| Elvis Costello – Watching the Detectives Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I always heard the line "red dogs under illegal legs" as "red dots under a legal X" -- meaning drops of blood on some sort of contract that's been signed with an X. Just me? Probably. Ah well. | |
| Johnny Cash – First Time I Ever Saw Your Face Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Cash's cover of "Hurt" from American IV gets most of the attention as his swan song, and rightfully so, but for me, this song is even more poignant and heartbreaking. Just as with "Hurt," Cash takes a familiar song and makes it completely his own. You can't listen to this without thinking of Johnny's lady, June Carter Cash, and knowing that he's singing about her and their great love, at the very end of their lives together. You've got to have a heart of stone to hear him sing lines like "I know our joy would fill the earth / and last 'till the end of time my love" and not get choked up. I can't begin to imagine the loss and remembered joy of two people who have been deeply in love for almost 40 years, facing their mortality and the fact that they will soon be separated by death. It's sad, but also a thing to be celebrated. How fortunate any of us would be to find someone to be our one true love and companion in life, and to have what Johnny and June had. And I can't think of a lovelier epitaph for their life together than this song. |
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| Lou Reed – Perfect Day Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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When I first heard this song, it created a very specific scene in my imagination: someone living an existence of abject misery, very likely in the grip of drug addiction, enjoying one beautiful, perfect day of mental clarity and peace with someone they love, but then inevitably going back to their miserable life. The line "oh such a perfect day / you just keep me hanging on" refers to that one day of happiness that keeps the narrator from killing himself, as hopeless as his existence is and as unlikely as it is that he'll recapture that "perfect day." What makes it incredibly sad to me is how simple his perfect day is -- sitting in the park, drinking sangria, feeding animals. It reminds me of times when I've been incredibly depressed, and it has invariably been some common, simple pleasure, like sitting in spring sunshine and feeding ducks, that has kept me hanging on. |
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