For many other songwriters, and I have to say for artists (painters) too, my personal opinion is that quite often there isn't any "deep" [significant look e] meaning. They just put a bunch of words down that sound good together, because they sound good together.
Jackie, I have to emphatically disagree. As a songwriter the words are far too important to the telling of a story just be be some abstract collage thrown together, that's absurd. A good song always tells a story, especially in folk music, but even if it's a pop love song.
From Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, and Hank Williams, to George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter, to Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Joni Mitchell, et al...folk, rock, show, bluegrass, opera, country...the words *are important. There are some strange pieces that seem to make sense to the *writer (see MacArthur Park), but whose failure of imagery render them a *seeming abstraction, but no one writes lyrics without some purposeful cohesion to the words...that's what makes it a song. Even Frank Zappa's avant-garde, "abstract" lyrics were chosen to create a cohesive motion in subtext to the music.
Yes, there were the Surrealists among the poets like Rimbaud who wrote in abstract imagery...but that was a certain "school," a "movement" in writing. But to say that a songwriter 'just puts a bunch of words down together because they sound good together' just isn't true. That's not a matter of opinion, that's just not what songwriting is all about. Certain songs may sound that way to you, but those are few and in-between. The majority of songwriters care about their words very deeply, it's their poety, their literature.
