Your favourite lyric

"Love is for fools, and all fools are lovers, It's raining on my house and none of the others"

But my fave lyric of the week is from "Do You Realise" from the new Flaming Lips album....

"you realise the sun don't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round"

I said to Hank Williams, 'How lonely does it get?'

Hank Williams hasn't answered me yet.

Ned to thread! ;-)

Me:
Set Adrift On Memory Bliss is my fave entire lyric.
Fave couplet: "When we get you outside/You're fucking dead!" (Shampoo)

Hm, let me try to answer this seriously.

*thinks*

I might be some time.

and though final words are so hard to devise I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes

and/or

folks who've watched their mother kill an animal know that their home is surrounded by places to go

"Poverty? Real as it gets! Don't think I Won't Skin You When Your Skin is All That's Left! The Tension Mounts, but the Drama's Pretty Cheap - - this ain't no Ultimatum, but Baby I know Where You Sleep!" - "Heads I Win Tails You Lose" by Cop Shoot Cop

"I will kiss you forever on nights like this/I will kiss you and we shall be together" - The Cure: "The Same Deep Water As You"
"Keepin' it sushi-raw/Turn small potatoes to vichyssoise/Like un, deux, trois" - Poem-Cees: "Sha Sha"
"Hang your head in SHAME!" - Severed Heads: "Hot With Fleas"
"Oh/You can get lonely..." - Pet Shop Boys: "I Want A Dog"
"I don't want nobody but you" - 808 State: "Moses"
"Dave is floating/And old man Einstein/Crazy in his attic" - Underworld: "Pearl's Girl
"The sore in my soul/The mark in my heart/Her acid rain..." - Front 242: "Tragedy (For You)"
"This is me on top of you/And I can't believe that it took me this long..." - Pulp: "This Is Hardcore"
"There was a girl in Paris/Who made funny faces just like Clara Bow/How was I to know/That she would wear the same cologne as you/And giggle the same giggle that you do?" - Prince and the Revolution: "Condition Of The Heart"

I could go on and on...

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry

And there's Brian Wilson's 'God Only Knows', from the nerve of starting a love song with "I may not always love you" and the verse

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on, believe me
The world would show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?

Some others: Common People by Pulp, Burma Shave by Tom Waits, The Winner by Bobby Bare.

Soul Coughing, "True Dreams of Wichita":
'I've seen you Fire up the gas in the engine valves
I've seen your hand turn saintly on the radio dial
I've seen the airwaves pull your eyes towards heaven
Outside Topeka in the phone lines
Her good teeth smile was winding down'

even if you don't show up in your chemise lacoste (klaus nomi, where lacoste seems to rhyme holocaust)

scratching his claws on my habitat (neil tennant, where cat rhyms habitat)

victorian, I love your shops (momus)

Hmm, I really like nasty lyrics. So stuff like Sondheim: 'Casting thoughts of you aside / In the south of France / Would I think of suicide? / Darling, shall we dance?' (Could I Leave You?). Or Lehrer: 'It just takes a smidgeon / To poison a pigeon in the park' followed by 'We'd kill them all with laughter and merriment / Except for the ones we take home to experiment' (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park). Or something by Brel, like 'Les Bonbons 67' in which he revisits his 1950s Belgian yokel character to find he's become a fatuous, conformist hippy: 'Et toutes les Samedi soirs que je peut / Germaine, j'ecoute pousser mes cheveux / Je crie 'Paix au Vietnam!' parce que, enfin, j'ai mes opinions...'

"Sometimes I wish that i was a wrestler, a Mexican wrestler in a red vinyl mask. And i would grab you and bodyslam you, and maybe cause physical harm. But when we would land, I might take pity on you--I can crack all your ribs but i can't break your heart... Cause you will never love me, and why should I even care? It's not that you're so special, you're just the cross i bear." Jill Sobule, 'You Will Never Love Me'

...sorry that was a long one, but i just love lyrics in the whole song.

Oh I could also go on and on with more. Maybe i will later.

"The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife/Did it quick and split/Back home, fresh as a daisy to Maisy, oh Maisy"

- 'Guts', John Cale

"Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn't it?/Why didn't you just leave me if you didn't want to stay?/Why'd you have to treat me so bad? Did it have to be that way?/Now you stand here expectin' me to remember somethin' you forgot to say"

- 'She's Your Lover Now', Bob Dylan

--Minutemen

Love is sweeter than honey Honey is sweeter than wine Wine is sweeter than tangerines Tangerines are blind --Meat Puppets

My smile is stuck I cannot go back to your Frownland My spirit's made up of the ocean And the sky 'n' the sun 'n' the moon 'n' all my eyes can see I cannot go back to your land of gloom (etc) --Beefheart

and pretty much everything Robert Pollard has penned.

'Isn't it rich, aren't we a pair/Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air'.

Something which moves me just now, though I don't know why

'Oh momma dear, we're not the fortunate ones'

Someone I could choose just about anything from. Today it will be (randomly)

'So when I met you, I didn't forget you/Not till I found that I'd run out of change'.

Something new, which I love

'Call it coincidence, but whenever we're together/You're over the moon while I'm under the weather'.

There are thousands more, I suppose.

Different for everyone I see.

'Oh momma dear, we're not the fortunate ones'

-- Great call, Cookie. I love that line: it reminds me of... Morrissey!!

'Papa, I know you'll be upset / Cos I was always your little girl' // and the rest

"I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn / I wore it hoping to impress / So frightfully camp, it made you laugh / Tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress"

Andrew L - "She's Your Lover Now" is prime evidence for Dylan being a great lyricist yes.

All C - big yes to "Send In The Clowns" - beautiful lyrics.

Plenty of people can capture the pain of a break-up, but ABBA manage the wretched pathos too - "I apologise if it makes you feel bad / Seeing me so tense, no self-confidence"

Oh, and what Tracer said, of course.

Also two amazing Public Enemy lyrics - the first verse of "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos" and the first verse of "By The Time I Get To Arizona" - nobody has ever set a scene in a song like those two tracks do. Of course the rest of the tracks don't live up to it - they couldn't.

Funniest opener, from Pulp's Razzmatazz: "The trouble with your brother / He's always sleeping / With your mother."

(Safe, boring, schmindie. Yay fer me)

"Knife-sharp trouser creases slicing air"... Bruce Cockburn

"Sinister, cynical instrument, who makes the gun into a sacrament, whose only response to the deification of tyranny by so-called developed nations idolatry of ideology"... Bruce again

"Just last night I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become."... Femmes

"They're locking him up today/They're throwing away the key/I wonder who it'll be tomorrow -- you or me?"
-- Arthur Lee, "The Red Telephone"

"Sometime I trip on how happy we could be"
-- Prince, "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

"That ain't no freight train that you hear
Rollin' down the railroad tracks
That's a country-born piano man
Playin' in between the cracks"
-- Leiber and Stoller (for the Coasters), "That is Rock 'n' Roll"

"I will give you my finest hour
The one I spent watching you shower"
-- Debbie Harry (I think), "Picture This"

bewitched bothered and bewildered - rogers and hart

I've sinned a lot, I'm mean a lot
But I'm like sweet seventeen a lot
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - am I

I'll sing to him, each spring to him
And worship the trousers that cling to him
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - am I

When he talks, he is seeking
Words to get off his chest
Horizontally speaking, he's at his very best

Vexed again, perplexed again
Thank God, I can be oversexed again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - am I

Wise at last, my eyes at last,
Are cutting you down to your size at last
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - no more

Sometimes direct, straightforward lyrics are the best. Ex. A:

Life is meant to live
And I'm afraid -- I'm afraid to die
Please God, please God, don't take my life
Please. Please help me. Carry me home

Dennis Wilson, Carry Me Home. These lyrics can't help but be even more poignant given Wilson's (aching) voice and his (early) death.

Neil Young's another good example of moving, direct lyrics (sometimes).

I feel like a king
'Cause I just kissed my baby.

"Shakey Shake" - Pixies - Levitate Me

"backwater" - eno

It's a funny thing about humility
As soon as you know you're being humble
You're no longer humble
--T Bone Burnett

I believe when they found the body of General George A. Custer Quilled like a porcupine with Indian arrows,
He didn`t die with any honor nor any dignity, nor any valor.
I wouldn`t doubt when they found George A. Custer
American general, patriot and Indian fighter,
He died with a shit in his pants

minutemen, "The Punch Line"

Dreams are stillborn in Hollywood

-Van Dyke Parks, "Palm Desert"

You can say the sun is shining
If you really want to
I can see the moon
And it seems so clear

You can take the road
That takes you to the stars now
I can take a road
That'll see me through

[Nick Drake - Road]

The entirety of 'No Language In Our Lungs' by XTC.

Damn. Forgot:
"Oh you've got green eyes/Oh you've got blue eyes/Oh you've got gray eyes"
― Rickey Wright (Rrrickey), Thursday, May 26, 2005 7:46 PM (twelve years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The one I’d usually pick isnt’t that though, it’s

You won’t be happy with me
But give me one more chance
You won’t be happy anyway

I'd probably go with this from Being Boring..

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You'd be sitting somewhere here with me

And he was just like a great dark wing
Within the wings of a storm
I think I had met my match
He was singing
And undoing
And undoing the laces
Undoing the laces

"When you said that I wasn't worth talking to/I had to take your word on that"

Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things
And the only words that are worth remembering

TVZ, "Nothin'"

Bo Diddley - The Great Grandfather

The great grand-pappy when the land was young
Barred his door with a wagon tongue

When the times got tough and http://i.imgur.com/QbYzHTH.jpg smart
Said his prayers with his shotgun cocked

lol and the "washington football team" smart

"We won't make the same mistakes
that other lovers do
saying 'this will last a lifetime'
when it's just a year or two"

Prefab Sprout - "All The World Loves Lovers"