For centuries, words and music enjoyed a happy co-existence, but this relationship becomes strained in the era of mass media, when innocence and naiveté are displaced by deliberate sociological connotation. This element belongs within the purview of executive producer-administrators rather than mere musician-songwriters. It addresses itself directly or obliquely to the personal mores, preferences, ideas, and values of all consumer classes. Its overt commercial motivation works not so much to supress individual expression and action, but rather, to render it demographically definable, or else to consign it to ineffectiveness and irrelevance.

Musical discourse is an excellent vehicle for sociological connotation, but it is too specialized and too rarified, its best practitioners too masterful and perspicatious. Lyricism and theater, on the other hand, make for a safer, sanitized, and legitimatised mass culture, albeit one in which music is no more than a platform upon which lyrical and theatrical elements take precedence.

I don't set words to music because words—much as I love them—no longer stand in the kind of innocent and naive relationship to music that they once did, and because their sociological connotation is pervasive and irrevocable, and carries too much authority.