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Joni Mitchell – Electricity Lyrics	3 years ago
"He" is Mitchell\'s then-recent ex James Taylor; "she" is Carly Simon, the fellow singer-songwriter he moved on to. Mitchell doesn\'t think Simon has any better chance of "fixing" Taylor\'s damage than she herself did. I assume the line "She wants me to tell her what the trouble might be" means Simon turned to her for advice.

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Joni Mitchell – The Sire of Sorrow (Job's Sad Song) Lyrics	5 years ago
The line "My loves are dead or dying, or they don't come near," as well as the antagonists' lines about suffering being a punishment from God, always reminds me that this song was written at a time when HIV was a virtual death sentence. On the same album, Joni covered "How Do You Stop," a beautiful song by Dan Hartman, a contemporary and friend who had died from AIDS-related complications.

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The Bangles – Following Lyrics

6 years ago

I don't think the relationship is entirely in someone's head. I've always heard it as a lesbian singing to a friend who experimented with her when they were teenagers, to the point that the singer thought of them as girlfriends. But either it was never as serious to the other girl, or it was at odds with the conventional life she planned for herself. After high school, she got involved with a guy and tried to put some distance there, and the singer reacted badly. The singer didn't want to let go. She wants to believe she meant something. And maybe she did/does, or maybe she's just overinterpreting things. It's open to interpretation, and that veiled quality is part of what makes it striking. There's also anger in it, hurt, need. It's obviously a personal song. The writer (whose sexual orientation I don't know) has said she was writing about her "high-school sweetheart." A lot more gay people were closeted or in denial even when the song was recorded in the mid '80s, let alone in the time period it presumably would be written about (the early '70s, going by when the writer would have been in high school).

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Elvis Costello – London's Brilliant Parade Lyrics

8 years ago

This song absolutely breaks my heart. I don't know how many times I heard it before it really sank in how sad it is, in the way it contrasts a grim present circa 1994 with something long vanished, maybe always a lie. There's a lightness of touch to the way it's played and sung, and some irony in the wordplay, but I think you have to have deep feeling for something to come up with something so good. It's the kind of song you wish everyone knew, and you just have to consign yourself to the cult mentality. There are people who hear it and get it, and it may outlive us all, because it's part of an important body of work. And he hits this level often. Grade-A Costello.

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Elvis Costello – Sleep of the Just Lyrics

10 years ago

I took "I thought that he was asking me to dance [...] We've have made a lovely couple" as sarcasm. The soldier's demands for this personal information are bullying. Here's a little light shed on the song by the bard himself, in the liner note to the 1989 compilation GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! “Songwriters sometimes take secret revenge on people who piss them off by making them the villain in a song. I finished this song on the bus to Letterkenny after a curt exchange of views with one of "our brave lads” at the border of what we laughingly call “our country.” Anyway he ended up in here along with his sister, the topless model.“

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Joni Mitchell – See You Sometime Lyrics	10 years ago
@[vanja89:2073] This is long after your question was posed, but she has been clear about this one in an interview, some years later -- she was writing about James Taylor. She laughed about the fact that on his next album cover after For the Roses was released, he actually wore suspenders.

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Elvis Costello – Hidden Shame Lyrics

11 years ago

Repressed homosexuality? It doesn't *have* to be that, but it does fit. It wasn't a run-of-the-mill argument that led to the death, because we're told "not a single word was spoken." I'm thinking the childhood friend made some kind of sexual advance, made overt something that had been subtler between them ("We would run and hide"), and it was too much for the narrator, and he lashed out and he's always been guilty. In the final verse, "I'm not saying if I did or if I didn't"...he's already said he must have pushed the boy to his death, so it isn't that. It would seem to be "I'm not saying if I did or if I didn't [love him] / But like my shame that kind of love [between men] is always hidden." This was written for Johnny Cash, whose "Folsom Prison Blues"-style recording is excellent.

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Randy Newman – Ghosts Lyrics

11 years ago

A brilliant song. Not the easiest of Newman's to love, or to "get" the first time, but what seems at first fragmentary, in both the words and the music, ultimately reveals itself as beyond improvement. It isn't easy to do as much as he does here. The words and the music and the singing all together bring this lonely, ruminative, frightened old World War I vet into sharp focus. I like to imagine it's the same character from Newman's "Going Home (1918)," who 60 years earlier was singing about returning to "the land I love, and the one girl who waits for me."

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Tom Waits – Diamond in Your Mind Lyrics

11 years ago

The very religious Solomon Burke took a few liberties with the lyrics in his (superb) recording. "Zerelda Samuels said she almost never prays" in his version, because, he reasoned, if you got your arm blown off, you must have called on the Lord a few times (I paraphrase). Also, the line "something about God that I just don't understand" is changed to "and all so ever grateful for God's almighty hand."

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Randy Newman – Real Emotional Girl Lyrics	12 years ago
Newman has said that what he wanted us to take away was that the narrator is not such a good guy. He's betraying this girl all over again, telling a friend things that are not his to tell. But most people hear it "straight," as a very loving song.

submissions

Elvis Costello – Sleep of the Just Lyrics

12 years ago

I don't think so, because the singer/narrator is describing "the girl" too objectively. The first two verses (especially the first) sprang from an unpleasant confrontation Costello had with a young British soldier. Costello himself seems to be the "I." The latter two verses are, indeed, about an estranged brother and sister -- he's gone into the Army, while she poses for soft porn and sleeps around, and it's implied she drinks heavily or worse. In the last verse, the brother does not want to reveal to his fellow soldiers that the pin-up they're ogling is his sister ("His family pride was rising up"). A common misreading of the final verse is that it describes a gang rape, but "pinned up upon the barracks wall" is clearly about a picture, not a person. If I were trying to tie it together, I would say that Costello had an unpleasant encounter and tried to find compassion in his imagination; he gave a rude real-life soldier a poignant back-story that exists only in this song. The brother is still protective of his sister, while the sister is unconsciously drawn to a one-night stand because he resembles her brother.

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