Favorite lyrics

Barry said:
John Prine "Angel From Montgomery"

I am an old woman
named after my mother
my old man is just another
Child who's grown old
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If dreams were thunder and lightning was desire this old house would have burned down a long time ago.

I first heard this song come from Susan Tedeschis mouth and it was uncanny. Great song.

I am loving this thread, never even heard of dc berman. This will be a fun deep dive.

One of my favorite songs is Sun Kil Moon “Carry Me Ohio”

I can’t count to all the lovers I’ve burned through so why do i still burn for you, i cannot say.

Oiy.

Keep it coming
 
jjjimi84 said:
If dreams were thunder and lightning was desire this old house would have burned down a long time ago.

I first heard this song come from Susan Tedeschis mouth and it was uncanny. Great song.

I am loving this thread, never even heard of dc berman. This will be a fun deep dive.

One of my favorite songs is Sun Kil Moon “Carry Me Ohio”

I can’t count to all the lovers I’ve burned through so why do i still burn for you, i cannot say.

Oiy.

Keep it coming
Click to expand...
Bonnie Rait does a great job on it also
 
Elvis Costello is probably my favorite artist of all time. I've been digging in to his music for more than 20 years now and I can never seem to get enough. He's probably the closest thing to an idol for me that I can find in music.

Here he is taking some shots at his idols:

Was it a millionaire who said "Imagine no possessions"?
A poor little schoolboy who said "We don't need no lessons"?
The rabid rebel dogs ransack the shampoo shop
The pop princess is downtown shooting up
And if that goddess if fit for burning
The sun will struggle up the world will still keep turning
Madman standing by the side of the road saying
"Look at my eyes, look at my eyes, look at my eyes, look at my eyes"
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Now you can't afford to fake all the drugs your parents used to take
Because of their mistakes you'd better be wide awake

This song is also great for the irony in it's presentation versus the content of the lyrics. EC is a master at irony and wordplay. I think the perfect artist for me would be some weird amalgamation between Elvis Costello and Warren Zevon.
 
jjjimi84 said:
One of my favorite songs is Sun Kil Moon “Carry Me Ohio”
Click to expand...
His song Gustavo always gets me. What a storyteller.


I wrote a check and I bought an old house
I got a TV and a worn-out couch
I hired a guy named Gustavo and his friends
To fix it up from the foundation

Oh god, those motherfuckers drove me nuts
With their electrical saws and mariachi music
But they really stepped it up, man
And they put their backs into it

But they lived pretty far away
They wanted to stay for a couple of months
Till the work got done, and I said "sure"
Made 'em a key and got 'em a microwave

Gustavo was an illegal immigrant
He took the money that I gave him
And he went and spent it on strippers and casinos
And, hey, every once in a while with them I'd go

It gets boring out in the mountains, you know
Choppin' wood, fallin' asleep to the TV snow
Makin' ground beef tacos
On the top of a pot-belly stove

Eatin' noodles from a Styrofoam cup
Waitin' for a ride who never shows up
Walkin' into town, browsin' the windows
Lookin' at rifles, lookin' at ammo

At night when everything's closed
In my wet boots and my winter clothes

One night they were headed for Tahoe
They asked me along but I said "fuck no"
'Cause I was tired and my money was tight
And they just laughed and said "alright"

And on the way back they got stopped
By a redneck Sunnyside highway cop
Gustavo was drunk and had an ounce of pot
And spent the night on a jailhouse cot

They deported him back to Mexico
He called me collect from a Tijuana pay phone
Asking, "Man, could you wire me money?"
Twenty-five hundred for a border coyote

He needed work and he missed his family
But I hung up and I said, "I'm sorry"
But I hung up and I felt uneasy
I hung up and my heart was heavy
I hung up and my back was aching
Pickin' up the work they left in front of me
The demoed walls and the pulled-up floors
The busted up cabinets and the broken drawers
The kitchen sink was layin' in the backyard
And I looked down and my hands were tremblin'
And I looked up and my roof was leaking

Now I still sleep on my beat-up old couch
In the living room of my unfinished house
I got a licensed contractor
But he quit 'cause his wife was dyin' of cancer

But what the hell, I'm just here tryin' to find answers
To find peace of mind, to get a piece of the rock
A place to put my mantle clock
And my old guitars and gently rock
Back and forth in my front porch chair
Without a worry, without a care
I'm doing alright but I'm still not there

My house ain't done, but it's alright
Floors ain't level, but I ain't some suburbanite
Who cares about bathroom tiles
Straight lines and building codes and Chinese wind chimes

My house ain't done, but it's fine
Come out here from time to time
In December for the snow
And in July to watch the roses grow

My gardener asks had I seen Gustavo
I just laughed and I said "fuck no
Not since that night he left"
His hair combed back, headed for Tahoe

My girlfriend asked had I heard from that guy from Mexico
I said, "You mean Gustavo?"
And I just laughed and I said, "No
Not since he called from the Tijuana pay phone"

Really, I don't give much thought to Gustavo

I love to go out to the mountains, though
And in the fall, feel the breeze blow
And in the winter, watch the falling snow
And in the spring, love the rainbows
And in the summer, smell the roses
White and red and yellow
 
Anything from G.G. Allin. Actually, he was a pretty good wordsmith but there was something very wrong with that man...
 
I'll do a nod to Tool, for the song "Stinkfist".

Why? It's a perfect encapsulation of how unexpectedly layered Maynard James Keenan's lyrical work can be...

The conciet of the song is, on its face, entirely taboo. I mean, the name is "Stinkfist", use your imagination.

But beneath it is a theme that is entirely common, identifiable, and human: the kind of existential boredom when you're just going through the motions in a dull haze and desperate for anything to break you out.

So the narrator resorts to increasingly drastic measures to do so...effectively using the taboo of the subject matter to provide the emotional wallop to illustrate the narrator's desperation.

There's something kind of sad about the way that things have come to be,
desensitized to everything,
what became of subtlety?
 
Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau
Some belong to strangers and some to folks you know
Holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand
To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands
Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop
And an illustrated book about birds
See a lot up there but don't be scared
Who needs action when you got words
You've finished with the mop then you can stop
And look at what you've done
The plateau's clean, no dirt to be seen
And the work, it was fun

Wow that is some genius level song writing. Especially this part.

"Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop
And an illustrated book about birds
See a lot up there but don't be scared
Who needs action when you got words"
 
I am an anti-christ
I am an anachyst

I love that "rhyme". Apparently it annoyed the hell out of Glen Matlock.

She was a girl from Birmingham, She just had an abortion
She was a case of insanity, her name was Pauline, she lived in a tree

Apparently that was based on a true story. I have always loved it because it got me into a lot of trouble when I worked in a record department in a department store. Can you believe that a customer actually complained about the music coming from a record bar?? There is a lot of humour and a lot of interesting social commentary on Never Mind the Bollocks. I wish they had done another album.

Don't eat stuff off the sidewalk.
You don't need it - so don't eat it

Lux Interior was a wise man. You can see how he has learned life's lessons the hard way. It's generous how he shares his experiences with us via song.

Life is hard Full of stuff

I mean you just can't argue with that. He had a way of breaking down the complications of life into the most basic facts. Allegory? Metaphor? Allusion? Who needs them?
 
We can be together
Ah, you and me
We should be together

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America
In order to survive
We steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide, and deal
We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young

We should be together
Come on all you people standin' around
Our life's too fine to let it die
We should be together
 
Peter Hammill may be one of the greatest relatively-unknown lyricists alive.

There's a house with no door, I'm living there
At nights it gets cold and the days are hard to bear inside
There's a house with no roof, so the rain creeps in
Falling through my head as I try to think out time

I don't know you, you say you know me
That may be so, there's so much that I am unsure of
You call my name, but it sounds unreal, I forget how I feel
My body's rejecting the cure

There's a house with no bell but then nobody calls
I sometimes find it hard to tell if any are alive at all outside
There's a house with no sound; yes, it's quiet there
There's not much point in words if there's no-one to share in time

I've learned my lines, I know them so well
I am ready to tell whoever will finally come in
Of the line in my mind that's cold in the night
It doesn't seem right when there's that little dark figure running
Won't somebody help me?

There's a house with no door and there's no living there
One day it became a wall, well I didn't really care at the time
There's a house with no light, all the windows are sealed
Overtaxed and strained – now nothing is revealed but time

I don't know you, you say you know me
That may be so, there's so much that I am unsure of
You call my name, but it sounds unreal, I forget how I feel
My body's rejecting the cure
Won't somebody help me?
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Think my fav is a line from Skip Tracer by Sonic Youth, it's spoken word over a cool groove.

"Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers"

The lyrics to the whole thing are great, but that line in particular has stuck with me.

Also a big fan of Freak Scene's lyrics (Dinosaur Jr.)
 
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