I was working out a song for a guitar student by a British artist named Jamie Cullum called “All At Sea”, when I discovered a gem. I liked “All At Sea”, but it’s written for piano so translating it to guitar is a bit of a challenge, and some chords just do not translate well. I decided to explore Cullum’s repertoire and I came across one that I just loved called “I’m All Over It”.<\/p>\n
I enthusiastically worked it out just for my own pleasure…not an easy song to play by any means. Cullum is considered somewhat of a jazz-pop artist, and his jazz influences certainly come out in his writing. His first releases were mostly jazz standard covers but he began throwing in the occasional self-penned song by his second and third albums. By his fourth album “Catching Tales”, the majority of the songs were original. The song “I’m All Over It” was co-written with Ricky Ross and appears on his fifth album “The Pursuit”.
\n
\nIn examining the song further I realized the lyrics, outside of the title phrase “I’m All Over It”, are really not all that brilliant. Now, if you have read even a few of my articles, you’ll know that I almost always say there’s no excuse for poor or less-than-quality lyrics! So am I contradicting myself here? I don’t think so. Imagine if this terrific song had had terrific lyrics too!<\/p>\n
Here are the lyrics:<\/p>\n
Hello innocence, though it seems like we\u2019ve been friends for years CHORUS:<\/em> She’s a melody, that I\u2019ve tried to forget but I can\u2019t<\/em> [repeat CHORUS]<\/em><\/p>\n BRIDGE:<\/em> LAST CHORUS:<\/em> The most blatant problems are that he changes person (from “you” to “she”), he uses old tired phrases like “down to my knees” and “begging you please”, and he uses disconnected ideas “please don’t go, you think I know”. \u00a0It’s classified as pop\/jazz, so essentially you have pop lyrics over a jazz\/pop melody\/chord progression. \u00a0And we all know that “pop” doesn’t always go much deeper than…well, pop.<\/p>\n Are lyrics important? This is a question that comes up time after time with many songwriters, and I think the main reason people question it is because there are so many songs that have pretty mediocre lyrics and are all about music and\/or production. Oh, and a popular artist helps too :-).<\/p>\n But a lot of people love songs with mediocre lyrics, not BECAUSE of them but IN SPITE of them. When I was a kid growing up, we couldn’t HEAR a lot of lyrics for many songs on the radio because recordings were bad and the radios we heard them on weren’t much better. But the point was that we didn’t care! We mumbled the lyrics we couldn’t hear and didn’t know and loved them anyway. And the ones we could hear were not scrutinized very closely either. We rarely questioned what a song was really about. And that hasn’t changed much through to my kid’s generation.<\/p>\n “I’m All Over It” is a break up song. \u00a0And in spite of my lyrical criticism, I love it.<\/p>\n So what do you think? I was working out a song for a guitar student by a British artist named Jamie Cullum called “All At Sea”, when I discovered a gem. I liked “All At Sea”, but it’s written for piano so translating it to guitar is a bit of a challenge, and some chords just do not translate well. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lyrics","category-music","category-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prwoq-fO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI’m finishing, how I wish I had never begun
\nThough it should be the last one
\nAnd it’s dragging me down to my knees
\nWhere I’m begging you please
\nLet me go, don\u2019t you know<\/em><\/p>\n
\n I’m all over it now<\/em>
\n And I can’t say how glad I am about that<\/em>
\n I’m all over it now<\/em>
\n Cause I worked and I cursed and I tried<\/em>
\n And I said I could change and I lied<\/em>
\n Well there’s something still moves me inside<\/em><\/p>\n
\n It still follows me<\/em>
\n When I wake in the dead of the night<\/em>
\n And I know that I can’t find<\/em>
\n That song going round in my head<\/em>
\n Like the last things you said<\/em>
\n Please don’t go you think I know<\/em><\/p>\n
\n No I won’t come back<\/em>
\n No I won’t come back<\/em>
\n No I won’t come back<\/em>
\n No I won’t come back<\/em>
\n One dark morn-in\u2019 she left without a war–ning<\/em>
\n And took the red-eye back to London town<\/em><\/p>\n
\n I’m all over it now<\/em>
\n I’m all over it now<\/em>
\n I’m all over it now and I can\u2019t say how glad I am about that<\/em>
\n I’m all over it now<\/em>
\n Cause I worked and I cursed and I tried<\/em>
\n And I said I would change but I lied<\/em>
\n Well there’s something still moves me inside…<\/em><\/p>\n
\nIJ\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"