Favorite song lyrics?

[ryan]

Whether you like to admit it or not, you've probably got a favorite song lyric. What are some your favorite lyrics, and why?

And, for those interested:

What makes a good song lyric?

Has a song lyric ever had any influence on you? The first time you had sex, or drank a beer, or climbed a mountain, or did drugs, what music were you listening to, or thinking about? Was it the music itself, or the lyrics, that you think had the most influence? Or was it a cumulative effect?

If you write lyrics, from where do you draw your inspiration?

[ryan]

Here's something to get the conversation started. File this under, "Where do you draw your inspiration?"

I've recently been reading a short-story collection by Kevin Brockmeier, called "Things that Fall from the Sky." This guy has a way with words that astounds me. His eye for detail and ability to craft emotional resonance out of crystalline little paragraphs has influenced the way I think about the lyrics I write. I think, "If I could write song lyrics as well as this guy writes prose, that would be something."

Here's an excerpt from one of his short stories, called "Apples." In this aside, the narrator introduces us to his junior-high classmate Allison Downy, the girl he's already informed us gave him his first kiss. He takes us through his entire relationship with her in less than 2 pages, and I think it's some the most beautiful and expertly-written prose I've ever read:

Let me tell you about Allison Downey.

In the Monday morning assembly at which we began our seventh-grade year, I sat behind a girl I hadn't seen before. She was wearing a lake-red pullover with a dangling hood, and her collar dipped at the root of her neck, revealing a little chain of vertebrae. During the morning prayer I followed this ridge of bone with my eyes, sliding occasionally into her hood, then climbing to her collar like some tiny mountaineer. We stood and sat for the pledge of allegiance, and Principal Raymer took the microphone for his introductory address. When I noticed a loose hair on the girl's shoulder, a certain tidiness in me insisted that I remove it. I remember feeling anxious and slightly abashed as I reached out my hand. The instant I touched her she turned around. I started in my chair and, coloring, presented the hair to her. I expected to be met with a show of irritation, but I wasn't. Instead, she signaled me near, then demonstrated something to me that I have not since forgotten: how if you hold a hair taut and draw your fingers toward the root, it will make a short, thin sound like the hum of a spinning top.

This was Allison.

Allison wore long sheer skirts that rustled against her shoes, and she spoke in a scramble of words when she was nervous. She walked down the stairways of our school like a demonstration of motion, her left hand sweeping the banister and her feet skipping the final step. (She took great pleasure, I think, in practiced little gestures like these -- blindly shutting a familiar door, perfectly striking a matchbook match.) I had three classes with her that year: earth science, English, and geography. One evening, as we sat in her bedroom plotting a posterboard map of Brazil (an assignment for Mister Ullom's geography class), a small down feather floated from my winter coat and settled on the fringe of her eyelashes; we worked for half an hour before she noticed it. One afternoon as she waited for the bus, she found a woolly orange caterpillar bunching and elongating over her sandal, and when she showed it to John Peacock, he stepped on it. She glowered silently at him for the next three days. At the last football game of our seventh-grade year, a night when the cold shaped our words into little white mushroom puffs, I asked her if she wanted a drink from the concessions stand, and after a prolonged quiet, she said that she'd been thinking recently about the difference between good guilt and bad guilt and that though she wasn't sure, and there was certainly room for disagreement, she thought that she might have a lot of bad guilt. I hid a smile and arched my eyebrows at Matt Newton. Allison began to say something, muffled herself, and nodded. "You know what I'm sick of?" she said after a moment. "I'm sick of significant glances." And when she seethed off through the bleachers, I hurried behind her to apologize.

Allison collected glass snowstorm balls, which she kept in neat rows on the shelves of her bedroom. I remember shaking them with her and watching the water churn inside: what would it be like, we wondered, to live in such a place -- a home that might stagger and right itself, a silver eruption of snow? She liked to walk through the revolving doors of shopping malls and multistory office buildings without touching the partitions, and she could do this with such casual grace that it seemed as if she were simply passing through an empty doorway, sheets of glass whirling around her. Once on Halloween she gave me a plastic ring crowned with a flared orange spider, and I wore it like a talisman until its band split in the laundry.

Allison lived with her mother and small brother (her father was remarried). She was careful and muddled and dreaming and lovely. And though she would move with her family one winter to the forests and slate-blue skies of the Pacific Northwest, and I would not see her again, for a long time I believed in my sleep that I was still living in those months and years, awakening with the thought that she'd be waiting in the lunchroom.

Jeff, Justin and Tyler, going back to our discussion regarding "the particular is the universal," I think this is a good example of what I envision that to mean. I think it also demonstrates the "don't tell me, show me!" philosophy. Brockmeier's description of Allison achieves a remarkable effect largely due to the fact that he doesn't just tell us what she was like. He shows us, in very clear detail, and lets these details speak for themselves.

[Jeff]

Some (key word—so much I am just not thinking of right now) of my favorite pop lyrics:

One Offs:

Hallelujah
Fairy Tale of New York
What’s so Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding
Vincent
Joey
Pictures of You
Mr. Blue Sky
More Than This

Repeat Offenders:

Beatles: Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby
Peter Gabriel: Don’t Give Up, Big Time
Sting/Police: Moon Over Bourbon Street, Every Breath You Take
Martin Gore: But Not Tonight, Somebody, It Doesn’t Matter
Neil Finn: Fall at Your Feet, Into Temptation, Four Seasons in One Day
Bruce Springsteen: State Trooper, Highway Patrolman, My Father’s House
Billy Joel: Vienna, Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song), And So It Goes
Randy Newman: Redneck, Love Story (You and Me), Sail Away, Political Science, Louisiana 1927, In Germany Before the War, Real Emotional Girl (!), God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind), and When She Loved Me

I guess that Randy Newman is my favorite lyricist. But I draw almost no inspiration from him. No one can write like he can, because no one else is him. It took me a long while to come to this conclusion. For many years I tried to write like Billy Joel but never really pulled it off. Ultimately, I think everyone has to write in his own voice. And the sad fact is, not every voice is interesting or compelling. I think almost anyone can be an artist if they devote some time and energy to exploring their talents, but only a handful of artists are worthy of serious attention.

As for influence, I know very clearly the song that has most influenced my songwriting, and in every aspect. It’s one I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but it’s:

Billy Joel’s All for Leyna.

Jeff

[Thanin]

People might think this is a joke but it's not.


Pigface: "Got the tapeworm; I want out."

Half the time I feel like I have one, the other half I feel like I am one.

[mj]

"If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?"

I've got this new, great appreciation for Modest Mouse these days (thanks, Justin!)

[ryan]

I think Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock is pretty high on my list of great lyricists. I like the way he composes his lyrics out of sets of related thoughts, and how each thought is condensed into a terse little catchphrase. He doesn't strike me as a particularly happy dude, but man, he writes so well about the dark side of human experience. Some fragments of his that I really like:

"Everything will fall / Fall right into place."

"I woke up this morning, and it seemed to me / that every day turns out to be / a little bit more like Bukouski / and yeah, I know he's a pretty good read / but God, who'd wanna be / God who'd wanna be such an asshole?"

"So now we're drownin' in birthday cakes"
(used as a metaphor for getting older)

"The universe is shaped exactly like the earth / If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were."

"Does not exist. Take an exit."

The entire song of "Space Travel is Boring" (www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/modestmouse/spacetravelisboring.html)

"These walls are paper-thin and everyone hears every little sound. Everyone's a voyeur is them watching me watch them watch me right now."

"Well some guy comes in / lookin' a bit like everyone I ever seen. / He moves just like crisco disco / breath 100% Listerine. / He says, looking at something else / but directing everything to me, / "Every time anyone gets on their knees to pray, well it makes my telephone ring. / And I'll be damned." / He said, "You were right. No one's running this whole thing." / He had a theory, too. / He said that God takes care of himself / yeah God takes care of himself / And you of you."

Yeah, I dig that stuff.

[ryan]

A few lyrics I like from Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" album:

"I'll love you with all of the madness in my soul."

"The poets down here don't write nothing at all / They just stand back and let it all be."

"With her killer graces, and those secret places that no boy can fill
With her hand on her hips, oh and that smile on her lips because she knows that it kills me
With her soft french-cream standing in the doorway like a dream, I wish she'd just leave me alone
Because French-cream won't soften them boots and French kisses will not break that heart of stone
With her long hair falling and her eyes that shine like the midnight sun
Oh, she's the one."

[Betterout]

I've been a big Bowie fan for a pretty long time (I remember Dave and I raving about "Let's Dance" a coupla decades ago). That said, until I read the lyrics to the song "Young Americans," I seriously disliked it. Today I think it's sort of a mixed bag lyrically, but I think the best ideas on the song are good enough to forgive the less than excellent ones. Some of my favorite lines in the song are as follows:

"It took him minutes, took her nowhere / heaven knows, she'd have taken anything"
"We live for just these twenty years / Do we have to die for the fifty more?"
"Would you carry a razor /In case, just in case of depression?"
"Her heart's been broken just like you have"
"Ain't there a pen that will write before they die? ... Ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?"

Bowie has had lots of interesting ideas that worked, and some that didn't work at all. Early on, he said he was influenced by William S. Burrough's 'cut and paste' style of writing, wherein an idea is written down fully, cut into strips of random length, tossed into the air, and pasted onto a sheet of paper in the order they're picked up. Apparently, he then used the randomized sheet as inspiration for new lyrics. The goal of this is to determine how much of idea remains when the language fails. One such experiment was "Bewlay Brothers." I think the words are dreadful for the most part, but they're packed with creepy and iconic imagery that still sticks with me.

And so the story goes they wore the clothes
They said the things to make it seem improbable
The whale of a lie like they hope it was
And the Goodmen Tomorrow
Had their feet in the wallow
And their heads of Brawn were nicer shorn
And how they bought their positions with saccharin and trust
And the world was asleep to our latent fuss
Sighing, the swirl through the streets
Like the crust of the sun
The Bewlay Brothers
In our Wings that Bark
Flashing teeth of Brass
Standing tall in the dark
Oh, And we were Gone
Hanging out with your Dwarf Men
We were so turned on
By your lack of conclusions

I was Stone and he was Wax
So he could scream, and still relax, unbelievable
And we frightened the small children away
And our talk was old and dust would flow
Thru our veins and Lo! it was midnight
Back at the kitchen door
Like the grim face on the Cathedral floor
And the solid book we wrote
Cannot be found today
And it was Stalking time for the Moonboys
The Bewlay Brothers
With our backs on the arch
In the Devil-may-be-here
But He can't sing about that
Oh, And we were Gone
Real Cool Traders
We were so Turned On
You thought we were Fakers

Now the dress is hung, the ticket pawned
The Factor Max that proved the fact
Is melted down
And woven on the edging of my pillow
Now my Brother lays upon the Rocks
He could be dead, He could be not
He could be You
He's Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and Caricature
Shooting-up Pie-in-the-Sky
The Bewlay Brothers
In the feeble and the Bad
Bewlay Brothers
In the Blessed and Cold
In the Crutch-hungry Dark
Was where we flayed our Mark
Oh, and we were Gone
Kings of Oblivion
We were so Turned On
In the Mind-Warp Pavilion

Lay me place and bake me Pie
I'm starving for me Gravy
Leave my shoes, and door unlocked
I might just slip away, hey

Just for the Day, Hey!
Hey, Please come Away, Hey!

I've always admired Bowie's willingness to experiment musically, lyrically, stylistically, and--let's face it--sexually, as well as his obsession with notions of identity. He's a hacky has-been now, but I think he was truly an adventurous soul in his prime. I'd go so far as to call him an Artist... note the capital A, Jeff. He's been a big inspiration to me on numerous levels, and he's written some of my favorite lyrics, "Space Oddity," "Five Years," "Ziggy Stardust," "Ashes to Ashes," and several others included.

[chris]

They Might Be Giants, "End of the Tour"

Cadmus Park, "The Diarist" (yeah, it's about me, but what are you gonna do?)

XTC, "Dear God" (cliched, maybe, but oh well)

[Betterout]

Way to rock the 'Park, dude!