Outside of his public image, the other noticeable aspect of Ferry has been his songwriting. While the recordings he made with Roxy Music suggested glamour and good times, Ferry’s introspective soul-searching lyrics tended to be mostly about romantic yearning, desire and heartache—for the protagonist in his lyrics, the situation is never black and white. One of many examples of that jaded sense of detachment and irony is “Mother of Pearl,” from Roxy Music’s 1974 album Stranded: “If you’re looking for love/In a looking glass world/It’s pretty hard to find.”
On the 50th anniversary of Roxy Music’s self-titled debut album, an occasion that will be celebrated by the band’s upcoming reunion tour this September, Ferry recently published in the U.K. a compendium of all his original compositions to date. Simply titled Lyrics, his songs are presented in chronological order from the first Roxy Music record from 1972 to Ferry’s most recent solo album, 2014’s Avonmore. To Ferry’s fans, Lyrics might be the closest thing to a quasi-memoir by the singer.
In a recent Newsweek interview, Ferry talked about why he is putting out this book now.
“I just wanted to keep it a plain and simple collection of the lyrics to the songs, and that’s how we did it,” he said. “It’s important to me and people seem to like my work. It’s a good document for them to refer to and find the right lyrics to the right song. Sometimes people would look them up on the internet or whatever, and they’re completely the wrong words. It was a very nice thing to do.”
On how he approaches songwriting given the emotional range evoked by his works, Ferry said that it’s complicated.
“You try and find the right words to enhance the music. You want to write words that you feel where there could never be any other words for the song,” he explained. “That’s what you try to do. As I said many times, the music for me comes first and then I might have an idea for a line, but not the whole song. The whole song is something I work on and just try and find out what the words should be saying to enhance the music and to be right inside the music. I can’t say I find it easy.
“I like the abstraction of making music,” he continued. “And when you particularize it with words, it’s sometimes hard to say the right thing. But when it works together, it seems to be a sort of powerful force. It affects people and certainly affected me from a young age listening to songs where the words and music just really captured my soul. I try and get it right when I’m making my own songs.”
Amid the publication of Lyrics and the upcoming Roxy tour, Ferry is working on his next solo album. Earlier this year, the singer released Love Letters, an EP of cover songs.
“I like to be in the studio,” he said. “I’ve been working on lots of things, and so there’s an album of new work that I’m working on at the moment. It’s very nice working on the Love Letters tracks, so hopefully, there’ll be an album of those at some point as well. [I’m] excited about the new things I’m doing. It’s been a long time since I’ve released anything, so it was nice to get something out in the interim.”
Lyrics by Bryan Ferry, published by Chatto and Windus, is out now.
