Are Songs Harder to Write than Books?

I was reading a review of the album Catholic Boy, by the James Carroll Band, which was fronted by the eponymous Carroll. Jim Carroll is known mostly for writing The Basketball Diaries, about his troubled youth in New York, matriculating in parochial school during the days and in the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen by night, huffing ether on the Staten Island Ferry (if I remember correctly) and vaulting turnstiles on the subway. It’s a quintessential coming-of-age in a grimy, pre-Giuliani’d NYC story. The Basketball Diaries was a somewhat harrowing memoir (though probably less disturbing than Christian F.) dealing with addiction, sexual abuse, the creative urge, and, well, basketball. The book, which wasn’t bad, has been overshadowed to some extent by the movie, which was, and starred a young Leo DiCaprio in a period when all of that credibility he’d accumulated with his incredible performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? seemed to be getting squandered in one misfire after another.
Anyway, this review of the album Catholic Boy mentioned that the songs were good, which this critic found surprising, since this wasn’t always the case when someone was trying their hands at being a songwriter after crafting fiction or poetry (Carroll wrote some poems, though I’m not familiar enough with his body of work in this area to do anything but note it in passing).
Is writing songs harder than writing fiction? Does it require a different skillset altogether?
A few years ago I remember seeing the nominally-libertarian but really nihilistic and heavy-drinking comedian Doug Stanhope do a bit in which he staggered around drunk on-stage, and spoke to the crowd, saying words to the effect of “I love you. I love you. I really love you, baby. I love you.”
His point with this exercise, he said, was to demonstrate how unimaginative songwriters are. Maybe he’s right.
Sometimes, though, what we judge mindless or insipid only seems so. The Ramones made a career out of mining this feigned-mindlessness undergirded by brilliant pop calculations, stripping the prog and arena-oriented artifices that had accreted around rock music at the time and going back to basics with an approach to punk that felt like it owed a greater debt to Buddy Holly than Sid Vicious.
Tangential, but related, is the question of how hard it is to write children’s books. I’ve never attempted to do it, but I imagine it’s hard, even though rudimentary logic would suggest that it would be easier than writing books for grownups. Children read at a slower pace than adults, have a more limited vocabulary, and they also have shorter attention spans. Writing a thousand-word book where the colorful illustrations may be the real star of the show (or seem to be) should be easier than crafting a two-hundred and fifty-thousand word novel, shouldn’t it?
The questions here are kind of rhetorical, but kind of not. A lot of the genius in children’s books, I think, lies in the delicate balance the best children’s authors strike in creating something that can be enjoyed on a literal level by children and on an allegorical level by their parents or whoever is reading the book to them. Also the kind of brevity required to write a kid’s book must be hard to master, and probably impossible for some mainstream novelists. Judicious pruning during the editing process is difficult when you’re looking at a novel (“Kill your darlings”), so imagine trying to condense a book-length story into a thousand words, while still conveying the tone, describing your characters, and relating the plot to the reader. I imagine, ultimately, it is harder to write something that can be enjoyed by children as well as adults rather than just adults.
I imagine, but I don’t know.
And I probably won’t probe too much deeper into the subject now or in the near-term, if for no other reason than that I don’t have any kids (that I know of) and my nephew is old enough now to read on his own. Also I haven’t seen him in some time because me and his mother (my sister-in-law) aren’t on the best of terms with each other. Maybe after we bury the hatchet (if we bury the hatchet) and our estrangement is a thing of the past, I’ll give my nephew’s bookshelf a good reading, and then get back to you.
Whoever the hell you may be.
You’re probably not there, actually.