but made me think more about songs where the last verse(or possibly an alteration) in the chorus changed the whole damn thing.
My example Lorelei by the Pogues post MacGowan)end
a long lost love ballad, for the long lost love Lorelei which suddenly at the end
But if my ship, which sails tomorrow
Should crash against these rocks,
My sorrows I will drown before I die It’s you I’ll see, not Lorelei
Until the very end when they switch it up and note
ETA: Notably, a band called Psychotica did a fairly admirable cover of the song back in the '90s, but they totally fucked it up by singing “Freedom of choice/Is what you want” at the end.
Oh favorite example of a song with a “punchline” is The Grateful Dead’s *Me and my Uncle. * The narrator tells a story of how he and his uncle jointly cheated some cowboys at a game of poker, and fled with the money after killing a couple of them. He concludes
Jim Croce’s You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.
Chorus is:
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim
Then Jim gets beat up by a guy named Slim. The last verse changes to “And you don’t mess around with Slim”.
A famous example is “Green Green Grass of Home” where the idyllic scenes of returning home get flipped in the last verse and we realize the singer is a prisoner on death row:
“Margaritaville” goes through that kind of progression at the end of the chorus after each verse. First it’s “But I know it’s nobody’s fault.” Then it becomes “Now I think…hell, it could be my fault.” Finally it ends with “And I know, it’s my own damn fault.”
Throughout, the refrain is “War, children, is just a shot away.”
Then, “Rape, murder, is just a shot away.”
But at the end, it switches to, “Love, sister, is just a kiss away.”
In Cat’s in the Cradle, we go from “When you coming home Dad” to “When you coming home Son”
In “Get On With It” the person who sings “Get on with it” and the person who sings “Let’s take it slowly” switch places, and the meaning of “it” shifts as well.
Probably unintentional but in the last verse of Beatles’ “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” McCartney mixes up the character’s names so “Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face and in the evening she still sings it with the band.” (It was Molly doing her pretty face on the previous verse.)
In the last chorus, City of New Orleans switches from “Good morning, America” to “Good night, America.” This emphasizes that passenger rail is disappearing in the U.S.