Editing Roy Orbison (section)

===Lyrical themes===
Critic Dave Marsh categorizes Orbison's ballads into themes reflecting pain and loss, and dreaming. A third category is his up-tempo rockabilly songs such as "Go! Go! Go!" and "Mean Woman Blues" that are more thematically simple, addressing his feelings and intentions in a masculine [[braggadocio (rap)|braggadocio]].{{citation needed|date=March 2024}} In concert, Orbison placed the up-tempo songs between the ballads to keep from being too consistently dark or grim.<ref>Lehman, pp. 70–71.</ref>

In 1990, Colin Escott wrote an introduction to Orbison's biography published in a CD box set: "Orbison was the master of compression. Working the singles era, he could relate a short story, or establish a mood in under three minutes. If you think that's easy—try it. His greatest recordings were quite simply perfect; not a word or note surplus to intention."<ref name="escott"/> After attending a show in 1988, Peter Watrous of ''The New York Times'' wrote that Orbison's songs are "dreamlike claustrophobically intimate set pieces".<ref name="watrous"/> Music critic Ken Emerson writes that the "apocalyptic romanticism" in Orbison's music was well-crafted for the films in which his songs appeared in the 1980s because the music was "so over-the-top that dreams become delusions, and self-pity paranoia", striking "a post-modern nerve".<ref>DeCurtis and Henke, p. 157.</ref> [[Led Zeppelin]] singer [[Robert Plant]] favored American R&B music as a youth, but beyond the black musicians, he named Elvis and Orbison especially as foreshadowing the emotions he would experience: "The poignancy of the combination of lyric and voice was stunning. [Orbison] used drama to great effect and he wrote dramatically."<ref name="hall"/>

The loneliness in Orbison's songs for which he became most famous, he both explained and downplayed: "I don't think I've been any more lonely than anyone else&nbsp;... Although if you grow up in West Texas, there are a lot of ways to be lonely."<ref name="hall"/> His music offered an alternative to the postured masculinity that was pervasive in music and culture. [[Robin Gibb]] of the [[Bee Gees]] stated, "He made emotion fashionable, that it was all right to talk about and sing about very emotional things. For men to sing about very emotional things&nbsp;... Before that no one would do it."<ref name="hall"/> Orbison acknowledged this in looking back on the era in which he became popular: "When ["Crying"] came out I don't think anyone had accepted the fact that a man should cry when he wants to cry."<ref name="hall"/>