I’d thought of “I’ve been through the nine tiers of Hell,” but friends tell me they hate the classical references I love to put into my songs… (Does anyone here have any problem with “Ipsos custodes need custodiet-ing”? (To rhyme with “getting.”) I thought it was rather clever…)
You’re far too eclectic for this crowd. 
England Dan and John Ford Coley
I’m not sure why I called,
I guess I really just wanted to talk to you
Isn’t that why most people call someone?
I love Bruce Cockburn. I really do. He’s written so many amazing lyrics I almost feel bad bringing this up. But every so often his earnestness runs away with his poeticism and produces these awful mangled trainwrecks of metaphor that just make me cringe all over for him. I picture him lying awake for the past umpty years wishing he could take the whole thing back and rewrite it properly, now that it’s much much too late. Like so:
Big Circumstance comes looming like a darkly roaring train
Rushes like a sucking wound across a winter plain
Recognising neither polished shine nor spark nor stain
And wherever you are on the compass rose
You’ll never be again
Where to even start? ‘Loom’? ‘Roar’? Darkly roar? ‘Loom’? ‘Rush’? ‘Train’? ‘Wound’? It’s the clunky juxtapositions that bother me. But never mind that . . .
Poetic license be damned. Wounds cannot rush. It’s a perfectly horrible visual I could so do without. I’ll give him ‘sucking,’ kind of - once you’ve known a certain kind of personality the metaphor takes on its own genius. But no circumstance, big or small, can ‘recognise’ anything - is he making it a train or a wound or a sentient entity here? And why would he expect it to recognise a ‘stain’ anyway? The ‘compass rose’ bit really bugs me too.
But here’s the worst bit:
Blessed are the dead for love
And those who cry for peace
And those who love the gift of earth
May their gene pool increase
Oh Bruce. That last line is so off it just embarrasses me.
Kris Kristofferson is a master lyricist, but I just don’t understand the third line in this verse of Loving Her was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again:
“Waking in the morning to the feeling of her fingers on my skin…”
(Nice sensuous image)
“Wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been…”
(Beautifully evokes the renewing spirit of love, good)
“Teaching me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying…”
(HOWZAJIGGA WHAT???)
I mean, WTF? Is the woman a time traveller? Is he suggesting he’s only been alive since today, or that he skipped yesterday altogether? What the hell man?
Still one of my favorite songs though. If I’m in the right mood, it can bring tears to my eyes. All except that yesterday line of course.
Again, I love Counting Crows, but every once in a while, Adam Duritz writes a “wait…what?” line. Take this one from Round Here:
“I walk through the air…between the rain and back again through myself where…I don’t know.”
Great Moments in Lyrical Laziness:
“Cisco Kid” by War.
“Eat the salted peanuts out the can”? To be fair, the lyrics throughout the song are minimalist, but at least the rest of them are somewhat related to the topic and are evocative. I’m not saying that they DIDN’T eat salted peanuts out the can, but I question the need to immortalize that moment in song.
The whole song Fancy bugs me, if that counts…
(I think Rebe MacEntire sang it)
Yes, she did. But first there was Bobbie Gentry.
Listening to Thin Lizzy this morning when it struck me…
Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
Hmm…I wonder where in town the jailbreak could occur? I don’t know…maybe…at the jail!!!
We had a few arguments about it at our place. I still think they wrote it in 2008, and had to quickly change it to 3008 because it was late getting released or something.
From the same song:
Here we go, here we go, satellite radio
Y’all gettin’ hit with boom boom
Beats so big I’m steppin’ on leprechauns
Leprechauns?
Wikipedia informs me that Pete Townshend was born on May 19th, 1945, so my best guess is he was trying to tie the day of his birth to the end of the war. Not that that makes the lyric any less clumsy, but still.
Not necessarily. Maybe they’re just customizing their iPhones.
“Take another little piece 'o my heart, now baby…” -Janis Joplin
That’s a pretty clear metaphor, though.
I have an issue with the sports imagery in The Postal Service’s Nothing Better:
And I will block the door
Like a goalie tending the net
In the third quarter
Of a tied-game, rivalry
Can anyone point me to a sport with a goaltender (assumed by me to be hockey, since he is blocking a doorway) that is played in quarters?? Water Polo maybe?
Still a nice little song, IMO.
When I played youth league soccer, it was played in quarters. Maybe he’s talking about a 10-year-old kid.
Regarding “feet b elow his knees”
I remember reading somewhere that there is a verse for each memebr of the Beatles, so the whole verse is:
He bad production,
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease.
Which is about John (if the words Walrus and Ono don’t give it away). He got feet down below his knees refers to the fact that John is not on his knees but instead is on his feet, standing firm against the rest of the bands concerns about Yoko and other things that were causing a rift.
There could easily be a moratorium on any song ever again beginning with “Woke up this morning” or “I was walking down the street.”
When I was a kid, Elton John’s Tiny Dancer was big (and I was a big EJ fan).
In the song, Elton sings the following lines:
Jesus freaks,
Out in the street.
Handing tickets out to God
Unfortunately, I never heard of the phrase “Jesus freaks” but I have heard the phrase “freak out”, so my poor 7 year-old brain parsed the song like this:
Jesus freaks out in the street,
Handing tickets out to God
Which I’m sure I thought was a really deep analysis of the birth of Christianity or something. To this day I have always been amused by the image of the Son of Man acting like a newly-converted Moonie at the airport, one who accidentally ingested the “special” mushrooms.