Definitely not “lazy” but also not in the least bit hummable.
You can hum that wicked bass line Jaco lays down.
Hmm I dunno how Coyote isn’t hummable…
If you want unhummable may I present Pearl Jam’s “Heyfoxymophandlemama” and The Beatles’ “Revolution 9”
But maybe those aren’t songs. They’re art pieces.
It seems to begin with a spoken phrase when a verse begins and goes to a more melodic phrase after. It might seem a little awkward to hum the first phrase. But I think it has melodic integrity. The second phrase needed the first. After that it is very hummable:
“And I’ll just be getting home with my reel to reel
There’s no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone
And still feel related
Like stations in some relay
You’re not a hit and run driver, no, no
Racing away
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway”
That’s the kind of thing I guessed the thread was going to be about when I first saw its title.
So he intentionally structured to have narrative/ spoken bits aren’t lazy. Feh.
Perhaps on example of songs that I would’ve expected to be hummable but I didn’t find that would be the big songs from La La Land. Yes the singing was flat but there wasn’t much hookiness in the melodies to begin with, imho.
You might want to check that link ![]()
(Don’t worry–nothing naughty this time…unless you use Kitchen Bouquet for something other than its intended purposes.)
Let’s. Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Ha! Thought I did a copy/paste, but guess not.
I thought this was going to be a Genesis-bashing thread.
There’s a group who (in their pre-hit era) did a ton of gorgeous music without anything like a “hummable tune”. 
I can hum their whole catalog (but only while Steve Hackett was a member.)
John McCrea from Cake. Awful. Like listening to Joe Buck.
Love him! Just figured out Shirt Skirt Long Jacket to jam on with a friend. I get that he can be love/hate - cool.
Several Jim Stafford songs have no melody; “Swamp Witch,” has no chorus; “A Real Good Time,” has a melodic chorus–you get the picture.
Hail, Hail by Pearl Jam
I don’t agree. I can sit down at a piano and have a new tune, chorus, melody, bridge, etc within a few minutes. What is really really hard is coming up with some meaningful words.
What the achievement is is having a tune that sticks in someone’s head long after they’ve heard it, but writing a tune per se is quite easy. If Joni Mitchell writes a song that doesn’t have a simple catchy melody then that is almost certainly a stylistic choice and nothing to do with how hard it is to write a tune.
Just tested this. Yep, new song with fairly catchy tune including melody, bridge, chorus, chords etc in a few minutes. It’ll be gone by tomorrow unless I choose to keep playing it to embed it in my memory, but for now it exists. No words though.
If the tune’s catchy, the words only need to be marginally sensible for it to be a hit. If you really can knock out a good tune that easily, then you should hook up your talents with some musicians and lyric writers. It’s not difficult to string chords that make sense together. But to make something catchy–you may have a skill that is useful and marketable. (Unless that is what you already do for a living.)
When I saw the OP, I had a suspicion about what he meant, but wasn’t sure beause I was unfamiliar with Coyote. So I looked it up on YouTube, and it was in fact reminiscent of what I thought the OP was describing, which is a song without balanced phrasing, a regular meter, or rhyme structure, but rather through-composed (if you can call it that, since I doubt much composition goes into it; it’s probably improvised.)
Jackson Browne did this a lot, as did Paul Simon, on Graceland and subsequent albums.
Another example is “Foolish Love” by Rufus Wainwright, until he finally gets to the chorus.
I’ve heard songs like this on the Christian stations.
If you can’t write a decent song yourself, just sing the classics if you want to keep your audience’s interest, mmmkay?