On a long and lonesome highway
East of Omaha
You can listen to the engine
Moanin’ out his one note song
You can think about the woman
Or the girl you knew the night before
Bob Seger Turn the Page
I remember it
Dublin in a rainstorm
Sitting in the long grass in summer
Keeping warm . . .
Sinead O’Connor - Troy
It seems like years since you held the baby while I wrecked the bedroom . . .
Sinead O’Connor - Emperor’s New Clothes
She left a lipstick letter on the mirror shattered on the bathroom floor
All I could put back together was never see me no more
Took all her clothes but one red dress, the one she knows I like the best
All I could do was clean up the mess and wonder where she’d gone
I had a sky-blue, rag top Mustang, a 1964
She drove it off into the night till it just wouldn’t go no more
She caught a ride on into town, bought some gas and laid the top down
Then she burned that pony to the ground on the desert in new Mexico
Delbert mcclinton. When Rita leaves
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train
"Till Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65 we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell,
It’s a time I remember, oh so well
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” -The Band
“I went back to Ohio
But my city was gone
There was no train station
There was no downtown.”
The Pretenders - My City Was Gone
“Blasting, billowing, bursting forth
With the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes
Man with his flaming pyre
Has conquered the wayward breezes.”
The Moody Blues - “Higher And Higher”
This is a great thread!
She brought her boyfriend
All six-foot-seven
She sent him to where they parked
To go and get the car
She stayed behind there
She stood in line there
She got something to drink
And then she told me her name
San Antonio Girl, Lyle Lovett
Pretty much any lyrics by Robert Hunter. Can’t possible choose, but one example:
Gone are the days when the ox fall down
He’d take up the yoke and plow the fields around
Gone are the days when the ladies said, “Please,
gently Jack Jones, won’t you come to me?”
(chorus) Brown eyed women and red grenadine
the bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down
and it looks like the old man’s getting on
In 1920 when he stepped to the bar, drank to the dregs of the whiskey jar
In 1930 when the Wall caved in, paid his way selling red eye gin
etc.
- Brown Eyed Women, Grateful Dead
The majority of Grateful Dead songs tell a story, often from POV of a character. Jack Straw, Black Peter, Wharf Rat, Sugaree, Stagger Lee, Loser, Friend of the Devil, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones …
And I’d second (and third and fourth) Dylan, Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell.
Among recent bands, the Decemberists! No one put up this one yet?
We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale
It’s ribs are ceiling beams
It’s guts are carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill
You may not remember me
I was a child of three
And you, a lad of eighteen
But I remember you
And I will relate to you
How our histories interweave
At the time you were
A rake and a roustabout
Spending all your money
On the whores and hounds
You had a charming air
All cheap and debonair
My widowed mother found so sweet
And so she took you in
Her sheets still warm with him
Now filled with filth and foul disease
As time wore on you proved
A debt-ridden drunken mess
Leaving my mother
A poor consumptive wretch
etc.
- Mariner's Revenge, the Decemberists
“Well, I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona
Such a fine sight to see
It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flat bed Ford
Slowing down to take a look at me”
The Eagles
I know these are the first lines but they are so iconic that Winslow, Arizona built a monument (on the corner).
Oh, well imagine
As I’m pacing the pews in a church corridor
And I can’t help but to hear
No, I can’t help but to hear an exchanging of words
What a beautiful wedding
What a beautiful wedding, says a bridesmaid to a waiter
And, yes, but what a shame
What a shame the poor groom’s bride is a whore.
Panic! At The Disco - I Write Sins Not Tragedies Lyrics
Meant to toss in Tom Waits, too.
Edna Million in a drop-dead suit
Dutch Pink on a downtown train
Two-dollar pistol but the gun won’t shoot
I’m in the corner in the pouring rain
Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest
And I’ve been drinking from a broken cup
Two pairs of pants and a mohair vest
I’m full of bourbon, I can’t stand up
- Tom Waits, Jockey Full Of Bourbon
Oh very young, what will you leave us this time
You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while
And though your dreams may toss and turn you now
They will vanish away like your daddy’s best jeans
Denim blue, fading up to the sky
And though you want them to last forever, you know they never will
And the patches make the goodbye harder still
Cat Stevens
There’s a port on a western bay
And it serves a hundred ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes
Looking Glass - Brandy (you’re a fine girl)
Billy was born within sight of the shipyard
First son of a riveter’s son
And Billy was raised as the ship grew a shadow
Her great hull would blot out the light of the sun
And six days a week he would watch his poor father
A working man live like a slave
He’d drink every night and he’d dream of a future,
Of money he never would save
And Billy would cry when he thought of the future
Sting - Island of Souls
Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still aint callin
I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom
I sent two letters back in autumn, you must not-a got em
There probably was a problem at the post office or somethin
Sometimes I scribble addresses too fast when I jot em
Stan - Eminem
Well you went uptown riding in your limousine
With your fine Park Avenue clothes
You had the Dom Perignon in your hand
And the spoon up your nose
And when you wake up in the morning
With your head on fire
And your eyes too bloody to see
Go on and cry in your coffee
But don’t come bitchin’ to me
Billy Joel
Great thread, and lots of great lyrics, but I think most of you aren’t getting @Pizzagirl 's challenge. It’s not great opening lyrics, or lyrics that tell a great story, but opening lyrics that immediately put you in the middle of a story. The pop equivalent of Garcia Marquez’s great opening for One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember the day his father took him to discover ice.”
John Mellencamp’s Jack and Diane is a great song, but starting it “This is the story of Jack and Diane / Two American kids growing up in the heartland” doesn’t exactly plunge you into the middle of a narrative. It’s beginning at the beginning. Contrast that with Rhett Miller’s Victoria: “This is the story of Victoria Lee / Who started out on Percodan and ended up with me.” After the cliched first line, packing Percodan and a sense of direction – with a hint that “me” isn’t exactly first prize – into that second line really kicks off the ballad.
Some others I like:
Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town: Well they’re still racing out on the trestle, but that blood never ran in her veins / Now I hear she has a house out in Fairview and a style she’s tryin’ to maintain
The Hold Steady, Chips Ahoy: She put nine hundred on the fifth horse in the sixth race / I think its name was Chips Ahoy! / It came in six lengths ahead we spent the whole next week getting high
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Breakdown: It’s alright if you love me / It’s alright if you don’t / It’s OK if you’re running away / Honey I get the feeling you won’t
There were some other Wilco songs mentioned, but not Via Chicago: I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt alright to me
Bob Dylan was a master, at least early in his career. To some extent, it was his technique: Strings of gnomic images forced you to invent a story he might be talking about:
“Mama comes fleet foot / Face full of black soot / Talkin that the heat put / Plants in the bed bugs”
“The guilty undertaker sighs / The lonesome organ grinder cries / The silver saxophone says I / Should refuse you”
“With your mercury mouth in the missionary times / And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes”
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging / They’re painting the passports brown / The beauty parlor is filled with sailors / The circus is in town”
And one of my all-time obscure favorites, the Amazing Rhythm Aces Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous: “Sittin at a tiny table in a ritzy restaurant / She was starin at her coffee cup / He was tryin to keep his courage up by applyin booze”
One of my favorite music videos… And the opening lines do put you in the middle of the story. 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes
Q: Where can you hunt down an amazing bargain with only a twenty in the pocket?
A: Thrift Shop (by Macklemore)
Thanks, JHS - that was very much it.
OK, so not just atmospheric, literary scene-setting and distinct characters, but you have to be dropped into the MIDDLE of the story with characters? That does tighten it up! I’d stay with “Mariner’s Revenge,” because you get dropped into a strange place (belly of a whale), with characters, and THEN you get the story that ends up with how they got there.
A lot of Dylan might drop out, though, because while it’s incredibly literary and evocative, it’s more about character and scene description than a story – though that could be argued either way. (Is “Maggie’s Farm” a story you get dropped into, or a description you get dropped into? “Subterranean Homesick Blues” sets an amazing mood with imagery, but is it precisely a story?)
“Thrift Shop” is great but it’s no more a story than anything else that humans sing. (We don’t usually sing “la la fol de rol,” or “yeah yeah yeah,” we sing about stuff we experience – like thrift shopping, in this case – and generally, since there’s a singer, there’s an implied character. Great singers embody characters well, but that doesn’t mean the lyrics establish a story immediately.)
Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” wouldn’t work IMO, because it’s a description of a relationship and what’s underneath it; there’s no story (other than the fact that we always have a story as humans.) And so on.
I’d propose:
“Laid back in an old saloon, with a peso in my hand,
Watchin’ flies and children on the street,
I catch a glimpse of black-eyed girls who giggle when I smile,
There’s a little boy who wants to shine my feet.
And it’s three days ride from Bakersfield and I don’t know why I came.
I guess I came to keep from payin’ dues …”
(You’re in a setting, with a character, and don’t know how he got there. So it’s in the middle. The song then cycles to the start of the story:)
“She said her name was Billy Jean and she was fresh in town.
I didn’t know a stage line ran from Hell …”
(And then you get the events that got him to Mexicali.)
– “Mexicali Blues,” Grateful Dead, lyrics John Perry Barlow
IMO you’ll end up with a lot of country and folk ballads, eg::
“Went out one night for to make a little round,
I met little Sadie and I shot her down,
Went back home and I got in my bed,
Forty-four smokeless under my head.”
– “Little Sadie,” 20th c, various artists
(You’re in a story; you’ve got a POV of someone who shot someone called Sadie and went to bed, which certainly sets up his character; and then you know there will be some kind of action, so you need the rest of the story.)