I Will Sing You Songs

[aMillionDreams]

Post your favortie lyrics.  Could be a line, a verse, or the whole song.

"I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
To ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge"
-Bob Dylan from "Tomstone Blues"

[SMc55]

"Oh shit run"

Brief and really unexpected. Genius!

[SMc55]

Favourite non-MMJ lyric: "She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake"
Elvis Costello, Watching the Detectives.

Good thread, amilliondreams.

[tomEisenbraun]

and all i could think of was last summer
and those wonderful days...

I keep singing that over and over.
I hope they play it when they come around

Also, sufjan stevens
"all things go, all things go" that line is stuck in my head

[Chills]

Time marches on
Time stands still
Time on my hands
Time to kill
Blood on my hands
And my hands in the till
Down at the 7-11
Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

The past seems realer than the present to me now
I've got memories to last me
When the sky is gray
The way it is today
I remember the times when I was happy

Same old sun
Same old moon
It's the same old story
Same old tune
They all say
Someday soon
My sins will all be forgiven
Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

They say "Everything's all right"
They say "Better days are near"
They tell us "These are the good times"
But they don't live around here
Billy and Christie don't--
Bruce and Patti don't--
They don't live around here

I had a girl
Now she's gone
She left town
Town burned down
Nothing left
But the sound
Of the front door closing forever

Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

[Chills]

It's dreamy weather we're on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice

I disappear in your name
But you must wait for me
Somewhere across the sea
There's a wreck of a ship
Your hair is like meadow grass on the tide
And the raindrops on my window
And the ice in my drink
Baby all I can think of is Alice

Arithmetic arithmetock
Turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat?
How did the razor find my throat?
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier

And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I'm dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice

[Chills]

You dance real slow
You wreck it down
You walk away, then you
Turn around

What did that old blonde
Gal say?
That is the part...
You throw away

I want that beggars eyes
A winning horse
A tidy Mexican divorce

St. Mary's prayers
Houdini's Hands
And a Barman who always
Understands

Will you loose the flowers
Hold on to the vase
Will you wipe all those teardrops
Away from your fase
I can't help thinking
As I close the door
I have done all of this
Many times before

The bone must go
The wish can stay
The kiss don't know
What the lips will say

Forget I've hurt you
Put stones in your bed
And remember to never
Mind instead

Well all of your letters
Burned up in the fire
Time is just memory
Mixed in with Desire
That's not the road it is
Only the map...I say
Gone just like matches
From a closed down cabaret
In a Portuguese Saloon
A fly is a circling around
The room
You'll soon forget the
Tune that you play
For that is the part
You throw away
Ah, that is the part
You throw away

[Chills]

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again

[Chills]

Never win and never lose
There's nothing much to choose
Between the right and wrong
Nothing lost and nothing gained
Still things aren't quite the same
Between you and me

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

I still hear your voice at night
When I turn out the light
And try to settle down
But there's nothing much I can do
Because I can't live without you
Any way at all

[Chills]

 ::) Yeah that's a lot of stuff.
If someone wants to read them...

[fitzcarraldo]

A little rain... & some more Waits, but he isn't exactly singing this.   ;D

Well Frank settled down in the Valley
and hung his wild years
on a nail that he drove through
his wife's forehead
he sold used office furniture
out there on San Fernando Road
and assumed a $30,000 loan
at 15 1/4 % and put down payment
on a little two bedroom place
his wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
made good bloody marys
kept her mouth shut most of the time
had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
that had some kind of skin disease
and was totally blind. They had a
thoroughly modern kitchen
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan
they were so happy

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple Mickey's Big Mouths
drank 'em in the car on his way
to the Shell station, he got a gallon of
gas in a can, drove home, doused
everything in the house, torched it,
parked across the street, laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red then
Frank put on a top forty station
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed north

Never could stand that dog

[Chills]

Yes, I love that one, brilliant!

Ok, my songs were written by Warren Zevon, Tom Waits (2), Woody Guthrie and John Cale

[ratsprayer]

i may do the Chills thing here and keep posting song after song, but one of my faves:

"in 1984, i was hospitalised for approaching perfection"


'random rules' by the silver jews

[EC]

I have loved everything I ever heard by the Silver Jews.  And isn't one of them a poet, too?  Beautiful.

[ratsprayer]

the aforementioned david berman in other topics is the mastermind/lyricist for the silver jews.  tada!   ;D

[BIGVICLBI]

I'm the master rapper and I'm here to say
I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way
 ???Barney Rubble circa 1985?

[ratsprayer]

vic chesnutt - vesuvius

"christian charity is a doily over my death-boner"

ill be damned if i know what hes really saying, but i think that line is fucking great.

[ratsprayer]

ok ok, so talking blues songs are an entity of 40 years ago, this one from a few years ago is amazing:

It was a beautiful day in New York town
Folks jogging, biking, walkin 'round
When a couple of airplanes came around
Hit the big towers, knocked 'em down
Worst disaster on US soil – ever!...
Course, there's the Indians....a few million slaves...the buffalo...
Anyway, it was worse than Pearl Harbor!

President W. was flying round
Far away from New York town
When finally he came on TV, he said
Why do they hate us – 'cause we're free
Free to round up dark-skinned bearded guys...
Free to detain anyone who might have ties to – 'Sama....Al Qaida...
Somewhere in Cleveland there's some guy named Al Kida....K – I – D – A...
He's freaking out

Congress quickly rang the bell
And tried to fight those terrorist cells
With laws designed to never let
Our country fall to a terrorist threat
Anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone
who knows anyone....who might know a terrorist – is a terrorist!

There's terrorists using your email name
Sitting next to you at the ballgame
There's terrorists jumping in your bed
Terrorist's borrowing your head
Never seen so many terrorists!....I had to turn in my own mom....
You know what they say – unpaid parking tickets....
Aids terrorists!

There's laws for this and laws for that
To keep those terrorists under wraps
Some folks disagree with these
And talk of civil liberties
But it's like the Attorney General says....
If in times like these you can talk about individual freedom...
You're probably a terrorist!...

If you're planning air travel soon
You might want to think about a weather balloon
Nothing gets past those x-ray peekers
And don't carry nothing in your sneakers
Sorry for all the delays...if you want to get there so dang fast you oughta take the train....
"I have never been so insulted"...."Shut up, Dale".....

Well India and Pakistan
Are thinking of trading nuclear bombs
Israel and the PLO--
Suicide's the way to go
Meanwhile the lessons of 9-1-1 are clear...let's blow up the Middle East...
Smoking marijuana aids terrorists....John Walker Lindh could be your kid
Unless we get an economic stimulus package....
Cuba's our enemy unless we need a prison camp....
And let's get that guy in Cleveland--Al Kida!

[ratsprayer]

Look ma, they're gonna fry Tim McVeigh
She said, that nice guy who was on the cover of all those magazines
Why would they wanna do a thing like that
I said, Well he killed all those people in Oklahoma City
She said, Nonsense, people don't kill people, car bombs kill people
I said, Well yeah ma, but they gotta do something with him
She said, Why don't they just get Mike Tyson to bite off both his ears


And I say true revolutionaries never bomb buildings
True revolutionaries never bomb buildings
It attracts too much attention
They never bomb buildings

A little girl down my block was born with silicone in her breasts
Turned out her grandmother and her mother had both had the implants done
and well, evolution took care of it this time round
And I started wondering why so many women with big breasts looked so sad
And I thought maybe it had something to do with the weight,
the burden they're asked to carry in the world--
to feed it, to be the object of its desires--
and I wondered what burdens the rest of us are asked to carry, and I thought

True revolutionaries never bomb buildings
It attracts too much attention
They never bomb buildings

And I decided to take a walk and do nothing 'cept look in the eyes of
Everyone I pass, and not be the first to avert my eyes no matter what
And I planned to go out for ten or fifteen minutes, but things started happening
and I didn't return for two years by which time I was heavyweight champion of the world
nd the expectant father of sixteen children, by thirteen different women

And while walking down 14th street, between 7th and 8th avenues in New York City
on my way to the subway to see the Yankees,
I suddenly realized you were my best friend in the world, and I grinned all the way
til the bottom of the seventh inning

I was in a fishing village in coastal Spain, it was Our Lady of Abortion Sunday afternoon
All the pregnant women in their first trimester went before the priest to receive the blessing of
Try Again sometime, try again

The old barber had dyed his hair green for the occasion
And pierced his nipples
And rode his skateboard to the statue of Conan O'Brien
Where he did backflips for the little kids
Who threw coins given to them by their parents

A visiting lecturer, achingly handsome
Had just given a How to Build Bombs in your Basement seminar in the park
And all the young girls put their notebooks away dreamily
And put dandelions in their hair

The chimpanzee who had managed to type out Hamlet three years before
Was sitting in the third floor office of the drivers license building
Typing out zoning ordinances, typing out learners permits, bored and lonely

Pee Wee Herman was sitting in the central square in the grass
Naked and masturbating
While all the townspeople moved to him slowly
And kissed him softly and sung lullabies in the grass

Princess Diana was driving through Paris in an open car all by herself
She waved, everybody waved back
She went to the zoo and spent the rest of the afternoon feeding peanuts to the gorilla

And in Berkeley, in Greenwich Village and in Paris, and in Scottsbluff, Nebraska
No one sits around funky little coffee shops anymore talking revolution
No, they get a Starbucks to go
Then they go back to their basketball games
And see who can jam, who can jump higher, who can take it to the rack
And they all wear baseball caps
'Cept they don't say Yankees or Dodgers or Cardinals anymore
They say Nike, Reebok and Adidas
'Cause the pro players, they don't play for teams anymore
They play for shoe companies
And the kids aren't fooled, they're just biding their time waiting for the millennium
When all the computers will crash because the best scientists in the world
Forgot to make them read zero

chorus

And I had a head full of dark thoughts
And suddenly everything cleared
And I realized, the only purpose really to revolution
Is to be able to love who you want, how you want, when you want, where you want,
So I took off all my clothes, & stole a boat, rowed off to the middle of the lake
Jumped in looked back at you
Said, c'mon, get wet

True revolutionaries....

[EC]

I'm the master rapper and I'm here to say
I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way
???Barney Rubble circa 1985?

Woah.  Woah.  

Yeah, remember when "rap" was considered the "cool" thing for the kids, and all these commercials started doing it, and it was totally weird and lame?