submissions
| Steely Dan – True Companion Lyrics
| 13 years ago
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Personally, I consider this Donald Fagen's magnum opus. Everything about this recording glows, but what blew me away was the vocal arrangement. This is fantasy. The kind of tone it creates lends itself to any number of images in the mind, anything from sailboating to space travel, etc. Fitting that it ended up in "Heavy Metal" by itself because it doesn't fit Steely Dan's material before it OR Donald Fagen's material afterward. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Your Gold Teeth II Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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I suppose the Charlie-Brown-esque main part of the song is nice, but it's the power chords in the intro that got me hooked.
Danfan: it could be analyzed as 6/4 or 4/4 alternating with 2/4 during the verses, but it meanders in and out of several time signatures. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – The Royal Scam Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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I think it's pretty relevant nowadays, with the furor over illegal immigration. America is painted as this Utopia overseas, but it's not the reality once people make it here. It can be 3 or 4 generations out before immigrants see prosperity here, if at all. I don't see much metaphor here; it's a pretty straight-ahead commentary on the immigrant experience. |
submissions
| 10cc – I'm Not In Love Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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My interpretation of this song over the years is different from the others I see here, with more morbid slant. I don't see it as a male- OR female-oriented song, but the lyrics are what someone "hears" in their mind being said by a lover who has shut them out or dumped them. I regard this as the single most depressing musical work ever written; no other song has seemed as heavy to me. Combining this lyrical analysis with the music, it makes me think of someone's final thoughts as they commit suicide with drugs or slit their wrists over a painful rejection. Whether the singer's assessment of the situation is accurate or not, these are the sentiments they feel coming from the party who has forsaken them in some way.
I read somewhere that this was supposed to be a humorous song, being a sarcastic commentary on fear of commitment. I don't see where anyone could think of this as a "funny" song.
On another note, I also read that contrary to popular belief, the "choir" effect was NOT achieved with synthesizers; it was actual vocals recorded onto tape loops and faded in and out with a mixer. |
submissions
| Hall and Oates – Family Man Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Pretty straight-ahead: a woman trying to seduce an Ozzie Nelson type. But it seems odd to file this under Hall & Oates since it was originally a Mike Oldfeld tune. |
submissions
| Supertramp – School Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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I can remember blasting this on my cassette player every morning when I got up and showered to go to junior high school. It took that kind of pumping up to get me out of bed and get the blood circulating. It was another variation on "school sucks", and I could not have agreed more. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Rudy Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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It didn't dawn on me until this last post that the whole "super tramp" theme could be a declaration that everyone is a tramp, a wanderer seeking significance and truth. This song would fit that idea. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Poor Boy Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Great observations here about being content with poverty and adapting to it. He values friendship and being his own man above his image. This song also has the only clarinet line I've ever liked anywhere. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Fool's Overture Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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I disagree with the Christian reference. You can't strip a man of pride who displayed none and showed disdain for it. As far as laughing until the day he died, Christ was only mocked in this way during the last few hours of his life. I'm not sure what this section is in reference to, but I really don't think it was Christ. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Downstream Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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It's a great love song. It celebrates a relationship that either will go or has gone the distance. I did an arrangement of it for a recital at college. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Breakfast in America Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Or, going back to the Rudy theory... Many of the band's songs seem to deal with a conceptual tramp/hobo, "street person". Listening to the song, I can picture such a person on the streets of London tromping around to the beat, fantasizing about going to America. I'm reminded of "The Royal Scam" by Steely Dan, which also comments about the erroneous image that many non-Americans have about America that leads them here. In comparison with the rest of Supertramp's repertoire, this song seems pretty nondescript. |
submissions
| Supertramp – Another Man's Woman Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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The meaning is fairly straight-ahead. The singer is pissed because his woman is a cheater and plays head games with him. But this song has my all-time favorite piano solo in it, and the gradual introduction of countermelodies at the end is a level of artistry seldom seen in rock composition. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Aja Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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I think people are reading a lot more into this song than needs to be. I've been listening to it since I was a kid, and it remains one of my top 10 favorite tunes. To me, it's simply a vignette, a taoism-oriented snapshot of a time and place. It could be Chinatown, it could be any place with a strong Chinese ethnic population. "Aja" is a general reference to any place where one can experience Asian culture (and I know a lot of Asian-Americans will blast me for that--let 'er rip!). The song reminds me of visiting a Chinese area of California and soaking up some local restaurants or street markets, then attending a parade of some kind. "Double helix in the sky" could simply be fireworks, but if you take the drug tack on it, it could mean swallowing or snorting the drugs as opposed to smoking them or freebasing. "Dime-dancing" is also a general term for working; "dancing on a dime" was once a term for earning a wage, so the singer could simply be stating that he prefers to hang out in Asian locales after work every day. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – The Caves of Altamira Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Probably the most off-the-wall thing anyone ever wrote a song about: cave paintings. Altamira is the site of the oldest known cave paintings. This song does a nice job of describing the feeling of seeing written communications from thousands of years ago. |
submissions
| The Police – Darkness Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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One of my favorite lyric works ever. Such catchy lines! "I could make a mark if it weren't so dark / I could be replaced by any bright spark"... A masterpiece. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – The Fez Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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And all this time, I thought it was in reference to the Shriners, and how they open doors to success for their own members. Interesting. I think the condom idea would be a reach if not for the fact that the band is named after a dildo in the first place. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Kid Charlemagne Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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As a songwriter myself, I LOVE the lyrics to this one. It's funny to me, though I couldn't explain why. These two picked the damnedest things to write songs about. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – FM (No Static at All) Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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What stuck out the most about this song to me was its use of a string section. I haven't heard any other Steely Dan song that does. I saw the movie "FM", and it was a sleeper, but it obviously inspired the series "WKRP in Cincinnati", which was cool. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Everyone's Gone to the Movies Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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To me, this is one of the creepiest songs ever written. Not just for the subject matter, which is obviously a mass child molester doing his business, but for the pairing of this with seemingly light-hearted music. I'm always fascinated by songs that do that: mix lyrics with a music style that does not seem to match. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Do It Again Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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And all along, I thought it was simply a song about criminal recidivism and the futility of the justice system. |
submissions
| Steely Dan – Haitian Divorce Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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This was one of their best lyrical offerings, despite its lack of airplay. Some very interesting observations here about the baby at the end that never dawned on me; I always thought it was just a passing reference and it never made sense to me. One thing that you have to keep in mind is the 70s nostalgia the song embodies. In the middle 1970s, Papa Doc Duvalier was the dictator of Haiti, and he was a crook. As brutal as he was to his own people, he was always cordial to the U. S. tourists and government. The song is in the reggae style of the time. So the chorus is basically an enticement by Papa Doc for tourists to forget their problems and come to Haiti to have them solved in a quickie divorce. I think the message of the song is that there can be long-term consequences from rash decisions, and that there is no such thing as an easy divorce. Very good observations about the baby, though; they helped. |
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