Mountain - Nantucket Sleighride - Life as a whaler in Massachusetts.
Genesis - Driving the Last Spike - Life building railroads in England in the 1800s.
Others?
Johnny Cash: Boy named Sue, Folsum Prison blues, Drunken’ Ira Hayes.
He had a million of them.
Merle Haggard: Pancho and Lefty. Mama Tried. Misery and Gin. And many more.
Let’s not even mention Willie Nelson.
Well, maybe not what your looking for as it’s less a lifestyle song and more of a narration of an event, but maybe MC McCall’s Convoy.
Heck, I guess ‘Woodstock’ would fit as an event style narrative example as well, and sort of different.
Alice’s Restaurant.
As usual - Al Stewart.
Take your pick: the Fall of Constantinople, a Murmansk Run, the life of Lord Grenville, gun running, Angolan civil war, emigrating through Ellis Island, etc.
One of my favorite Warren Zevon songs is Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner.
A Norwegian mercenary fighting in Africa is double-crossed and killed. His ghost seeks and exacts revenge, then continues to roam the earth, eventually encountering Patty Hearst. It’s a tale we can all relate to.
Bob Dylan’s song Lily, Rosemary, and The Jack of Hearts is a song about Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.
Genesis - “Get 'Em Out By Friday”
Unscrupulous developers scam people out of their property, raise their rent, and force them to live in smaller and smaller dwellings. By the end of the song, they are genetically modifying tenants to be half-size so they can cram in twice as many.
Breathing by Kate Bush. A song about a fetus worried about the effects of nuclear fallout. And “breathing” nicotine from it’s mother.
“The Weight” the Band.
God, there’s so many songs that meet the OPs criteria.
Wow! All in a song? Sounds like the movie.
Another, Peter Gabriel - Into the Light - Inside the mind of an assassin.
500 Robots in MY House. Self explanatory.
‘The Whole of the Moon’ the Waterboys.
Sad, haunting tale of a lost love.
And Dylan’s Black Diamond Bay tells the tale of an assortment of people just before a volcanic eruption kills them all.
Fastball’s The Way-- Based on the real life story of an older couple who went the wrong way into the desert and died.
Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald-- About. . . the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Rapture by Blondie is odd. A man from Mars that eats heads, cars, guitars, etc.
Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed is full of them. All true (more or less) I believe:
- brief bio of Holly Woodlawn. For example.
j
Check that; it is Family Snapshot.
On the same (Melt), you have Intruder with such lines as:
I like to feel the suspense when I’m certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Dylan’s The Ballad Of Hollis Brown, the story of a man so driven by poverty and dispair, that he kills his wife and children and then himself to put them all out of their abject misery. Cheery little tune.
Murder, Tonight, In The Trailer Park by The Cowboy Junkies.
The story of a murder and its aftermath told in a series of cinematic snippets:
But was it him…?
And while I think about it, The Honeymoon Killers by Magazine is the story of a murderous spree in which the murders … are not addressed. In any way. There’s stuff about listening to Mantovani and eating ice cream, but that’s it. I love it greatly, and wonder vaguely if is closely based in some way on the film of the same name, which I have carelessly never seen. Anyone able to enlighten me?
j