“Only football gives us thrills, rock n’ roll just pays the bills.”
Roger Taylor
“It’s a one time thing, it just happens a lot”
–Susanne Vega
So I found that life is just a game
But you know there’s never been a winner
Try your hardest, you’ll still be a loser
The world will still be turning when you’re gone
Wheels of Confusion by Black Sabbath
I like opening lines that draw you into a song. Here are a trio of examples:
Well my daddy worked in the coalmine
Till the company shut it down
Then he sat around and drank hisself blind
Till we put him back underground
Steve Earle - Oxycontin Blues
One summer evening drunk to hell
I stood there nearly lifeless
The Pogues - A Pair of Brown Eyes
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows
Two things, two things that don’t get old
Love and rock and roll
- Greg Kihn / Love and Rock And Roll
There’s a heaven and a hell and there’s an ‘Oh, well’
X - “White Girl”
Not really a rock lyric, but…
We were standing on a mountain top,
where the cactus flowers grow.
I was wishing that the world would stop,
when you said ‘we’d better go.’
Robert earl Keen
The sun in your eyes made some of the lies worth believing
- “Eye in the Sky”, Alan Parsons Project
I forgot the name of the song and the singer but the line is: Just because they so pretty that don’t mean that they so nice.
I love the intentional spoonerism in American Pie:
I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck