I love this song. And yes, when it’s a spectacularly beautiful sounding song, it’s hard to say if the lyrics are what you respond to.
I’m not a lyricist, but I can give you what the lines mean. Not nice and poetic like the original, but at least you’ll have the meaning.
I’m sorry, my love
I know that it’s already over
Broken hearts. . .
Hope that has left. . .
Whenever the moon shines,
I know that you won’t be sleeping
Not you
Not me
The sad regret has already come
We have to be apart forever
Well, hope this snippet doesn’t cross the line, but if it does, well… less just wouldn’t cover enough in this case.
From REM’s Green You Are The Everything:
Here’s a scene
You’re in the back seat laying down
The windows wrap around
To sound of the travel and the engine
All you hear is time stand still in travel
and feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn’t end
But slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you’ve ever seen
And they’re there for you
For you alone
You are the everything
Maybe this one is for pre-seatbelt kids, but it so perfectly captures the feeling of falling asleep in my parent’s car on the way home, past my bedtime, with the moon mysteriouly following us and the engine throbbing away. Really, for me a perfect song.
I would quote the entire work of John Darnielle, but that might violate fair use. So this is merely an excerpt from my favorite Mountain Goats hate song, “Baboon.”
So much bitterness in so few words! And from “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod,” the most beautiful song I know that combines Biblical allusion and imagery from evolutionary biology to tell a story about surviving an abusive childhood.
And to those who mentioned Regina Spektor’s brilliant “On the Radio”: yes! Doesn’t she just make you love the world?
I don’t know why, but hearing that others also love this song makes me very happy. 
An excerpt from Todd Rundgren’s “Love of the Common Man”
I would be so pleased to spend some time
To hear a little talk about what’s been on your mind
'Cause it don’t take long
To turn my head around
If it comes easy
'Cause everyone needs the love of the common man
'Cause everyone
http://trconnection.com/lyrics/Song.11.8
Rundgren writes a lot of beautiful lyrics that are way beyond typical boy/girl/love junk - it made it hard to pick just one to submit here, but if you want to check out more go here:
I started to post that one myself. You’re right; it captures perfectly the childhood experience of falling asleep in the back seat of your parents’ car with the stars drifting overhead.
If foreign songs are allowed, I’m sure Severine’s 1971 Eurovision winner “Un Banc, Un Arbre, Une Rue” is a beautiful lyric about childhood, but I can’t find a decent translation:
…Un jour ou l’autre il faut partir
Pour se construire un avenir, un avenir
Et c’est l’inoubliable instant
Où l’on rend ses habits d’enfant, d’enfant
Chacun s’envole rempli d’espoir
Sur le chemin qu’il s’est choisi, qu’il s’est choisi
Vers la richesse ou vers la gloire
Pourtant quelque soit notre but, notre but…
Odd perhaps, but I’ve always liked the way the passing of time was expressed in “Windmills Of Your Mind”:
Don’t be too harsh on them, Dex. They were clearly under the influence of that sick bastard Fabulous Creature (who in turn was clearly in despair over Memphis State getting hammered in the basketball-tourney-thingie last night.)
Another vote for Leonard Cohen - I liked “Hallelujah”, but prefered “Take this Waltz” (although strictly speaking credit for the lyrics should go to Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Little Viennese Waltz” translated by Cohen) - not sure if you’d count it as a love song though.
“Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women
There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows
There’s a tree where the doves go to die
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost.”
Alternatively, “Bright Eyes” - Mike Batt and Art Garfunkel
“There’s a fog along the horizon,
A strange glow in the sky,
And nobody seems to know where you go,
And what does it mean?
Oh, is it a dream?”
There are versions of both on Youtube.
Memphis State? That is so last century.
Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true.
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil.
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet.
All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world–
So there was only one thing that I could do,
Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long!
Ministry, “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
Round Here; Counting Crows. The whole song is filled with hauntingly painful beautiful images like:
“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog
Where no one notices the contrast of white on white
And in between the moon and you the angels get a better view
Of the crumbling difference between wrong and right
I walk in the air between the rain through myself and back again
Where? I dont know”
A mostly-forgettable band called The Men put out an album that had only one decent song on it, in my estimation; Church of Logic, Sin & Love. I tracked down the album when I was in college just because the lyrics sounded like something from Kerouac’s On the Road; simple but resonant.
“Two hours later they decided to stop at a diner,
'Cause they just loved the smell of eggs and coffee.
I just had to smoke a cigarette and wear a hat…
By the time that they set off again,
The sun was starting to set, it made the sky look red like a nuclear way…
One of them said, ‘What do you want more than anything in this whole wide world?
Do you want money, do you want sex, or do you want all that success?’”
In the same vein of simple but effective, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car is filled with quiet despair.
"You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way
“I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone”
The Killers’ “Read my Mind” has a line that just gets me every time.
So cool:
It’s funny how you just break down
Waitin’ on some sign
I pull up to the front of your driveway
With magic soakin’ my spine
Guy Garvey of Elbow writes some amazing lyrics. This from their first album “Asleep at the Back” from the song “Scattered Black & Whites”:
Been climbing trees I’ve skinned my knees
My hands are black the sun is going down
She scruffs my hair in the kitchen steam
She’s listening to the dream I weaved today
Crosswords through the bathroom door
While someone sings the theme-tune to the news
And my sister buzzes through the room leaving perfume in the air
And that’s what triggered this
I come back here from time to time
I shelter here somedays
I’m a 1920s-style-Death Ray kinda guy.
I’d have to go with hymns, if love songs are out.
Amazing Grace:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun
How Great Thou Art:
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
And take me home
What joy shall fill my heart
Then I shall bow in humble adoration and there proclaim
My God how great thou art!
Alleluia Sing to Jesus:
Alleluia! bread of angels, Thou on earth our food, our stay;
Alleluia! here the sinful flee to Thee from day to day:
Intercessor, Friend of sinners, Earth’s Redeemer, plead for me,
Where the songs of all the sinless sweep across the crystal sea.
*Take some solace in these words, take notice of this place.
Hollow whispers that they are, like the wind upon my face.
Sing softly in my ear and look at me with wonder.
I will try to ease your fear as the darkness pulls you under.
I will walk this ground forever
and stand guard against your name.
I will give all I can offer,
I will shoulder all the blame.
I am sentry to you now,
all your hopes and all your dreams.
I will hold you to the light,
that’s what forever means. *
-Forever, Bruderschaft
I recently flipped through my old high school and cegep agendas, which were practically diaries at that point, filled with lyrics and pictures and drawings that mattered to me at the time.
One song quote that’s actually written down in more than one of them is from the song Thief, by Our Lady Peace:
“Someone help me understand who ordered
This disgusting arrangement with time and the end”
Another one from a similar era, I Mother Earth’s Used to be Alright
“And then you long
For the days of trippin’ down
The long road just reading the
Signs that show you the way to
A higher place you meditate to
Feel the quiet of the earth
That was back
When we used to be alright”
The Refreshments, Down Together
“We’ll find a speck of dust
And scribble down our life story”
None of them are earth-shattering, but I love them.