“The lyrics Jim Morrison wrote for the Doors are wonderful and chilling and moving,” David Lehman writes to me. Poet, critic, and series editor of The Best American Poetry, Lehman knows about song lyrics. His most recent book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, is a wide-ranging study of American standards. Morrison “brilliantly communicated states of extreme emotion,” he writes: “the rage of lust (‘Light My Fire’), a gentler desire (‘Touch Me’), paranoia, fear, sheer darkness.”
Lehman’s answers remind me that, although Morrison regularly name-checked his favorite writers—in one interview he rattled off “Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cendrars, Max Ernst, Céline, Burroughs,” and was still characterized by the journalist as “rambling”—his favorite singer late in life was the one and only standards master, Frank Sinatra. The thought of Francis Albert Sinatra singing James Douglas Morrison’s lyrics compels me to look up Ol’ Blue Eyes’ discography. Did he ever sing “Touch Me”? No dice, baby.
“I think ‘People Are Strange,’ for example, is an outstanding rock lyric, very haunting, with artful use of repetition and a beautiful emphasis on that major-league word, strange,” Lehman writes. ”He uses ‘stranger’ more in the manner of Camus than of Orson Welles, and it connects with ‘you’ the speaker as well as ‘you’ the listener: the existential ‘you.’” Lehman likes especially how Morrison interchanges “look” and “seem” with “are,” which suggest that “‘your’ state of mind is what’s at stake.” Lehman types out the lyrics in his email to “show how rhetorically balanced the first stanza is, each line divided into two clauses conjoined by ‘when.’”
— from "When You're Strange" by Daniel Nester, October 19, 2011
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69750/when-youre-strange