On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolor in the rain
Don’t bother asking for explanations
She’ll just tell you that she came
In the year of the cat
Asia “Without You”
Gazing at a sunrise reflected in your clear eyes
Misty morning forest, smoke fires
Make our way through the broken day
I couldn’t stand to stay without you
Funny how some lyrics rise to the top due to the times, the zeitgeist…
Even an old Elvis Costello song I haven’t heard in years.
But lately, when people ask me how I’m doing, the first thing that springs to mind is:
Well, I used to be disgusted,
Now I try to be amused.
Early one morning while making the rounds
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down
I went right home and I went to bed
I stuck that lovin’ forty-four beneath my head.
-Johnny Cash, the original gangster rapper.
And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart.
High up in the sky the little stars climb,
Always reminding me that we’re apart.
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein
Dennis is a menace with his “anyone for tennis?”
And beseeching me to come and keep the score
And Maud saya “Oh Lord! I’m so terribly bored!”
I really can’t stand it anymore
Kristofferson is one of the great lyricists in American music:
See the ruins on the hill
Where the smoke is hanging still,
Like the echo of an age long forgotten.
There’s a story of a home,
Crushed beneath those blackened bones.
And a roof that fell, before the beams were rotten. - “Darby’s Castle “
Casey joins the hollow sound
Of silent people walking down
The stairway to the subway and the shadows down below.
Following their footsteps through the neon-darkened corridor
Of silent desperation,
Never speaking to a soul. - “Casey’s Last Ride”
Ani DiFranco’s another:
Sitting in the board room,
The I’m-so-bored room,
Listening to the suits talk about their world.
They can make straight lines
Out of almost anything
‘Cept for the lines of my upper lip,
When it curls. - “Blood In The Boardroom”
I opened up a bank account when I was nine years old I closed it when I was eighteen I gave them every penny I’d earned and they gave my blood and my urine a number
And now I am sitting in this waiting room, playing with the toys.
I am here to exercise
My freedom of choice. - “Lost Woman Song”
A hand held over a candle in angst fuelled bravado
A carbon trail scores a moist stretched palm
The sky was Bible black in Lyon
When I met the Magdalene
She was paralysed in a streetlight
She refused to give her name
When the taxis gather in mock Solemnity
Funeral hearses court the death of virginity
A love song with no validity
Pretend you never meant that much to me
Numb, a Valium child, bored by meaningless collisions
A lonely stretch of headlight, diamonds trapped in black ice
A mirror cracked among the white lines
I saw a war widow in a launderette
Washing the memories from her husband’s clothes
She had medals pinned to a threadbare greatcoat
A lump in her throat with cemetery eyes
how to miss the entire sentiment of a song.