Inspired by the recent thread on cover versions of songs that change the meaning, I was thinking about songs in which the meaning of the verse or chorus or lyric changes as the song goes on.
A few examples:
“Nothing,” from A Chorus Line. The word “nothing,” starts out as a statement of fact, then a taunt, then an expression of triumph, and finally an expression of sadness and loss.
More obscurely, "Bride’s Lament,’ from The Drowsy Chaperone starts out with an admittedly stupid lyric (“I put a monkey on the pedestal”), and slowly turns the phrase into a lament about choices that makes it all the more touching at the end.
Finally, moving away from Broadway, there is Lyle Lovett’s “Nobody Knows Me,” whose lyrics start as a love song, but, by the end changes into an admission that the singer is fooling himself.
In Jacques Brel’s “Madeleine” the singer is waiting for his girl to show up for a date. It becomes obvious by the end that not only isn’t she going to show up, but she * never * does and he’s completely deluded about her being his girl. But he’ll wait for her again tomorrow.
Travis, by the Toadies starts like a song about a guy running away with his girlfriend. The final verse reveals that it’s actually about an obsessed stalker who breaks into a woman’s house to rape and kidnap her.
“End of Innocence” by Don Henley. At first, it’s about a kid talking about his parents’ divorce, then the next verse is an anti-Reagan rant, finally, it sounds like a boy sadly expecting to depart from his girlfriend.
It happens very quickly, and it’s really more of a play on words, but Lit’s “Miserable” starts with a lyrical joke:
You make me come
You make me complete
You make me completely miserable
Kevin Gilbert’s “When You Give Your Love To Me” starts out as a sweet and hopeful song about a guy nervously professing his love. His descriptions of his life improving once they get together grow more and more absurd until it’s obvious that the song is really about not expecting yourself to magically change just because you’re in love.
The Banks of the Ohio
Starts out as a songs about a couple chatting about their wedding plans until the man drowns the woman for saying turning down his proposal.
This technique is used a lot in musical theatre, and can be very effective. In Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years, Cathy sings a song called “A Part of That”, wherein she explains how blessed she feels to be in the room when her husband, who is an up-and-coming novelist, gets inspired. “And then he smiles/His eyes light up and how can I complain?/Yes he’s insane, but look what he can do/And I’m a part of that.”
But then, in the last verse, that same phrase drastically changes meaning, and we discover that things are not quite so idyllic: “And then he smiles/And where else can I go?/I didn’t know the rules do not apply/And then he smiles/And nothing else makes sense/While he invents the world that’s passing by/And I’m a part of that/I’m a part of that/I’m a part of that/Aren’t I?”
Total Eclipse of the Heart goes back and forth from “I need you now tonight, and I need you now forever, and if you only hold me tight, we’ll be holding on forever” to “Nothing you can do, a total eclipse of the heart.”
Devo’s “Beautiful World” starts off as an apparently happy description of a good happy world, but by the end you realise that it’s actually a fairly viciously sarcastic song.
Bowie takes a similar approach in “Heroes”: From “I will be king and you… will be queen” to “We’re nothing and nothing can help us,” and “we can beat them forever and ever, then we can be heroes, just for one day.”
In Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the word expresses religious ecstasy, physical passion, anguish, and defiance. (In Buckley’s cover, it’s mostly anguish.)
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” seems to be a song about the degradation of the environment ("Don’t it always seem to go you don’t appreciate what you’ve got? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.) But it gets much more personal than that when we hear that her old man left in a big yellow taxi. And in at least one version, a tractor tows away her house!
It starts out like he’s still friends with an ex-gf he still pines for:
“So you’re in love with someone else
Someone who burns within your soul
And it looks like I’m the last to know”
Recalls how close they used to be:
“We spent summers up beyond the bay
And you said, these are such perfect days
That if the bomb drops baby, I want to be the last to know”
That he still loves her and would like to get back together:
“The last to know, if you’re happy now
Or if he’s pleading with you like I pleaded with you…
If you go, don’t let me be the last to know”
And finally:
“The last to know, how youre feeling
The last to know, where you are
The last to know, if youre happy now
Or if he’s cheating on you, like I cheated on you
And you were the last to know.”
I’m not normally a hip hop fan at all, but OutKast’s massive hit “Hey Ya” eventually grew on me. (They were ALWAYS playing it at the place by my office where I usually went for lunch.) It’s a very clever song, and I was impressed/amused by the way it totally changes gears halfway through. Actually, the song changes meaning twice. It opens with the lines “My baby don’t mess around because she loves me so, and this I know for sure”, but the rest of the next two verses are about how UNSURE the narrator is about love. This continues until the line “Why are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?”
At this point the narrator apparently realizes that his listeners don’t care about his relationship problems or his ruminations on the nature of love. There’s a sort of lyrical breaking of the fourth wall and he says “Y’all don’t want to hear me, you just want to dance.”
The song then continues in a totally different vein, with call and response boasts about being cool, plenty of sexual innuendo, and the famous exhortation to “shake it like a Polaroid picture!”
Harry Chapin does this a lot - one example is “Get on with it” in which two lovers alternate verses, one starting with “Get on with it” and one starting with “Let’s take it slowly”. In the beginning of the song, it’s the man wanting to push forward in the relationship, because all is well, while the woman wants to go more slowly, but in the end, as things fall apart, the man wants to go slowly before they break up, while the woman wants to “Get on with it”
Although I didn’t find it myself (Rob Paravonian did) and the song isn’t very good, the extended version of the “Friends” theme song starts with “No-one told you life was gonna be this way” and then goes to “Your mother warned you there’d be days like these”.