Tim McGraw’s Red Ragtop is about a relationship that ends because the two decide to have an abortion:
*"Well the very first time her mother met me
her green eyed girl had been a mother to be
for two weeks
I was out of a job and she was in school
and life was fast and the world was cruel
we were young and wild
we decided not to have a child"*
Phew I was about to Google the lyrics because I thought I’d had them all wrong all this time.
A guy at work pointed this one out.
From Jailhouse Rock:
Number forty-seven said to number three:
You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
Were prisons ever co-ed?
Actually, it’s about having sex with other men in the YMCA. The YMCA used to function like a gay hostel/bath house. They rented bunks, cheap. Hence the line, “Young man, there’s a place you can go, I say young man, when you’re short on your dough.”
I’ll add The Foo Fighters’ Walking after You. It’s as much a stalker anthem as Every Breath You Take.
I think the jury is still out on whether “Perfect Day” is about heroin or not. On the one hand, it’s not exactly a far-fetched interpretation, but on the other hand, when Lou Reed wanted to write a song about heroin he came right out and called it “Heroin!” Still, heroin or not, the “you’re gonna reap just what you sow” towards the end is enough to make it more than a little creepy. If it is a love song about a person rather than a drug, I’d have to class it as one of those “love songs” in which the narrator is a psycho stalker out for blood.
That said, the BBC charity version was creepy primarily because it sucked so much.
I can’t believe this thread has gotten this far without those two great love songs from the 80’s (every couple’s love songs)
and
They also adopted the Meatloaf tune, which always creeped me out more when a couple referred to it as their song:
I want you
I need you
But there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you
Now don’t be sad,
Two out of three ain’t bad.
What were people thinking?!?!
There is a great Judy Collins song from the 60’s that is supposed to be creepy called * Pretty Polly * Where a girl is taken out into the woods by her fiance and murdered – it is a chilling combination of music, lyrics and performance that always made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:
Willie, oh, Willie, I’m a-feared for my life
Willie, oh, Willie, I’m a-feared for my life
Let me be a single girl, if I can’t be your wife.
Very worth a listen.
And while we’re on the subject, so did the All Saints cover of Under the Bridge. They didn’t even know it was about trying to score heroin.
I’ve been looking for a cite on the Possum Kingdom story, but I all have is this: http://www.musicfanclubs.org/toadies/toadies/ripart.txt, in particular:
The only other thing I could dig up was that they got very tired of playing the song, so I don’t know how much else there is out there. I tried looking up crime info or lore on Possum Kingdom itself, and came up empty.
This isn’t a song in English but it more than deserves mention. In 1966 Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song for then-teen singer France Gall called Les sucettes. The song talks about a girl who likes lollipops. France Gall sung the song and made it into a hit thinking it was a song about lollipops. Pretty much everyone else put 2 and 2 together and figured out what the “lollipops” really were. She was pretty pissed off when she finally figured it out.
Which comes out more or less as:
Actually, I read this somewhere as a valid interpretation of the lyrics:
“She showed me her room isn’t it good, Norwegian wood”
“So, I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood”
The book was titled something like “The Poetry of Rock Music” and it was published sometime in the dark ages of the 70’s.
So, you see, Evil Death, that it predates SDMB and is an accepted interpretation of the song.
I have to admit that I’m somewhat surprised that there are people who don’t get that impression of the meaning from the lyrics. It’s the very first one I thought of when I first heard the song back in my teens. Honestly…what other interpretation can one come up with. The apartment is made of “good Norwegian wood”. The fire is made of “good Norwegian wood”. She’s just led him on all night, then told him nothing was going to happen, why don’t you sleep in the bathtub? What did he do, lay a fire in the fireplace and patiently wait for her to come home from work?
I believe John said he wanted to write a song about an affair he had without letting his wife, Cynthia, know about it. I’ve always listened to that song in this context. “I crawled off to sleep in the bath” sounds more like it’s said in jest.Especially considering “when I awoke, I wasn alone”. Doesn’t that imply that he wasn’t when he went to sleep? The last line is confusing but the “burning down the house” interpretation just doesn’t fit with the rest of the song.
Hey creepy, I think it is sexy too!
BTW, I always thought it was a song about a vampire because of these lines:
I can promise you
You’ll stay as beautiful
With dark hair
And soft skin…forever
Forever
A bit of an oldie:
Good Night Irene
Good ol’ suicide comtemplatin’ song-- by drowning, or overdose, depending on the version you’re listening to.
Not quite so old-- (and apologies if it’s been mentioned, I skimmed over the last coupla pages…)
Tom Waits’ I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.
Tom set it to such a rollicking tune that I didn’t notice what the hell it was about until I heard Holly Cole’s melancholy version on Temptation. I took it as an ode to stubbornly prolonged youth for years – somehow glossing over the line “Open up the medicine chest – I don’t wanna grow up.”
I’ve come to prefer Holly’s version, but now both of them make me want to crawl under my bed and sob, while the original used to just make me want to drink more and be raucous.
I guess it’s pretty much 50/50 odds on whether it’ll be Holly Cole or Leadbelly in the CD player when my people find me cold in the tub.
I don’t see anything, because all you’ve done is quote lyrics. If you want me to believe people interpreted the lyrics the same way you do back in the 70s, please cite them saying so.
Whereas I interpreted the lyrics thusly:
I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me
He went head over heels for this girl.
She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.
She actually wanted him to sit on the bed, with her. Hint, hint.
We talked until two, and then she said, “It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
She wasn’t laughing at him because she’d successfully led him on - she was laughing because she’d planned to go to bed with him, but he’d quite literally talked himself out of it.
I told her I didn’t, and crawled off to sleep in the bath
Don’t see her telling him to do it here, sorry.
As to the fire being in the fireplace as opposed to everywhere else, McCartney listed that as the meaning in his biography. I think I’ll side with the Beatle until you provide something more definitive … like a quote from John Lennon.
First of all, I’m not saying that burning down the girl’s house is what the Beatles intended in the lyrics. I’m saying that there was a book published in 1969:* Richard Goldstein’s Poetry of Rock* that discussed several songs of the day in terms of poetry and meaning.
In that book, Goldstein posited that a valid interpretation of the song was that after being left in the morning, he torched the place. He also spends some time discussing the double ententre of “Norwegian Wood” vs. “Norwegian would.”
I’m also not saying that it is the only viable interpretation of the song – just one, set forth a little over three decades ago, and so, just because someone goes there, doesn’t make them particularly odd, as it is an easily worked through interpretation of it.
I don’t want a flame war, but poetry can be interpreted many ways, and most of the Beatles catalog can be considered poetry as well as song.
see typo correction above
FWIW - when I first noticed hearing the song in the 70’s, I didn’t really understand it all, but I sure thought it was the guy talking about burning it down after sleeping in the tub. Not saying it was intended to be interpreted that way, just that I don’t see it as all that improbable an interpretation, either.
I never took this one seriously. I always thought of it as a comic revenge fantasy based on having one’s sleep cycle utterly destroyed by a baby for a couple of years (which is what babies do).
Haha, I thought I was the only one who thought Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was creepy. Great song, but it’s about killing people.
There was this old Blink 182 song, back on their first CD I think…anywhoodles, it wasn’t really creepy just depressing. Made me want to cry.