Good lyrics

Last week, some Brit poll declared that a U2 lyric was the best ever. Well, to each his/her own but as a major music fan, here are some of my favorites: I’m going away for the weekend, so feel free to add your own in the comments.

For the best barfight imagery, there’s Jim Croce’s “Bad Bad Leroy Brown”:

Well, two men took to fighting
And when they pulled them from the floor
Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle
With a couple of pieces gone

Ouch. Best logic from Dire Straits’ “Industrial Disease”:

Two men say they’re Jesus
One of them just be wrong

Pithy statement award to Janis Joplin and “Me and Bobby McGee”:

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

(Honorable mention: I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday)

As poetry goes, I love the rhyme and rhythm of “Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolour in the rain
Don't bother asking for explanations
She'll just tell you that she came
In the year of the cat

Anybody who works in Peter Lorre deserves a nod, but how about Bert Kaempfert as in Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”:

Bert Kaempfert's got the mad hits
You try to match wits, you try to hold me but I bust through

I’ve always been a big fan of Graham Parker, one of the greatest musicians who never hit it big. Here’s his “you can’t go home again” song “Back in Time”:

You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball
And look for the air-raid shelter but it's gone and the cafe seems so small
And all the gardens that had trees and stolen apples
Now have small businesses flourishing in cinder blocks

I could go on all night but let’s stop with Bob Dylan and “My Back Pages”:

My guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now

Good stuff.