Memorable Lyrics

From the St0nes' Rocks Off: The sunshine bores the daylight out of me

 

"There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes ..."

"Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say, hello in there ... hello."

"How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?"

"A question ain't really a question, if you know the answer too."

John Prine, and that's just from one album.

 

Tom T, who could have his own thread:

Daddy couldn't get work then
and I was just a child
And God was on vacation for awhile

Best description of hard times I’ve ever heard.

 

I had been thinking about posting something from Sam Stone, but specifically:

Ans the gold rolled through his veins
Like a thousand railroad trains

 

The next line always gets me, about the children:

And eased his mind in the hours that he chose
While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes

 

I worked in a pizza shop when I was younger. During one particularly cold winter day, I got back from a delivery, looked at one of the cooks, and said, “Do you remember December’s foggy freeze?”

Without hesitation, he responded, “When the ice that clinged onto your beard was screaming in agony?”

And we proceeded to sing the rest of Aqualung in unison.

From then on, we tried to work random lyrics into each of our shifts.

 

I got an old blue shirt and it suits me just fine
I like the way it feels so I wear it all the time
I got an old guitar, won't ever stay in tune
I like the way it sounds in a dark and empty room

I got an old pair of boots and they fit just right
Well I can work all day and I can dance all night
I got an old used car and it runs just like a top
I get the feelin' it ain't ever gonna stop

Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall
Stuff that's real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall

"Stuff That Works", Guy Clark

 

One of my favorite Guy Clark songs is one that does not lend itself well to quoting a couple of lines. This is a song that he wrote after his wife Suzanna's death of cancer, the title track of his last album.

He tells the story far better than I can.

There are a number of videos up on Youtube, recorded by an interviewer who spoke with him in the basement of his home in Nashville, in the shop where he built acoustic guitars and wrote songs. There's no telling how many songs he wrote down there. You can see the rack full of cassettes on the wall. There's a spot in one of the videos where he pulls a little piece of paper down from where it was thumbtacked to the wall. It had a snatch of lyric on it, unfinished, that he and Rodney Crowell had struggled with down there for several years, trying to get it just right.

I really miss that old man. And the young man, for that matter.

 

And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad so I had another for dessert.

And there's nothin' short a' dyin'
That's half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleepin' city sidewalk
And Sunday mornin' comin' down

 

Pretty much every Springsteen song is like that. Catchy melodies with lyrics so depressing they'll make you want to blow your brains out if you ever take a minute to really grasp them. "Born in the USA", "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark" are all the same way. "Glory Days" gets played between innings at every high school baseball game as a fun pick me up or a day-seizing anthem, and it's really a sad tale of not being able to leave that part of ourselves in the past and move on with our lives.
I'm not sure any American musician has had his songs misinterpreted more than Bruce Springsteen.

 

I laugh at myself and sing that first line many a Sunday morning.

 

lynyrd skynyrd always stunned me with the tightness of their writing.

"seems like/
one of the crew/
had a go/
with one of the guests/
oh yes"

as noted southern rock fan novak djokovic likes to say: chapeau.