A Corneta

"In the end, it's the songs about love that endure the best. Songs about work are good. Also songs about rivers, or parents, or roads. Good songs about children are surprisingly rare (yes it's hard to write about the feelings one has for one's child without nauseating people, but somehow songwriters manage to knock out a perfectly decent, sometimes even breathtaking, song about the airhead model they met in the toilet of a club without the same effect); songs about pets are best avoided. Songs about drugs - especially songs that purpot to be about girls but are "really" about drugs - don't have the same appeal when you are no longer at school and there's no one you can explain the hidden meaning to.
...
Songs that are about complicated things - Canadian court orders, say, or the homosexual age of consent - draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is that guy singing? Why doesn't he write a newspaper article, or talk to a phone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo ilustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway?"

Nick Hornby - 31 songs