Favorite lyrics.

[Bushleague]

What are your favorite songs lyricly? Not neccessarily acoustic songs.

I've always like alot of Gord Downie's lyrics if I had to pick a favorite song it would be this one. While typicaly vague, it sort of seems to tell the story of a minor event at a strip joint, but with lots of these random tangents thrown in. It just pulls me into the scene of sitting in some 3rd rate dive, listening to snatches of the various conversations going on around you.

https://youtu.be/Dy-KGZzJTrI

I think Leonard Cohen wrote this one, but I've always been familiar with the Niel Diamond version.

https://youtu.be/Ub1XtFwU9CA

And lastly, Tony Sly has a whole pile of songs with stand out lyrics, so bloody hard to choose just one, the guy was brilliant. I guess I'll go with this one... Scathingly dark lyrics and fuzzed out guitars to a bouncy show tune beat... pure genious.

https://youtu.be/xlJl0bGQXbo

[foxo]

This is more of a treatise than a song. It’s absolutely ingenious and it astounds me that a 24 year old had the audacity and intellect to write it.



It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

[Fred_Garvin]

Ripple

Great song and great lyrics. Hunter/Garcia work of art.

[Boneman]

“Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues” -Ringo Starr
“You got to strike when the moment is right, without thinking” - Pink Floyd

[Fred_Garvin]

Originally Posted by Boneman

“Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues” -Ringo Starr
“You got to strike when the moment is right, without thinking” - Pink Floyd

I was thinking Animals; the whole album.

[JonPR]

For me it has to be Leonard Cohen, with Joni Mitchell fighting it out with Dylan for second place.

Dylan has certainly produced some truly magical lyrics, but IMO his genius is the triple combination of lyric, melody and delivery. Certainly in the early days, no one sang Dylan like Dylan. People covering his songs proved how great they were (because of their strength in adaptability), but no one delivered them like him. All those idiots who complained that he "can't sing".... they were either deaf or had tiny brains, or both. IMO, in his day, he was the greatest white vocalist in popular music. (There were quite a few black singers who were greater. No white ones.) His words don't always sit well on the page (like Cohen's, who was a true poet), they need to be sung, and I'm sure that's how he designed them.

Anyway... along with works of genius, Dylan was capable of occasional clunkers. Rhymes that were uncomfortably forced. That line in Sara "the beach was deserted except for some kelp" is toe-curlingly ridiculous. It's only there so he has a rhyme for "help", and "deserted" refers to people, so kelp doesn't count; the right word is "empty", except it doesn't scan as well as "deserted". But then, as he once said, his pride in his craft amounted to, essentially, "making the words fit" - and that line is a perfect example of the kind of desperate hammering, sawing and chiseling that is occasionally necessary to get things to "fit". It's ugly, but OK it hangs together...

And in Sad Eye Lady of the Lowlands, I love a lot of the Dylan-Thomas-esque metaphors, for their evocative surrealism - "mercury mouth", "eyes like smoke", "my warehouse eyes"; but what, pray, are "curfew plugs"? I'm not getting anything from that at all. (Another random rhyme for "drugs", I guess...)

There are too many genius lines of Leonard Cohen's to quote here, but here's some examples of my favourite Joni Mitchell lyrics:

In Amelia:
"six jet plane
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
Like the hexagram of the heavens
Like the strings of my guitar"

"I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms"

Cactus tree:
"her heart is full and hollow / Like a cactus tree"

Case of You:
"I could drink a case of you, darling / And I would still be on my feet"

OK, I can't resist, here's a selection of my favourite Lenny's lines:

"It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal *****in' *
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat"

"I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA"

(I wonder if - just before he died - he felt he'd predicted Trump's success... )

And almost every line of Tower of Song is a jewel - although you maybe have to have reached a certain age (and be a songwriter) for it all to hit home!:

"My friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song

I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song

Now, you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song

I see you standing on the other side
I don't know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We'll never, we'll never have to lose it again"

*Edit: I do love it when this site automatically removes relatively harmless words it seems to consider dangerously offensive. (I've even been banned temporarily for some normal figure of speech that it never occurred to me might be offensive.) Still, I'm sure you mature folks will know very well what's been censored here.

[airborne1]

Molly Tuttles version of “Gentle on my mind”.
Bob Dylan’s “Tangled up in blue”.
Meat Loafs “Two out of three ain’t bad”.

[davidbeinct]

I really like the couplet from My Back Pages:
“Oh but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”
That someone so young could write that is, as foxo said, astounding.

For letting his guitar be part of the conversation, Jimi:
“I have a hummingbird and it hums so loud
(Muddy Waters riff descends from the stratosphere straight at your head)
You’d think you were, uhh, losing your mind.”

[mr. beaumont]

This whole song, but the last line guts me...

"I'm afriad I got more in common/ with who I was, than who I am becoming."

[cliff_the_stiff]

“…I walked a mile in your shoes. Now I’m a mile away, and I’ve got your shoes.”
Kings of Leon “comeback story”

[mr. beaumont]

Originally Posted by cliff_the_stiff

“…I walked a mile in your shoes. Now I’m a mile away, and I’ve got your shoes.”
Kings of Leon “comeback story”

Didn't they steal that line from Mitch Hedberg?

[J Patrick]

I don’t think John Prine ever wrote a song with lyrics that didn’t floor me….

[FrankHudson]

I was not going to answer, because as a lyricist-aficionado there'd be too many to pick from. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell have already been mentioned early in the thread. Like young Dylan, I'm a resident of "Baja Canada" and wonder if how far up into the 40s latitude-wise one has to be to write great lyrics!

Any such discussion, even if it's about favorites, has to tip their hat to Bob Dylan. Song lyrics pre-Dylan and song lyrics post-Dylan are operating in two different worlds. Cohen (who always praised Dylan) and Mitchell (who liked to tweak Dylan's reputation and boost her own sometimes) both have acknowledged that. What Dylan did is take some things that poets had already been doing and brought them back to musical contexts. In doing so he totally expanded things that songwriters could do.

Then I figured it's an excuse to toot my own, and my Parlando Project's horn. The Project takes other people's words and performs them with music. Here's a lyric Dylan could have written, but didn't because a non-songwriter Jean Toomer wrote it in the 1920s. I set it to music and performed that combination. See if you don't think of Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" when you hear this lyric. The following link will open up a new tab and play my perfromance.

Her Lips are Copper Wire

For me, coming upon Toomer's poem in the middle of his book Cane was a jaw-dropping moment. A great lyric. As to the performance, Greil Marcus seemed to like it a bit.

[Cecil6243]

Starry Starry Night (Vincent) by Don McLean.

[Riverwolf]

Gentle on my Mind

It's knowing that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line
That keeps you in the backroads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind
It's not clinging to the rocks and ivy
Planted on their columns now that bind me
Or something that somebody said
Because they thought we fit together walking
It's just knowing that the world will not be cursing
Or forgiving when I walk along some railroad track and find
That you're moving on the backroads
By the rivers of my memory
And for hours you're just gentle on my mind
Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'Cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me 'til I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see you walkin' on the backroads
By the rivers flowing gentle on my mind
I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin'
Cracklin' caldron in some train yard
My beard a rustling, cold towel, and
A dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round the tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you're waiting from the backroads
By the rivers of my memories
Ever smilin' ever gentle on my mind