Maybe it was the pressure of reality TV pop, which plastinated the process of hitmaking and made it part of the show, but there’s a deliberate self-awareness creeping into pop around this point: a cluster of hit songs about stardom, the biz, the radio, or just the song itself. The best of these was the nastiest – Rachel Stevens’ No. 2 hit “Some Girls”, in the charts a month before “These Words”, about a wannabe coerced into trading sex for hits that never come.
“These Words” is its flipside, as wholesome as “Some Girls” is sordid, a song in which Natasha Bedingfield tries to write the song she’s writing, is sure she can’t, and then finds – golly gosh! – that by speaking from the heart she has written it. It’s cutely done, tied up in a bow like a story with a moral – Bedingfield’s songwriting experience to this point was writing for Christian pop musicals – and is 100% committed to its idea, performed with brisk conviction. If you’ve bought into the rest of it, the calm-after-the-storm humility of the ending – “I love you, is that OK?” – is probably very sweet.
As the cynical tone of that paragraph indicates, I haven’t quite bought into it. Natasha Bedingfield has written a meta-pop single which borrows across genres and makes inspo-speak soar in ways that melt my hardened heart… but it’s not this one. It’s the much better “Unwritten”, whose mix of “Thank U”-era Alanis, sunshine pop and a final-third tilt into gospel gels where “These Words” is clumsy and self-conscious.
But then the self-consciousness is the point. “These Words” is in the tradition – an undeniably successful tradition – of Elton John’s “Your Song” and Adrian Gurvitz’ “Classic”, and a host of romantic poetry before that. Songs which are about juxtaposing the artificial, frail act of composition and the deeper, more profound feelings or states of being the composition strives to capture. As in “These Words” the division is often between the fancy and the straightforward – the dead poets and drum machines versus a simple declaration of love. And of course, the song must contain both, embedding that simplicity as the payload of artifice, embracing and rejecting its own cleverness.
The technique invites smugness and demands a lot from its singer, who has to be able to sell sincerity while impressing you with artifice. Decades of talent-show contestants stumbling through “Your Song” has taught us all how difficult that is, despite how easy Elton made it seem. Natasha Bedingfield is still finding her voice – her throaty register here reminds me of Nelly Furtado, whose “I’m Like A Bird” is a cousin of “These Words” in how it builds to launch a front-loaded chorus. But she’s not quite a skilled enough performer to land some of the ambitious lyrics she’s set herself – the mispronounced “hyperbole” only the most glaring sign of that – or a soulful enough one to make her “I love you”s feel like the liberation the song needs.
As I say a lot on Popular, and about much worse songs than “These Words”, it’s a lot better for a pop song to be ambitious than to be dull. 2004 has been full of songs that try and do interesting things and don’t quite work, but that’s a lot better than the grey functionality of the Cowell school. Natasha Bedingfield’s song comes from an honest place, a genuine frustration and fear that a mechanised industry won’t let her write something true. And there’s a lot to like in “These Words” – the way she shouts and soars over the clunking, ersatz-rap beat, and her general enthusiasm, which comes close to blasting the song past my cynicism. Close, but not enough: I’m still left feeling “These Words” collapses under the weight of its own ideas. If I was less jaded – but then again, no.
Score: 5
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I think I’d give this one a 7, Natasha produced two great songs – and was close to getting into my FearOfMu21c with ‘Unwritten’
I think Unwritten basically overwrote this in my memory.
Agreed!
Urggh, songs about writing songs. In most of them there’s a line that’s unforgivably irksome. In Spandau Ballet’s True it’s the assertion that the narrator is ‘listening to Marvin all night long’, in this it’s the casual way she mentions she read some ‘Byron, Shelley and Keats/ recited over a hip hop beat’. So musically open-minded and so well-read!
Yeah, Unwritten was much better.
Huh, she seemed to be clearly taking the piss here to me (I know that’s one of the most subjective questions)
I guess I should have been more sympathetic given that at the time I was writing plenty lyrics that framed me as silly or even contemptible and then getting miffed when people failed to appreciate the clever multilayered irony. None of mine got to #1. You’ll be shocked to learn.
I think it’s very knowing, very arch, but she would have got away with it if it wasnt for those meddling “dead poets and drum machines” a line later.
(Actually my headcanon is that it’s a reference to all the “Eminem is the new Robert Browning” guff that some UK critics were pushing in the early 00s, I mean it isn’t, but I would love it to be)
Yeah, that lyric is on a par with macca’s presents/peasant rhyme for ruining the song for me. Doesn’t matter what else you’re saying after that, I’m occupied trying to flick this grit out of my eye. I think it’s the way she intones Hip! Hop! Beats! in sync with the actual beat, do you see! that, ahem, sinks it for me.
Weirdly, I had to go back to YouTube to remind myself of how this one went – and God knows why. It was ubiquitous at the time, the kind of hit single you heard blasting out of hairdressing salons, sports cars and student bars alike, but for whatever reason it didn’t quite manage to stick in my brain. Now I’ve heard it again it’s as if the memories of that summer (or winter, as I was in Aus at the time) have come flooding back alongside it.
It’s OK. There’s a certain irony to the fact that it’s a song about crafting a song, because elements of it (particularly in the chorus) sound slightly jarring and “crowbarred” into the track rather than flowing naturally on from each other. If that’s deliberate, it’s a bit smug, but I suspect it’s more that this was the work of Bedingfield angling for as many cute hooks as possible and scattering them around the tune willy-nilly like a messy housemate.
Meanwhile, Natasha Bedingfield followed me on Twitter a few years back. I was flattered and stunned until I realised that she’s one of those celebs who follows absolutely bloody everyone – 12,700 people at the last count. So I doubt she (or her social media account manager) ever gives my dull observations a vaguely interested glance.
In a 2004 version of this, I got very excited when The Troggs followed my band on MySpace back then…
I remember that the instrumental of this track was used as a musical ‘bed’ for a Homebase advert.
You’re really rushing through my last year of uni here Tom – notable for this project, as it’s the first time in my life I had MTV and as such I have listened to this current tranche of #1’s a lot more than most others. Perhaps life would have turned out differently if I had spent a bit more time on my degree and a bit less watching such half-remembered jewels by Jem, The Bravery and Verbalicious..
These Words was one of the songs on a constant rotation then, and I have to go against the grain as I cannot see why it has been supplanted by Unwritten in popular consciousness. Both sit on the fine side of OK but this one does at least have some novelty and contains hooks for days. Unwritten if more competent is also much more derivative. I’ll go a high 6 for this rounded to 7, Unwritten a straight 6.
Sorry to be a grouch but another slightly below average #1 in ’04 for me. Maybe a bit harsh, but I’ll go for a 3/10 here….
So good to see this up and running again!
Natasha had an interesting, Sheena-Easton esque career in that she seemed to burn through her goodwill in her home country worryingly quickly, only to follow the money and enjoy far greater success by focusing on the US market.
Much like her brother, her second album more or less stiffed here following the disastrous lead single ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’, which really felt like a horribly misguided attempt to recreate the magic of These Words. She did save some grace with the much more pleasant ‘Soulmate’ which also made the top ten, but it didn’t really turn things around much.
But in the USA she had a different trajectory. These Words had been a modest success (#17) but Unwritten was much bigger, getting to #5 and was one of the most played songs of that year on the radio.
Wisely, come album two, the US label passed over I Wanna Have Your Babies altogether and got her into the studio to record some stronger material. ‘Love Like This’ a duet with the then-hot Sean Kingston got to #11 in the States, and then the next single ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ actually matched the peak of Unwritten and got to #5. A repackaged version of her second album actually hit #3 in the USA and went Gold.
Of those repackaged hits, the Kingston duet belatedly made #20 in the UK and didn’t do much to turn her fortunes around, and Pocketful of Sunshine was never even released despite its huge US success. Which is a shame, as it’s a great pop song with shades of early Nelly Furtado and a fantastic trick of having two choruses that coalesce at the end.
The US success didn’t last for her unfortunately, and her third album bricked everywhere. But still an interesting little footnote to a career that seemed to flame out very quickly on this side of the pond.
I just happened to be looking up the charts for April/May 2007 a few weeks back, and noticed “I Wanna Have Your Babies” at number 7. I never realised it made it as high as number 7, mainly because it was awful.
Your comment that Natasha’s US label chose not to take it is interesting, because one thing I recall about it was how the music video looked to have been tailor-made for US audiences…it had that “look” that you only get with American music videos. European artists often have different videos for the US and Europe (Kate Bush’s US video for “Rubberband Girl” never fails to amuse, because it is so different from the Kate videos we are used to), so having a very American video for the single over here probably didn’t help the feeling that Natasha was no longer very interested in the European market by that point.
The narrative I remember in the media and from public opinion at the time was that she completely abandoned the UK early on to chase fame and fortune in America full time. This at the expense of the rest of the world too.
As you say, this briefly worked in the US. Unlike other British artists who want their music to travel, she chose to 100% commit to the biggest music market in the world instead, living in Los Angeles.
However, she alienated her UK fans and when she was disposed of in the US, of which American audiences are famous for, there was nothing left for her at home. Or should I say, the UK.
Back in 2004, I was in my early 20s and would have considered myself hopeful and optimistic, and I’m not ashamed to say I was completely swept away by this song. I had a huge crush on a guy at my gym at the time this song was out, so its timing was just perfect for me. Surprisingly enough, 19 years on, and now better described as cynical when it comes to romance and love, I still enjoy hearing this, probably because it transports me back to that happy time.
Looking at this song objectively though, I think it’s fair to say that “Unwritten” was a better song. “These Words” are the only time we’ll meet Natasha as a solo artist here (she will appear again as part of an ensemble before 2004 is out), and it somehow seems wrong that her one and only appearance here isn’t with “Unwritten.” I looked up the chart archive earlier and was surprised to see that “Unwritten” only reached number 6. I assume it got slightly lost in the crowded pre-Christmas charts.
I’ve always really liked this – I know its mechanics are very, very obvious, but I find it infectious and cheering.
I’m not instinctively the kind of person who delves deep into grimmer personal events when talking about stuff online (no comment intended on those who do), but this was one of the most difficult summer of my life and for my sister and me, this always perked us up when it came onto the radio…
I love this – joyous, agreeably wholesome, melodious, charming pop. A bit out of time in 2004, but perhaps out of any time. And she gets carried away in the chorus as she should. For me (discussing chord sequences) it stays just on the right side of muso-clever-clever. And left me hoping for a supreme pop career which, a few exceptional singles aside, never came.
Her masterpiece, though? “Soulmate”. That is sublime, one of the songs of that (to be discussed without disturbing the bunny too much) rainy summer
This though is a strong 8. I love it