Indigo Girls quotes are always welcome with me!
My favorite line from them is in “World Falls”:
Everywhere I turn all the beauty just keeps shaking me
Ah, that whole song is magical. Neil Young is a right beast on guitar.
“And if California slides into the ocean like the mystics and statistics say it will,
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill.”
-Warren Zevon, “Desperados Under the Eaves”
So many Zevon lines…
“I got a part-time job at my father’s carpet store, laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score.”
Followed by another great line:
“I loaded up their furniture and took it to Spokane, and auctioned off every last Naugahyde divan.”
-Mr. Bad Example
“I can make her love disappear - For my next trick I’ll need a volunteer.”
-For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer
Some John Prine:
“Adam and Eve and Lucy and Ricky, bit the big apple and got a little sticky.”
"Esmeralda and the hunchback of Notre Dame humped each other like they had no shame.
"They paused as they posed for a polaroid photo, She whispered in his ear “exactly odo quasimodo”
-The Sins of Memphisto
My parents were both college professors, with PhDs, who had decided before I was born that the minimum I would obtain was a four-year degree. I was about 11 before I learned that college was not compulsory in the US.
Getting that paper really did make me feel so free.
And I have even gone back for an occasional class, or even certification, but nothing was like the yolk of that first degree.
My mother’s disappointment when I was not class valedictorian was palpable, and her pride when my brother was could have been sliced up and burned to warm you all winter.
My college graduation exercises had an outdoor venue, with no alternate for bad weather, and when I woke up in the morning, it was raining in sheets. I went back to bed for an hour, then got up, made a big pot of tea, and played “Closer to Fine” over and over on the stereo.
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes”
One of my (very many) favourites by them.
And then there’s: “The symptom of the universe is written in your eyes” Symptom of the Universe by Black Sabbath
“Out of the gloom I rise up from my tomb into impending doom…” God is Dead by Black Sabbath
“And they want to force my hand
Until I take what I wanted
And break all their lies
And defeat the fucking liars
Smash all the temples
And crawl through the rubble
And cry to the fallen”
Last of my Kind by Alice in Chains
“Visionaries dance your night away
There’s no tomorrow living for today”
Long Gone by UFO
Don Henley (or Bruce Hornsby) “The End of the Innocence”
They’re beating plowshares into swords for this tired old man that we elected king
I can’t come up one…
“And my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite that’s choking on the splinters”
“ Have you ever watched a moonbeam
As it slid across your windowpane
Or struggled with a bit of rain
Or danced about the weather vane
Or sat along a moving train
And wondered where the train has been”
The Moonbeam Song by Nilsson
The OP asked for a “Single line”
I can think of many multi-passage songs that might qualify as “best”
If we can stretch the single line a bit. I like this one.
Cold as ice, hard as stone
As he walks into the room, with
Another man who was feelin the same way
All hell’s breakin loose
Bang Bang, shoot’em up
Bang Bang, blow you away
-Tesla
It wasn’t the bullet that laid him to rest, was the low spark of high heeled boys
-Traffic
Like acid and oil on a madman’s face, reason tends to fly away
-Blue Oyster Cult
You could have a whole thread on Dylan lyrics, another on Bruce Cockburn, and two on Leonard Cohen…
… but the first time I heard a album that made me stop cleaning the house, pick up the LP jacket and read along with the lyrics was 10,000 Maniacs “In My Tribe”.
What caught my ear was the song About The Weather, lamenting her inability to get out of bed:
Do I need someone
Here to scold me
Or do I need someone
Who’ll grab and pull me
Out of this four poster dull torpor…
Pulling downward.
(“Four poster dull torpor” was what got me. Brilliant.)
There’s people running 'round loose in the world
Ain’t got nothing better to do
They make a meal of some bright-eyed kid
You need someone looking after you
Nicks- Petty
and the poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
Did you catch Springsteen on The Tonight Show last week? Fallon asked him about a fan controversy whether the line should read “sways” or “waves”? Bruce pulled out a copy of the Born to Run LP and said he insisted on perfection in every aspect of the album so the correct lyrics would be printed therein. The written lyrics were “waves”. Bruce did a double-take and said “For 50 years I’ve been singing sways. I don’t know how that got printed wrong.” I was so surprised by this I pulled my 50-year old Born to Run LP out to check. Sure enough, it’s written “waves”. I’ve always heard “sways”, rhymes with “plays”. Either one works, really.
For my obligatory Springsteen lyric, I’d like to submit all of The River but will distill it down to this:
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
As great as Born to Run and other early Springsteen albums are for mining amazing lyrics, I’ll posit there’s no more fertile ground than Blood on the Tracks.
“In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes, I bargained for salvation and she gave me a lethal dose”
Speaking of that Cult…
I’d like to do it to your daughter on a dirt road