Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks.
I can easily imagine looking down from a tower block of flats on to rows of back to back terrace houses, smokey chimneys, sounds of train clickety clacking I the distance probably some time in early April - its been a nice spring day and its cooling down - the scene looking something like a High Definition version of a Monet painting
Wouldn’t that be “Night Owl” also by Gerry Rafferty…?
No, since I don’t know that song. But I’ll check it out, thanks.
Forgot to mention Pink Floyd’s song “Echoes”, from the album Meddle. When I listen to that song, it’s like one long hallucination of swimming in the middle of the ocean, deep below the surface. There are, or may be, other creatures in that deep dark water, but it’s not at all frightening. I belong there.
Hmmm, I’ve noticed something…all the songs I would describe as evocative (Echoes, Boys of Summer, Cool Change, Sailing) have to do with water.
I was just revisiting “For the Roses” (Joni Mitchell) for the first time in quite awhile and I was instantly 13 years old again and feeling all the angst that goes with that.
That was going to be my contribution too:
It’s a remarkable song and I instantly replay my own subconscious video every time I hear it.
A lot of songs also mentioned evoke mental images for me in the same manner.
Robbie Robertson’s “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” like “Year of the Cat” just paints itself.
A lot of Beach Boys songs, like “All Summer Long” too.
Man, I can smell summer.
Another one is Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.”
I have the same mental image of laying in bed listening to a thunder storm every time I hear this song.
I think you make a good point. It also might be partly because when you’re younger you simply have more time to listen and ponder. Also also, you may not fully understand the lyrics and so might let the music and whatever your understanding of the words might be color your interpretation.
I’m having a hard time coming up with anything in the last ten years that qualifies as the kind of thing I’m talking about. There are plenty of songs that I like and that touch me, but not quite what I mean.
Off the top of my head, the most recent thing I can come up with Shawn Colvin’s Sunny Came Home, and that’s from 1996! Holy cow, that song just gives me chills. I know the lyrics add a lot and they, combined with the mandolin (I think it’s a mandolin)are so effective at portraying the tragedy of it.
Joan Osborne, “Right Hand Man”:
Let me use your toothbrush
Have you got a clean shirt?
My panties are in a wad
At the bottom of my purse
I walk into the street
The air’s so cool
I’m wired and I’m tired
And I’m grinnin’ like a fool
Yeah, pretty evocative.
Since there’s been some discussion of how, um, dated most of the songs are that we’ve come up with, here’s something more recent*: “Stolen Dance” by Milky Chance.
I want you
We can bring it on the floor
Never danced like this before
We don’t talk about it
Dancing on, do the boogie all night long
Stoned in paradise
Shouldn’t talk about it
I can just feel the heat and desire in the dancing.
*Wikipedia says it was released two years ago, but I’ve only heard in in the past few months. But it’s at least from this decade.
Copperhead Road makes me want to go fight The Man.
Well, this one may be pretty obvious, but “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors makes me think of driving down a dark midnight road in the rain.
There are a lot of old instrumentals that produce images for me (as they are intended to do). Like “Theme from the Magnificent Seven” always makes me feel like I’m somewhere in the high plains, with a big sky overhead. And “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” makes me feel like I’m in the South Pacific. And “Soul Coaxing” (“Ame Caline”) makes me feel like… I don’t know, being on a mountaintop at sunset, with a fresh wind in my face and the stars just coming out.
Thank you for remidning me of this song. Though not “evocative” for *me *in the spirit in which I started the thread, I’ve always dug this, as well as her better known hit “One of Us”.
My instant mental picture takes place in New York. For the most part, everything I picture taking place in NY is gray, so in my mind the picture is almost monochromatic.
The view is first person, walking down many flights of stair of a walk-up , sort of rundown apartment building on a weekday morning. It’s no “walk of shame”; just another day. and she (I) have a big black handbag. When the line “panties in my purse” is sung, I picture a kind of Schindler’s List style shot of full-color lacy pink panties crumbled at the bottom of the bag.
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Another good one that, while doesn’t necessarliy “effect” me, is a pretty stand out song that definitely put an image in my mind.
Not knowing anything about “Milkey Chance” when I first heard it, I pictured the artists from somewhere in the U.S. south (probably due to the slighty “hoedowny” flavor of the song).
I saw rough wood floors and maybe a quartet of guys jamming off to the side. They’re not full-on hillbillies, but sort of rural dudes that are musicians that know how to jam and also don’t really care if they get famous, but are almost doing it for a goof; their priority is their farm life but they do have a sense that they could make it in the music industry if they really tried. They’re just playing a local gig.
Imagine my surprise when I saw them on VH1, and they turn out to be three young Germans!
Lookin’ for Love by Johnny Lee
Makes me think of John Travolta in a cowboy hat. And Eddy Murphy. 
I’ll take that as a compliment 
I get two images from it: the first, in his apartment (“let me use your toothbrush, have you got a clean shirt?”) and the second, on the street as she’s walking home, sans underwear, wearing his shirt, hair still a little mussed, with a big ‘just fucked’ grin, giving off the vibe of a great and totally unanticipated night of sex, and not caring who sees it.
A lot of people are rather down on Osborne, but I wonder if they’ve heard this one.
“More Than This” by Roxy Music– a lovely melancholy song that just makes me feel that the narrator is looking back (at a relationship? his whole life?) and refusing to feel bad that there isn’t anything bigger out there.
This isn’t the official interpretation of course, just mine.
And I second “Year of the Cat”, “Under the Milky Way”, and “Boys of Summer” (though I prefer the remake by The Ataris).
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… and “Boys of Summer” (though I prefer the remake by The Ataris).
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Interesting. The Ataris version is okayish until “I saw a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac”. That always takes me right out of the song, and I think “riiiiiiight; and you young wannabe punks actually know who Black Flag is”. Not saying it’s rational or fact based, but that’s what I’ve always thought since the first time I heard it.
Do instrumentals count?
Because I have a very strong and relatively unpleasant reaction to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ROYu_ELpxs
As soon as it starts, I’m a very small kid in a reception hall in the middle of nowhere on some weird-ass day (say, Tuesday). It’s the middle of the afternoon or early in the evening (not dark yet) and I’m feeling kind of lost between all the adults who pay no attention to the few kids that are present. The crowd is not exactly distinguished either, lets say the local equivalent of rednecks. Strong lights, sound of glasses clinking. I’m getting tired, perhaps slightly ill and want to go home but I know that we’re not leaving soon and it’s a long way home (for a kid anyway).
So many I could probably mention but one or two of the top of my head: in Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits, the line “Like the Spanish City to me, when we were kids”. It refers to a permanent fun fair, the line evokes one of those intense evenings in early summer with the sun going down around 9pm, the smell of burgers and onions, and intense glazy-eyed teenage passions.
Eight Days a Week by The Beatles - the fade in, the enthusiasm of the singing, the harmonies of the chorus, for me it always evoked Britain in the mid 1960s more than any other Beatles song. In particular, for some reason it makes me think of offices and how that time was the high water mark of analogue office technology. Even though I wasn’t born until a few years later there’s something about 1965 which seems so innocent and optimistic. I thought all of this for years and then came Mad Men to confirm it all. There’s a scene at the first board meeting of 1965 where Joan says something like “Gentlemen, let’s begin 1965” - they don’t do that for any other year.
If I Needed Someone by The Beatles - the jangly guitar bits that both follow and accompany the harmonies evoke an image of sunlit uplands - endless rolling grassy hills with angled sunshine.
The same sunlit uplands are evoked by the line “grassland away” on Sheep by Pink Floyd.