The best songwriters make the process of crafting a lyric look easy. But it isn’t. Sometimes even successful songwriters struggle to find words that work within the confines of the song they’re writing. Heck, sometimes lyricists will even get desperate enough to use a word that’s not actually a real word when they can’t come up with anything else that’s better.
Videos by American Songwriter
That was the case in each of the following four songs. Apparently, it hasn’t bothered us as listeners, because each one has had at least some degree of success as a single. If you’ve heard one of these songs and noticed that something seemed amiss with the words, you’ve come to the right place. Here are the explanations for why the artist decided to put a made-up word or phrase into an eventual hit single.
1. Steve Miller Band, “The Joker”
This 1973 hit made “pompatus” a household word—except that it’s not a word at all. When Miller sang Some people call me Maurice / Because I speak of the pompatus of love, he was making a reference to a 1954 song by The Medallions called “The Letter.” What Miller apparently didn’t realize was that Vernon Green, The Medallions’ lead singer, was singing “puppetutes,” which was also a made-up word. There has to be some special honor that can be awarded to Miller for popularizing a word that was not only not real, but was a mishearing of another word that was not real. In any event, the joke is on us, because “The Joker” became the first of the Steve Miller Band’s three No. 1 hits and nine Top 40 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100, all of which came within a nine-year period.
[AS OF THIS WRITING: Steve Miller Band Tickets Are Available! – Get ‘Em Right Here]
2. Steely Dan, “Peg”
With lines like This is your big debut / It’s like a dream come true, “Peg” could be heard as an encouraging message from an admirer or friend to an actress on the verge of making it big. However, this is Steely Dan, so the apparent offers of support are sarcasm, and the tale is actually quite creepy. The actress’ story is told from the perspective of an ex-boyfriend enjoying some schadenfreude over her being the subject of a seedy photo shoot. When Donald Fagen sings, I like your pin shot / I keep it with your letter, he explained in a 2020 interview with the Wall Street Journal that he is substituting the made-up phrase “pin shot” for “pin-up,” as in a sleazy pin-up photo. He and bandmate Walter Becker thought it sounded better—and, importantly, more unseemly—than “pin-up.”
[AS OF THIS WRITING: Steely Dan Tickets Are Available! – Get ‘Em Right Here]
3. Genesis, “Abacab”
The lyrics to the title track of Genesis’ 1981 album are cryptic, so for those looking for clues as to the meaning of the song’s title, you’ll probably wind up even more confused than before you started looking. As it turns out, the word “abacab” has no meaning, because it’s not an actual word. It was shorthand for the structure that the song followed at one point in its development. There was an “A’ section, followed by a “B” section, a repeat of the “A” section, and then the “C” section, and so on. Even this explanation of the title’s meaning makes little sense—if you’re trying to match up the A’s, B’s, and C’s to the sections of the song as it appears on the album—as it evolved into an entirely different form by the time Genesis recorded it.
[RELATED: 3 Songs You Didn’t Know Peter Gabriel Wrote for Other Artists]
Even though “abacab” has no meaning other than its reference to song structure, Phil Collins sings it in the chorus.
When they do it, you’re never there
When they show it, you stop and stare
Abacab
Is it anywhere?
Abacab
Its inclusion renders the chorus, and quite likely the entire song, meaningless. At least for those of us who listen for the music at least as much as for the lyrics, it doesn’t matter, since “Abacab” was a post-punk ground-breaker for this venerable progressive rock band. Music fans in general didn’t seem to mind either, as it peaked at No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Genesis’ third-highest charting single at that time.
4. R.E.M., “Find the River”
This gorgeous closer to Automatic for the People includes some references to words we don’t hear every day, like “bergamot” and “vetiver,” but the lyric that Michael Stipe invented out of thin air is one that sounds like a real phrase. In the song’s final chorus, Stipe reels off the names of various types of vegetation: There is nothing left to throw / Of ginger, lemon, indigo / Coriander steam and rose of hay. In a 2008 Q&A with fans on the website Fluxblog, Stipe admitted that there is no such thing as “rose of hay,” adding, “I made it up because I needed, and could not find, something that rhymed with “way” and “naivete.”
Stipe also told the blog’s readers to “check out the list of convenience store items in ‘Saturn Return’ for another gaffe in honest lyric writing.” He is apparently referring to a word that sounds like “neopin,” which would indeed not be a real item, much less one you could get at your local gas station mart.
Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Mount Sinai Health System
