sort form Submissions:
submissions
Al Stewart – Flying Sorcery Lyrics 1 year ago
"Faith", "Hope" and "Charity" were the three Gloster Gladiator fighters of the Hal Far flight who alone defended Malta in 1941 until the Hawker Hurricanes arrived.

submissions
Al Stewart – Flying Sorcery Lyrics 1 year ago
@[anna114295:42905] Not to Amelia Earhart, but, to Amy Johnson. Amy Johnson was the first British woman to fly solo from UK to Australia. She did it with Gipsy Moth, G-AAAH "Jason". Amy Johnson died 1941 in the WWII.

submissions
Al Stewart – Flying Sorcery Lyrics 1 year ago
@[anna114295:42904] Not to Amelia Earhart, but, to Amy Johnson. Amy Johnson was the first British woman to fly solo from UK to Australia. She did it with Gipsy Moth, G-AAAH "Jason". Amy Johnson died 1941 in the WWII.

submissions
Leonard Cohen – Suzanne Lyrics 11 years ago
This song is about a real life incident. The protagonist is Suzanne Verdal, ex-wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. Suzanne, Armand and Leonard Cohen were (and are still) very good friends, and the incident which Leonard Cohen describes happened in the hippie community of Montreal in the early 1960s. Suzanne Verdal was serving herbal tea while Armand and Leonard were chatting and strumming guitar, and Suzanne and Leonard had a "soul sibling" moment - they felt as if their souls had touched each other. Nothing sexual, drugs or deeper meaning in this song, but a nice description of the St. Lawrence River at Montreal, Canada.

submissions
Bruce Springsteen – Youngstown Lyrics 13 years ago
I absolutely love this song. I grew up in an industrial factory town, which suffered really badly in the late 20th century from deindustrialization and pimping the factories to China, just like Youngstown.

The song is about the collapse of the blue collar America, the collapse of the American steel industry, the collapse of the working class and their dreams, hopes and aspirations. Working in a steel mill is comparable to Hell, but it still is better than being unemployed and on the mercy of charity.

The protagonist is a second generation steelworker - perhaps the same as in song "Born in the USA"? - who has returned home from Viet Nam war and works as scarfer. His task is to burn off any irregularities of finished hot steel. His father, a WWII veteran, works at blast furnaces. Pyrometallurgy requires notoriously high temperatures, and the work is immensely dangerous. Taconite, coke and limestone are the feedstock of blast furnace making pig iron, and the stacks reaching the sky refer to the stacks of open hearth furnaces for refining the pig iron into steel. "Sweet Jenny" is not a girlfriend or daughter, but Jeannette Furnace, the blast furnace of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Brier Hill Works. She was taken off blast 1977 and demolished 1998.

"The big boys did what Hitler couldn't do" refers to an ex-steelworker's words when he saw the Republic steel six blast furnaces being demolished. Mismanagement, bad business practises and greed drove many steel giants into bankruptcy - and gone was also the jobs, prosperity and American way of life. The big boys managed to do what Hitler tried and failed - destroy the soul of the American working class and middle class and destroy their jobs, sense of security, hopes and the American dream. The protagonist then asks why at all did they fight in WWII, Korea and Viet Nam, and why their sons died if no better future was available.

I like the electric version of this song more. It contains the true feeling and sense of steelmaking.

* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.