talked about, but not necessarily for this blog, just for my own journal/memory. I honestly did try to include a few memorable highlights from last night in this post, but the list got longer and longer and… yeah, not a good idea, so I scrapped it again.

Let’s just say, I had a really great time, because Frank was so forthcoming with stories about his songs, his process of songwriting, his attitude about the whole art and craft of being a musician / entertainer, his life and well, anything really. And he did it in his usual open, down-to-earth, funny, amiable and outright lovely way, in which he does most of the things he is doing. At least the things I see him doing.

I’m a huge fan. What can I say… :-)? And in less than 9 hours I’ll be seeing him on stage again and I’ll be singing and dancing my heart out down in the crowd….

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