Generic Uptempo Folk Song by the Limelighters.
Prince, 1999: I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray.
Pulp, Something Changed: I wrote this song two hours before we met /
I didn’t know your name or what you looked like yet
“My Girl (Gone Gone Gone)” by Chilliwack:
“She didn’t have to leave me
She didn’t have to run
She didn’t have to go without a word to anyone
I hope she’s doing alright
I got no way to know
Unless she gets to hear this song
Hear it on the radio”
Jim Croce - “I’ll have to say I love you in a song”.
Also, from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, he describes constructing the song within the song:
“It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah”
“Leaves That Are Green” by Simon & Garfunkel
These may not count:
Joan Baez’ “Time Rag” — “And just before I run out of words that rhyme”
Dylan’s “Sara” — “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel Writin’ Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you”
A great cynical song by a great band - *The Beautiful South *Song For Whoever
How about Like Patsy Would, by Hillary Lindsey, Liz Rose and Lori McKenna?
Steely Dan - “Deacon Blues”
I cried when I wrote this song
There’s Arlo Guthrie’s “Motorcyle Song”. The actual singing part of the song has nothing about writing songs, but the spoken words part is all about the process of writing the singing part (and, IMHO, the spoken words are inseparable from the singing part).
That’s actually a cover of a Willie Nelson song.
Here’s one: 26 Second Song:
“Hearts”, by Marty Balin:
Is everything okay?
I just thought I’d write a song /
To tell the world how I miss you
Cause each and every day
I think of all the words I never said /
And all the chances that I had to
Thanks, I know Cake does a lot of interesting cover songs, I should have done a search at least on the writers.
On his live alive “The Compleat Tom Paxton,” he tells the marvelous tale about how he write his first song “The Marvelous Toy” in the strangest circumstances imaginable: “on a typewriter while doing some graduate work at a place called Fort Dix, New Jersey.”
Sara by Bob Dylan
Last Song by Edward Bear
The initial couplet was also used by Billy Bragg in New England.
School’s Out by Alice Cooper
“We can’t even think of a word that rhymes.”
“Fountains of Wayne Hotline” from Robbie Fulks
Robbie calls the hotline to help him finish his (rock/pop) song which is titled, “Fountains of Wayne Hotline”.
Love Song by Melissa Ferrick
The lyrics refer to singing a love song but it’s really about her inability to write one since, at 21, she has had no experience to draw upon.
Well you ask me
To sing you
A love song
And I smile
I smile and say
Hold on
Let me think
That would be an old one
But how strange
At twenty-one
And I never even had one