Bob Seger, Roll Me Away —
And as the sunset faded, I spoke To the faintest first starlight
And I said next time, Next time We’ll get it right
Or better yet, “Pretty women out walkin’ with gorillas down my street.”
From R.E.M.'s “Departure”, “A hailstone brought you back to me.”
When John Mellencamp was the less musically well regarded Johnny Cougar he had a hit with I Need A Lover. It prompted me to buy his album A Biography. Although no great shakes, the first track Born Reckless contains a couple of lines that made me laugh out loud as they are the distilled essence of every lovelorn vocal:
Well what I really want to say is
I guess I don’t know, what it is I really wanna say
It was enough to keep me interested until he came good.
My pick for the same song would be “Then I got Mary pregnant, and mister that was all she wrote, and for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat”.
They say love conquers all
You can’t start it like a car
You can’t stop it with a gun
Warren Zevon - Searching For a Heart
Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Watching the detectives already quoted upstream but its so good it gives us TWO! best single lines.
Mine is ‘They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie’
Actually, it’s “scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
Jack and Diane has been played to death but there’s actually a really great line when you start to think about what it says, especially as you get older
Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone
I’m gonna cheat and post two consecutive lines by Springsteen. Either stands well on its own for the purpose of this thread, but together they transcend almost everything he’s ever written:
She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house, but all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night, with the eyes of one who hates for just being born
I’ll see you that and raise you
Hold onto sixteen as long as you can
Changes come around real soon, make us women and men
From “I am the Walrus” the Beatles.
“Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday”
AND
“Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess
Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down”
AND
“Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe”
“We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view…”
I will also add (Kris Kristofferson via Janis Joplin):
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
I also am one of the few with a soft spot for:
“Number 9, Number 9, Number 9…”
I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this in a similar thread, but this is my favorite, evocative Springsteen line:
Fat man sittn’ on a little stool
Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you
It’s like being magically transported to a crappy little amusement park in Jersey.
“Liberty, she pirouette, when I think that I am free”
Peter Gabriel, Solsbury Hill
Pink Floyd are really hard to beat as wordsmiths:
With
Without
And who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about?
Is Hank Williams rock?
I’ve always been struck by the simple but evocative line:
The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
Followed by:
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry.
No! Not in the least.
Off-Topic
If he counts, then I nominate a lyric by Jesse Ahern, a Boston folk singer I saw open for Dropkick Murphys earlier this month;
I’m out of luck
I still drive a truck
Back and forth on 93
I just turned 35
I gotta drive, drive, drive
Just to feed my family
One line and Rock Lyrics I believe is the simple requirement.
Using a post that ignored a simple instruction to ignore 2 simple instructions is a weird move. I’ll hide your post for this reason.
You know, I’ve seen a lot of people walkin’ 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
The Pusher, performed by Steppenwolf, written by Hoyt Axton (!)
This line always strikes me as hauntingly true.
Somewhere there’s a smile with my name on it. -The Replacements