I remember reading somewhere that it has to do with Vietnam. “Shining flying purple wolfhounds” being some kind of fighter plane. Probably just some fan’s interpretation.
A nonsensical lyric, like Yes or Psychadelic Era Beatles, doesn’t bother me. I think because in those songs we’ve voluntarily stepped into a worldview where nonsense reigns. It’s like how a Sci-Fi/Fantasy story is running by a different set of rules than a detective novel.
Where the lyrics are grating is when you’re presented with a more linear song that isn’t that crazy, that’s utterly logical… until someone needs something to rhyme with “Every day a little sadder, a little madder…” and asks for a ladder.
I nominate Cream’s entire catalog! White Room is actually less nonsensical than most…
In the white room with black curtains near the station.
Black-roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.
Silver horses run down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawn-light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
That line always brings me back to elementary school…and the nurse using a fine-tooth comb on kids with lice!
But I interpret it to mean that he had to be careful or she would have slipped through the comb/away from him.
Missed the edit to add a Deep Purple cut (“Knocking At Your Back Door”).
Another classic case of “I would never use these words if I didn’t have to make a rhyme”:
“Sweet Lucy was a dancer
But none of us would chance’er…”
It’s tough when it’s a band you originally had respect for.
Makes a lot more sense than “Eyeless Industry, that is what we are”. 
im told that one person you don’t ask what a particular lyric means is elvis Costello ……his peevish answer was “half the time the words don’t mean a damn thing in a song and if you like the song what the hell does it matter anyways?”
Keep on…til the bookstores close
Don’t stop til you get enough
Ok, I might not be hearing this Michael Jackson lyric correctly.
Agree. Lyrics can be nonsensical (or oblique, or cryptic, or quirky); and lyrics can be stupid. But it’s not just being nonsensical that makes them stupid.
Yet things didn’t change even in their post-prog years:
Here is my heart, waiting for you
Here is my soul - I eat at Chez Nous
I wish we had ribbons for Thread Winners. Man, that is embarrassingly awkwardly horrible.
I mean, I fired up the ol’ powerbook to drop in and mention VH’s “Only time will tell if we pass the test of time”, but “eat at Chez Nous”? Oh, gahhhhhd…
I should mention that I didn’t mean nonsense lyrics specifically. The nonsense lyrics in Blinded by the Light and American Pie are the whole point of those songs.
What I meant was a puzzling line that didn’t really go with the song. In my opening example, Kristofferson sings before and after that yesterday line, make perfect sense:
(About his lover’s fingers) Wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been,
Teachin’ me that yesterday was something that I never thought of tryin’.
Talkin’ of tomorrow and the money, love, and time we had to spend.
For comparison, try this excerpt of a new version of Rod Stewart’s Maggie May that I just made up:
…All you did was wreck my bed, and in the morning kicked me in the head.
Oh Maggie, a taxicab is nothing to die for.
You led me away from home, just to keep you from bein’ alone.
See? Stands out like a sore thumb because it doesn’t make sense.
Songs that have lyrics open to interpretation are one thing. But lyrics should fit the internal logic of the song.
Pretty much the entire catalogue of R.E.M. until Out of Time.
Even when they printed lyrics in the liner (and they didn’t always), and you could see the lyrics RIGHT THERE, they made only the faintest hint of sense.
Not entirely “lyrics as just another instrument”, but close. Also accidentally close to the Zen concept of “breaking the mind”.
Was Jon writing the lyrics at that point, or was Trevor Rabin?
I’ve read the Mickey Mantle once peevishly asked Simon what he didn’t use his name instead. The response: “Syllables, Mick, syllables.”
Yeah, sometimes things just get thrown in to fit into a line.
OTOH, it encouraged DiMaggio to be more public by doing those Mr. Coffee commercials.
Source of that story seems to be Simon himself, here.
Problem with that is that the song was written in 1967 and Mantle played through the 1968 season. So it wouldn’t have made sense to ask where Mantle had gone or to say he had “left and gone away”. (Simon himself says Mantle wouldn’t have worked metaphorically, but he offers a different reason - because Mantle was eventually corrupted, unlike DiMaggio. That’s something that he couldn’t tell Mantle, of course. But beyond that, it wouldn’t have worked time-wise, as above.)
The song’s entirely credited to Rabin (I think he uses those same lyrics in an early demo but I can’t be sure) so no matter who came up with that dumb line, it’s all on him.
“E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)” is one of my favorite Blue Öyster Cult songs. Great lyrics, except for this bit in the chorus:
“All praise
He’s found the awful truth
Balthazar, he’s found the saucer news.”
Who the f— is Balthazar???
Oingo Boingo - “Reptiles and Samurai”
Pretty much the entire song.
“The Best is Yet to Come”
First line: Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum.
WTF?
You don’t pick plums out of a tree; you pick them off of a tree…
I think you may have missed the second level of meaning here.
At its simplest, the lyric is saying that he picked a plum off the tree. But he’s also using the term plum as in “plum assignment”, i.e. something preferable to other choices. He’s saying that there were many possible choices available but he picked the best one. In that context, the phrase “picked out” makes more sense.