“Letter From America” — The Proclaimers
I’m sometimes asked whether there is any point to lyrics that nobody can understand.
My answer always is… “it depends” (I’m known for being decisive like that).
For example, I don’t speak Spanish, but I love Latin music. Although I can’t understand the words, I get a sense of the emotion of a song just from the singer’s performance…is it fast or slow, tearful or joyful, upbeat or sombre, and so on.
There are of course other songs that have seemingly unintelligible lyrics, even though you can hear the individual words perfectly well. The 40 year-plus mystery of just what the lyrics of “American Pie” are all about is a good example of that phenomenon.
And then there are songs where the lyrics are very powerful, but it’s just hard to make out the words or understand the message they’re trying to convey. “Letter From America” by The Proclaimers falls firmly into this category…at least for non-Scots.
A combination of obscure dialect, strong accents and references to historical events that would almost certainly not have resonated in the slightest with most of the world’s record-buying public somehow came together to make “Letter From America” an unlikely UK Number Three single in 1987 thanks to the quality of its composition and the energy of The Proclaimers’ performance.
