I am looking for songs that basically tell a story that go in a circle.
Like the song “Where Have All The Flowers Gone.”
Flowers -> Picked by girls
Girls -> Give To Men
Men -> Go To War
War -> Kills them, they’re in a grave
Grave -> People put flowers on the grave
Girls pick flowers and they circle starts over.
I don’t really care what it’s about, whether life or love or such
There’s a Hole in the Bucket, Dear Liza
“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” was a favorite of my youth. You could sing that forever, if you didn’t mind being driven insane.
“Fool’s Overture,” the concluding song on the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest Moments, both begins and ends with an orchestra tuning up. The conductor taps his baton at the end and then there is only silence.
London’s Burning.
I know a song that’ll get on your nerves,
Get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that’ll get on your nerves,
And this is how it goes…
Found a Peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut just now.
I just now found a peanut, found a peanut just now.
Many verses, basic idea: person finds a peanut, eats it, gets sick and dies, goes to heaven, then hell, then wakes to find it a dream. Then finds a peanut.
It’ll kill a good twenty minutes done right.
You remind me of the babe…
What babe?
The babe with the power…
What power?
The power of voodoo…
Who do?
You do
Do what?
etc.
There’s that “So we met at dawn at the gates of Paris” thing. (Not a song.)
Jack Straw by The Grateful Dead.
We can share the women,
We can share the wine.
Sinatra, It Was A Very Good Year.
I knew a man named Michael Finnegan
He grew whiskers on his chin again
The wind came up and blew them in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan
Begin Again!
This is the song that doesn’t end
Yes it goes on and on, my friend
Some people started singing it
Not knowing what it was
And they’ll continue singing it
Forever just because
This is the song that doesn’t end…
Oops, I posted the entire lyrics to a song…
Mods if that isn’t kosher then please amend my post (it’s going to make for a short thread though).
This is probably overkill, but the first thing I thought of was IQ’s concept album Subterranea.
“Are you inside, Provider, or am I?” begins and closes the story…
Ilkla moor baht’at
(On Ilkley moor without one’s hat) The word baht, is a contraction of ‘bar the’. To be withouth something that one should have, in this region we say they are bar that item. Bar= without or lacking something.
“Cat’s In The Cradle” by Harry Chapin and “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles have a return to the beginning in an ironic way.
Ditto Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
Where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
There is a Youtube video of Pete Seeger (about 80) joining an elderly Peter, Paul, and Mary for this song, and reminiscing about writing it. And he got it from a story told him by people in a town with a Civil War graveyard – I don’t recall the details but he was immediately touched by the circularity of the events.
Not lyrics, but what about Javanese gamelan? Not many things are more circular than that in music!
Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets, and *Do Re Mi *from “The Sound of Music” have pretty obvious circular structures.
I cannot remember the name of the song or the singer (although I’ll probably do one of these :smack: if someone else finds it) but there’s a song from at least 30 years ago which starts off with the singer saying that she’s in love with some guy, who is in love with someone else, who is in love with someone else, etc, etc until it comes back to someone who’s in love with her.