Saturday in the park
I think it was the Fourth of July
People dancing, people laughing
A man selling ice cream, singing Italian songs
She was staring out that window, of that SUV
Complaining, saying I can’t wait to turn 18
She said I’ll make my own money, and I’ll make my own rules
Mamma put the car in park out there in front of the school
Then she kissed her head and said I was just like you
You’re Gonna Miss This ~ Trace Adkins
Peering out of tiny eyes
The grubby hands that gripped the rail
Wiped the window clean of frost
As the morning air laid on the latch
A whistle awakened someone there
Next door to the nursery just down the hall
A strange new sound you never heard before
A strange new sound that makes boys explore
The Greatest Discovery - Elton John
“Just a small town girl
Livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere . .”
@mominva: fire and rain song brings back a memory thats not painful now; but horrible at the time. 22 yr old sister’s husband left her after college. she was so so sad & despondent & miserable and i remember drinking wine with her to that song. — 20 yrs later – it’s all better.
Now that she’s back in the atmosphere
With drops of jupiter in her hair…
She acts like summer and walks like rain
Reminds me that there’s a time to change…
Drops of Jupiter - Train
“I remember it all very well lookin’ back
It was the summer I turned eighteen
We lived in a one room, rundown shack
On the outskirts of New Orleans
We didn’t have money for food or rent
To say the least we were hard pressed
Then Mama spent every last penny we had
To buy me a dancin’ dress”
Fancy - Reba McEntire
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.”
Ohio- Neil Young
Eminem’s Toy Soldier is another really good one but it’s not so much the words themselves as the way they’re delivered by a children’s choir. You know immediately it’s about innocence lost.
"Step by step, heart to heart, left right left
We all fall down,
Step by step, heart to heart, left right left
We all fall down like toy soldiers
Bit by bit, torn apart
We never win but the battle wages on for toy soldiers
I’m suppose to be the soldier, who never blows his composure
Even though I hold the weight of the whole world on my shoulders"
In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name.
Sign O’ the Times - Prince
"Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail,
15 cars and 15 restless riders,
3 conductors, 25 sacks of mail
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out of Kankakee
Rolling past houses, farms and fields,
Passing trains that have no name, freight yard full of old black men,
And the graveyards of the rusting automobiles".
Really, any good ballad sets the scene immediately.
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin for a train
And feeling near as faded as my jeans
Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained
Rode us all the way to New Orleans
Janis Joplin singing Me and Bobby McGee
Well she’s up against the register with an apron and a spatula,
Yesterday’s deliveries, tickets for the bachelors
She’s a moving violation from her conk down to her shoes,
Suzanne by Leonard Cohen
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then he gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover
Three thirty in the morning
Not a soul in sight
The city’s lookin’ like a ghost town
On a moonless summer night
Raindrops on the windshield
There’s a storm moving in
He’s headin’ back from somewhere
That he never should have been.
Thunder Rolls - Garth Brooks
And pretty much every country song ever written.
Dirty Boulevard by Lou Reed
Pedro lives out of the Wilshire Hotel
he looks out a window without glass
The walls are made of cardboard, newspapers on his feet
his father beats him 'cause he’s too tired to beg
I come from down in the valley
Where mister when you’re young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done
Me and Mary we met in high school
When she was just seventeen
We’d ride out of that valley down to where the fields were green
More Springsteen (saddest song ever…)
Yvette in English by Joni Mitchell
He met her in a French cafe
She slipped in sideways like a cat
Sidelong glances
What a wary little stray!
She sticks in his mind like that
Saying “Avez-vous un allumette?”
With her lips wrapped around a cigarette
Yvette in English saying
“Please have this
Little bit of instant bliss”
@Joblue, I almost put The River too.
I usually don’t listen to country but this one always painted a picture for me:
Right now he’s probably slow dancing with a bleached-blond tramp,
And she’s probably getting frisky…
Right now, he’s probably buying her some fruity little drink
'Cause she can’t shoot whiskey…
Right now, he’s probably up behind her with a pool stick,
Showing her how to shoot a combo…
And he don’t know…
That I dug my key into the side
Of his pretty little suped up 4 wheel drive,
Carved my name into his leather seats…
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
Slashed a hole in all 4 tires…
Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.
Right now, she’s probably up singing some
White-trash version of Shania karaoke.
Right now, she’s probably saying, “I’m drunk”
And he’s a-thinking that he’s gonna get lucky,
Right now, he’s probably dabbing on
3 dollars worth of that bathroom Polo*…
–Before he cheats, Carrie Underwood
Also not big into rap but always liked this one:
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs,
But he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down,
The whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out
He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now
The clock’s run out, time’s up, over, blaow!
–Eminem, Lose Yourself
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee
the lake it is said, never gives up her dead
When the witch of November comes early”
And the story quite accurately is told in words and music like a sea chanty. Both the intro and the plaintive music let you know from the start that there will be no happy ending.
Back in Nineteen Twenty-Seven,
I had a little farm and I called that heaven.
Well, the prices up and the rain come down,
And I hauled my crops all into town –
I got the money, bought clothes and groceries,
Fed the kids, and raised a family.
Rain quit and the wind got high,
And the black ol’ dust storm filled the sky.
And I swapped my farm for a Ford machine,
And I poured it full of this gas-i-line –
And I started, rockin’ an’ a-rollin’,
Over the mountains, out towards the old Peach Bowl.
Talking Dust Bowl Blues by Woody Guthrie
You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht …