Good Lyrics Hall of Fame

I haven't listened to that album in a long time. I really had no use for the second half, other than that song. I need to give it another listen. It was much better overall than Go-Go Boots. Anyway, we were at a Truckers concert at the National a couple years back and late in the show Cooley started Eyes Like Glue. But about 15 seconds in he stops, quite drunk by then, and says, "I can't play this fucking song." He then starts it again and nails it.

 

One of my absolute favorite songs.

 

What we once thought we had we didn't, and what we have now will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet
Ask me things, but I don'r know where to start
They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

We call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease
Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?)
Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix

Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
"The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

 

My favorite line:

So don’t let 'em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.

 

Nick's a weird cat.

 

Ice Cube -- Summer Vacation. Too long to post here, but just the right combo of gangsta rap and an actual point to it.

I'm also partial to The Card Cheat by The Clash.

 

As much as I love Thunder Road (it's my favorite Springsteen song), I think these may be among the best four lines he's written in terms of sheer power of conveying the emotion:

She sits on the porch of her daddy's house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born

 

Pusherman -- Curtis Mayfield.

 

GREAT pull. Love that album, and the lyrics to that song in particular.

 

Billy, don't you lose my number.

 

Kris Kristofferson has a bunch of great ones, but my favorite is "Best of All Possible Worlds," which includes the following:

Well I woke up next morning feelin' like my head was gone
And like my thick old tongue was lickin' somethin' sick and wrong
And I told that man I'd sell my soul for somethin' wet and cold as that old cell
That kindly jailer grinned at me all eaten up with sympathy
Then poured his-self another beer and came and whispered in my ear
"If booze was just a dime a bottle boy you couldn't even buy the smell"

My favorite song line, however, is from "Black Rose," written by Billy Joe Shaver and most famously recorded by Waylon Jennings:

The devil made me do it the first time/the second time, I done it on my own.

 

"From the Hundred Years War to the Crimea,
With the lance and the musket and the Roman spear."

yeah, there was a point where I listened to that song every day for about a month