Love Quote by Susannah McCorkle

“I love words” lands like a small confession from someone whose day job is supposedly sound, not text. Coming from Susannah McCorkle, a jazz singer known for elegance and meticulous phrasing, it’s also a statement of craft. In jazz vocals, the voice is an instrument, but the lyric is the score’s emotional wiring. McCorkle isn’t praising language in the abstract; she’s naming the raw material she manipulates: consonants you can bite, vowels you can stretch, a single stressed syllable that can tilt a song from flirtation to despair.

The intent is deceptively simple: stake a claim for lyric intelligence in a musical culture that often treats words as delivery systems for melody. The subtext is more pointed. Jazz singers, especially women, are frequently framed as “interpreters” rather than authors of meaning. McCorkle’s line pushes back. Loving words means taking ownership of interpretation as an act of authorship: choosing which internal rhymes to highlight, which ironic aside to underline, which line break to breathe through like a secret.

Context matters because McCorkle built a reputation on repertoire - standards, story-songs, heartbreak with wit - where the lyric carries a novelist’s density. Her love of words is a love of character and subtext, of the way a smart lyric can smuggle social observation inside romance. It’s also a quiet credo: if the song is going to hurt, or seduce, or tell the truth, it starts with what’s actually being said.