| Blue Öyster Cult – Power Underneath Despair Lyrics | 5 months ago |
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What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gonna have some fun What do you consider fun? POWER UNDERNEATH POWER UNDERNEATH POWER UNDERNEATH DESPAIR |
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| Robyn Hitchcock – Agony of Pleasure Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| wut | |
| The Hollies – Stop Stop Stop Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| I'll take "Songs That Don't Know They Are About Sexual Assault", for $100. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Then Came The Last Days Of May Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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Enterprising fans have tracked this story down to a true incident: https://imgur.com/a/Vt1vfNG How it was found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l2DhFuylD4 |
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| Talking Heads – Psycho Killer Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| In Chris Frantz's new book, he claims that this song was "inspired by the wry morbidity of Alice Cooper". | |
| Elvis Presley – Hound Dog Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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I would think that having never caught a rabbit would actually help refute the accusation that one is nothing but a hound dog. "You're nothing but a snake, and you've never swallowed a mouse." |
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| Elton John – I'm Still Standing Lyrics | 5 years ago |
| So if you're in a circus, your odds of becoming a clown increase the longer you're there? | |
| Billy Joel – We Didn't Start the Fire Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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Comic book writer Kieron Gillen wrote a bit about this song that's worth repeating here: "It’s a gimmick song. A list song. It’s a list of events from Joel’s life – it gives the impression of building towards the present day, but really is pretty fucking random from across the timeline, selecting stuff as it would occur, a ramble. The song is so sleight to be sarcastic, but it’s delivered with a frustration and attack. The words are all meaningfully chosen, with juxtaposition between huge events and trivia equally sang with commitment, but the context is so traditional a frame to be almost dismissive. Yet with this disengagement – and with tricks thrown in to maintain interest from its monotony and add towards a slowly build tension – it builds towards an apocalypse, before backing off to a statement of that is how life feels as it is being lived, and the sense of apocalypse is an illusion, and the real horror is that this will continue ever onwards." |
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| Iggy Pop – Well Did You Evah Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| These are the original lyrics. The Iggy Pop/Deborah Harry version is different. | |
| Camper Van Beethoven – All Her Favorite Fruit Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| Wait, just realized it's 'cultivated'. That fits. Never mind. (now how do you delete a post here...) | |
| Camper Van Beethoven – All Her Favorite Fruit Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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I think two words are deliberately swapped in a couple of lines. "Does she ever whisper in his ear, all her favorite *places*" makes more sense if the couple is making love (she takes off her dress, and is whispering in his ear -- her favorite places to be touched?). "And all the most exotic *fruit* they are cultivating" is obvious. I don't know why CVB would do this, except just screwing around, but it makes more sense to me. |
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| Status Quo – Pictures Of Matchstick Men Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| From songwriter Francis Rossi: "Most songs I heard when I was growing up were about love of some sort, but I've never been able to get too lovey-dovey with it. I often thought, Why can't I write a lovely, "Wake up, I want to make love tonight" song? I can't do that. I get embarrassed even saying it to you. But in our own way, Bob and I have written love songs. "Matchstick Men" was basically about my ex-wife. I'd just got married, and I thought, Oh, this is a mistake, what have I done?" | |
| The Beatles – She's Leaving Home Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| Although Go Ask Alice was originally promoted as the real, albeit edited, diary of a real teenage girl, over time the book has come to be regarded by researchers as a fake memoir written by Beatrice Sparks. | |
| Ween – So Many People In The Neighborhood Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| "I don't know if they're *very* good people" is pretty obviously the lyric. | |
| Ween – Zoloft Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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There's another section at the end with some mumbly backing vocals. I've only found one version online but I'm not sure it's totally accurate: Gimme that z ,o-l-o-f-t (I can’t explain why I’m feeling this way) --> or (I can't explain how I'm feeling inside) Gimme a grip, make me love me (Trips in the barren for the month) Suckin' ‘em down, I’m happy man (Are you a monkey or a man-child) Can feel it inside, makin’ me smile |
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| The Doobie Brothers – Black Water Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| Not sure if the final chorus is a grandfather asking his daughter to dance with him, or a man instructing his mother to dance with his grandfather. | |
| Frank Black – Calistan Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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There's a YouTube video where he explains - it's about El Camino Real, a road that extends 600 miles down through California; - the radio is CB and the Big Fleet is all the truckers on the highways; - the weather refers to the smog in LA. I wish he'd said more about the more speculative elements (like LA being a valley of tar) but that's what's there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qik7gjekizk |
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| Shriekback – Only Thing That Shines Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews: "It is, I think, an honest look at those feelings you have on the precipice of a new, undoubtedly complicated but incredibly exciting love affair. ‘Am I really going to do all this again?’ All the sensible thoughts are recoiling but the possibilities look so vast and exciting. If you’re being really honest, though, I suggest, you will recognise that the point of no return was passed some time ago when you weren’t being so vigilant. Otherwise you wouldn’t be writing a song like this." |
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| Shriekback – Coelocanth Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews: "The old fish was always intended to be played on a keyboard (Fairlight, probably) but Hans Zimmer - in his only big production contribution to Oil and Gold - suggested a Shakuhachi. The main reason he suggested this was because he had just been working on the music for the Nic Roeg movie ‘Insignificance’ in which, after what some may find excessively wordy exchanges between (among others) Marilyn Monroe and Einstein, a nuclear blast rips the room apart in slo-mo to the sound of - that’s right - a meditative Shakuhachi. So - after I’d stropped about a bit - we got the same guy down and Coelacanth as we know it was born." |
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| Shriekback – (Open Up) Your Filthy Heart (To Me) Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews: "Another urban Rite of Passage tune (see Sago City). The young man looking to the Big City for initiation, the older man returning to his first city. Perhaps they’re the same person." |
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| Shriekback – Ronny Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2016 blog post by Barry Andrews: "‘Ronny’ was inspired by the tales Wendy and Sarah Partridge would tell of their Dad’s implausible (but actual) friendship with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. The character of an exiled wildman, living off past glories chimed with that particular melancholy that surrounds blokes on their own generally. Like many facets of gender, in my opinion, the predicament of maleness is no worse or better than that of our sisters but is observably different. I was trying to contrast the slightly bogus grandiosity of his prime with the seediness after the Fall. He does get a happy ending though." |
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| Shriekback – In The Dreamlife Of Dogs Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews himself: "This was the easiest Shriek tune to translate to the piano because the pianisms were already built into the original. I liked the idea of some slightly camp and florid piano adorning a tune about a dog twitching on the hearthrug, not totally sure why: foppish high culture and earthy houndliness perhaps being amusingly contrasted. The ridiculous arpeggio which opens the track is a private joke with myself. At secondary school (where playing piano was a skill, I discovered, which could often keep one’s head from being punched or put down the toilet) when ‘invited’ to perform for a coterie of hardnuts from the year above (‘dance, monkey, dance!’), I would open with just such a baroque flounce. I think the sheer Liberace-ness of it made me at once worthy of their indulgence - of grudging admiration even - and seem too strange and delicate a creature to be immediately destroyed." |
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| Shriekback – Going Equipped Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews himself: "Going Equipped is, of course, a list song. I love a good list song. I’m writing a piece at the moment which examines that whole area between Making Sense and Not: how far can you go into nonsense before it just becomes completely opaque and pointless? This song, I think, walks the line successfully, on the whole. List songs, though, by their nature, have a tendency to step into the surrealist, not-making-sense camp very easily: ’raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens…brown paper packages tied up with string etc’ is not, I think, any less nuts than ‘ we got the plasma, we got the chrome..we got the litmus, we got the trowels’. Surely?" |
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| Shriekback – Faded Flowers Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews himself: "Well, yes, the old showstopper from Oily Gold, made for this sort of [piano-only] production of course. Or great big drums and guitars and Michael Bublé possibly: it has the camp soul of a Power Ballad but let us not dwell on that." |
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| Shriekback – God's Gardenias Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews himself: "A song enamoured by the whole idea of Women, of pleasure, of the sheer variousness of life. It was a funny old time, that summer. There’s an ‘Apocalypse Now’ reference in the title: colonel Kurtz remembering his life back in Ohio where it seemed: ‘heaven had fallen to earth in the form of.. gardenias’. To tell you the truth, until just now when I Wiki’d it, I had no real idea what a gardenia looked like. Shameful unresearched botanical shit eh?" |
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| Shriekback – This Big Hush Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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From a December 2015 blog post by Barry Andrews himself: "Blind girl meets psycho, fondles tigers’ balls, Gets it On, has some regrets. It’s a story old as time." I don't understand it either. |
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| Yes – The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus) Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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According to Michael Tait, the band's lighting director, Anderson called him "at ten o'clock one night from Advision Studio and said, 'I want the name of prehistoric fish in eight syllables. Call me back in half an hour'". Tait subsequently found Schindleria praematurus, a species of marine fish, in a copy of Guinness Book of Records. Wikipedia says: "Schindleria is a genus of marine fish. It is the only genus of family Schindleriidae, among the Gobioidei of order Perciformes. The type species is S. praematura, Schindler's fish. The Schindleria species are known generically as Schindler's fishes after German zoologist Otto Schindler (1906–1959), or infantfishes. They are native to the southern Pacific Ocean, from the South China Sea to the Great Barrier Reef off eastern Australia." |
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| Rod Stewart – Maggie May Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| In his memoir Rod: The Autobiography, Stewart provided details of the experience that led to this song. Wrote Stewart: "At 16, I went to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the New Forest. I'd snuck in with some mates via an overflow sewage pipe. And there on a secluded patch of grass, I lost my not-remotely-prized virginity with an older (and larger) woman who'd come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can't tell you - but old enough to be highly disappointed by the brevity of the experience." | |
| Ween – My Own Bare Hands Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| It's like this song develops Tourette's near the end. | |
| Rasputina – Incapable Of Regret Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Not positive but maybe this is about Donald Rumsfeld? "As he often would describe it later, the task in Iraq was to remove the training wheels and get American hands off the back of the Iraqi bicycle seat." | |
| Rasputina – Flood Corps Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Hurricane Katrina. "The head of a Louisiana ambulance service said he had been told of one home in lower St. Bernard's Parish where 80 patients had been found dead and of an apartment home for the blind where the staff had abandoned the residents. The reports could not immediately be confirmed." | |
| Rasputina – The Humanized Mice Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| The quote about a mouse standing on its hind legs is from the Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics: https://books.google.com/books?id=1Y7BuyttlDUC, in a section about human/nonhuman chimeras. It does not say that the mouse doing this would be a cause for worry, though, just that it would be evidence of a humanlike behavior. | |
| The The – Kingdom Of Rain Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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"Is it just me? Or is this the way that love is supposed to be?" She's asking the same thing twice, here. If the answer to #2 is 'yes', then the answer to #1 is also 'yes'. Just sayin. |
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| Camper Van Beethoven – Borderline Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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From David Lowery's blog: "Borderlands are a concept from Geopolitical theory. It comes in handy when trying to describe California. Borderlands are regions where the immigrant population is still culturally and economically anchored to their nearby ancestral homeland. The classic example is Mexican immigrants in the Southwest of the US. Coachella valley, large swaths of LA, the southern Central Valley. All borderlands. These pockets are neither US or Mexico or both depending on your viewpoint. While physically part of the US they are culturally and economically tethered to nearby Mexico. If you slide into one of these pockets from Mexico or from the the southwest of the US there isn’t really much of a process of adaptation." It's really too long to repeat here; the rest is at http://300songs.com/2010/08/18/32-poor-mexico-so-far-from-god-so-close-to-camper-van-beethoven/#comments |
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| Michael Johnson – Bluer Than Blue Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Obviously this is from the point of view of someone who is trying to convince himself that his life will be better after a breakup, but it's a half-hearted and sad attempt. The advantages of being single as presented here are kind of shallow, i.e. catching up on TV shows. What struck me today upon hearing this, though, is the line about changing his telephone number. Who does that after a breakup other than people who are trying to avoid their exes? It's a weird line that doesn't fit the theme of the song. |
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| Frank Black – The Cult of Ray Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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[continued] FB: It’s going! [Laughs.] RB: Let’s do it right now. FB: Wonderful! [Clears throat.] Thank you for your time, by the way... RB: Sure. FB: ...and I won’t take too much of it. Over the years I have imagined, in my own mind, filling the Los Angeles storm drain and aqueducts with water to accommodate boats to ferry people around town. If you could be mayor, or king, of Los Angeles for a day, what great works could you imagine? RB: I would turn the river bottom into a freeway. You don’t need water, just clear out the rocks and you could have a freeway all the way out to the Valley away from the other freeways. There’s a lot of rocks there. There’s a drain in the middle that channels what little water’s there. FB: The Los Angeles river? RB: It goes all the way to the Valley. You’d have a freeway, which would give you extra ways of traveling from the Valley into downtown. FB: Some of us in the world are excited about colonizing Mars. Why do you suppose that some people have such a negative, or sometimes even hostile attitude about this? RB: It’s always been true that the average person has very little imagination. We can’t expect them to anticipate the things that we anticipate. It’s inevitable that we go back to the moon, its inevitable that we go to Mars, and its inevitable we go on out into the universe. We’re just not gonna stay here. The people that don’t think about these things, they think only of the practical things of getting up in the morning, and going to bed at night. But if that sort of thinking had occurred five hundred years ago, there’d be no America. Three Italian voyagers discovered America. Columbus never touched ground until the third expedition. Then Giovanni Caboto was sent by Henry VII, and finally Jacques Cartier was sent by Francois I of France. Each of them didn’t realize that what they were doing was creating a country with 300 million people. Now, if the thinking had gone on in those days the way it is today, they would have never have left Italy and France and England, and there would be no United States. So think of that. Come on! We’ve gotta do these things, in spite of the people who don’t care. FB: Amen. On that note, it seems inevitable that one day many locales on Mars will be named after you, Mr. Bradbury. Does that give you a little thrill? RB: Right now it’s enough that I have a crater on the moon named after one of my books. The Dandelion Crater. That’s good enough for me. FB: OK. You attended the first world science fiction convention, Worldcon, in 1939. RB: When I was 19 years old. FB: You’ve attended comic book conventions throughout your life. RB: I’ve been going the last three years to the one in San Diego. It’s great fun, its just jolly. FB: Are you a believer in human gathering? As humans, are we meant to gather? RB: It seems that we need it, doesn’t it? If we’re all crazy together...You can go to the comic conventions in July and you can see how crazy we are. Because we all get together and say, “Well, we’re pretty nuts, aren’t we?” But we love each other. So that’s why we do it. FB: Some Angelenos are secessionists and think the city would run better if it shrank some. Do you think Los Angeles’ problems might be helped by making it smaller, or do you think it should stay big? RB: We don’t need to make it smaller. What we need is the monorail. We were offered the chance by Helwig Monorail 40 years ago at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Helwig Monorail offered to build eight or 12 systems for free and give them to us, if we allowed them to run them. That seemed fair enough to me. So that would solve the traffic problem, because it’s above traffic, it’s off the street, and can be built away from the street then brought in and put up without any trouble or hurting anyone. We’re not going to make LA smaller, it’s too late. But we have to have a decent monorail system to help us move around. FB: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve read that before my time – I’m 40 years old – that movie theatres were everywhere, and that Los Angeles even used to have several Japanese-language movie theatres. RB: Oh, I used to go to them all the time, I took all my children to the one near Wilshire and La Brea. I took them to see all of [Akira] Kurosawa’s films there. FB: I guess it was a really wonderful time in America when movie theatres were so much more plentiful then they are now. RB: Well, now we have multiple theatres. Most of them are too small. I don’t like to go to the multiple theatres. But there’s still a few big ones and thank God for that. FB: Would you be in favor of making sections of Los Angeles pedestrian zones, free of cars, or do you think that car culture is too important to the city? RB: I helped Santa Monica rebuild their pedestrian section which starts at Wilshire and goes all the way down for about six or eight blocks, and throughout Fifth Street in Santa Monica. I’m responsible for nagging them to rebuild that, ‘cause it works. At Century City you have a car-free zone, and I helped rebuild that. I told them that they needed 30 restaurants, because people go out to eat, they don’t go out to shop. They go out to eat, and when they feel good, they buy things they don’t want. So I am in favor of more of these, I think Westwood could do with closing a few streets and turning them into pedestrian malls, and it will be done. It will be done. FB: In modern cinema, do you think that its become too violent or graphic, leaving less to the imagination, or is this an old fashioned kind of attitude? RB: Mostly crap, isn’t it? Every five minutes they explode ten thousand gallons of gasoline. So that is moronic. And indeed they’re too violent. So many of them are tests between macho males trying to prove they have biceps and balls. I like the old fashioned movies and there are still a lot of movies around that are excellent. During the last year or so there was a wonderful western that is a bit violent with Robert Duvall, called “Open Range.” There’s a film with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, “Secondhand Lions,” a beautiful film about Africa. And then during the Academy Award time, there was Annette Benning in.“Being Julia” was the name of it. Very nice film. So there are some good films around. But we have to pay attention to them. FB: The one filmmaker who has been able to make me cry is Jaques Tati. RB: Well, I knew him very well, he was a good friend. “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” is one of the funniest films, and one of the saddest films ever made. It’s very funny, but it has a touch of melancholy. Beautiful. FB: Is there a filmmaker that can make you cry? RB: Well, I did a film at Disney, “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” it has its moments that make you cry because it’s very human, the relationship of the boy with his father. And Jack Clayton directed that. Very nice. FB: Speaking of directors, I feel emotionally scarred to this day by a guy who almost punched me out in a barroom where my girlfriend worked. This was someone I did not know. You were almost punched out by John Huston, who you admired. Can you laugh about that now, or do you still feel hurt by that? RB: No, no, ‘cause it’s a long time ago, and he gave me a job to write [the screenplay for] “Moby Dick” and I’m very grateful. He’s the only one that paid attention to me 55 years ago. So I’m very grateful. FB: I’m a rock musician; I’ve done a lot of flying in the world, and I’ve gone through phases in my life where I’ve been afraid of flying. But once, I was upgraded to a flight on the Concorde. I know you’ve flown the Concorde–were you sad to see it go, finally? RB: That was a terrible mistake that was based on a piece of metal that was on the runway. And the tire of the Concorde hit the piece of metal and it went up through the plane and destroyed it, but it had nothing to do with the Concorde. But they were cowards to give up because this had nothing to do with the plane. It was a piece of metal on the tarmac. It should never have caused the destruction of the Concorde. FB: I only got to fly the Concorde once, but I loved that moment when the aircraft reached the speed of sound and the sound of the engines disappeared behind you. Do you have any favorite recollections of that supersonic flight? RB: It’s wonderful, but more important is this: I discovered when I flew for the first time that I wasn’t afraid of flying, I was afraid of me. Once I discovered that I was afraid of me, the fear went away, because I’m a good guy. So I’ve been flying ever since. A lot of people think they’re afraid of flying, and they’re just afraid of themselves, that’s all. FB: Maybe I should pass that along to my grandmother, who’s exactly your age; she still won’t fly. I think she’s traveled around the world on boats but she still won’t get on a plane. RB: She’s afraid of herself. Tell her to just relax and take a drink of gin and get on the plane. FB: I’ll tell her you said so. One time I got to travel on the Queen Elizabeth II. I imagine you probably traveled that boat once or twice in your lifetime. RB: I’ve taken all my daughters on it. FB: Were you sad to see that ship go? RB: Well, they’ve got other new ships. In fact, its still around, it’s making trips. It hasn’t been retired completely. FB: They say that the first ship to Mars will be a bit of a slow boat. Some say six to nine months. With that kind of travel time involved, do you think some colonists will be saying goodbye to Earth forever? RB: Oh, I can’t answer that, it’s too far in the future. I couldn’t answer that at all. FB: OK. Well, as colonists in the future, that distant future, do you think we should alter the atmosphere of Mars to make it more hospitable, or should we take a more ‘green’ approach and learn to live within its limitations? RB: At the start, we’ll have to live within its limitations. But as we begin to plant Mars, then the oxygen will come out of the plants, won’t it? That will take a lot of planting and a lot of doing. FB: As a writer, I’m sure you’ve had many meetings over the years with people in restaurants. What is your favorite restaurant in Paris, if it’s even still there? RB: Oh God Almighty, there are so many. First of all, there are 20,000 restaurants in Paris. And I’ve been in most of them. Fouquet’s is on the Champs d’Elysees, it’s a very nice restaurant, and it’s pretty social, and you have the fun of eating good food and watching the Parisian public walk by. FB: In Los Angeles, my personal favorite is the Pacific Dining Car downtown. RB: Oh, you just named mine. I go to both, I go to the one on Wilshire out in Santa Monica. It’s just as good. FB: Yeah, I like the one in Santa Monica as well. I really like the fact that there isn’t any music being piped in and it’s so quiet and sound-absorbent... RB: You can talk to one another... FB: Is that the mark of the restaurant of yesteryear, or is that just a fantasy of mine that back in the day a lot of restaurants were like that? RB: Nowadays people don’t want to talk to each other, so they go to a restaurant where there’s a lot of talk, a lot of sound, and a lot of music, and they don’t have to say anything. It’s a real bore. FB: When I was 16 years old I took the GED high school equivalency test because I was anxious to begin my career in music, and my mother made me finish high school. Would you have different advice for a teenager who’s in a rush? RB: Well, it depends what you’re going to do. Now if you want be a writer, you don’t need education. You can do it yourself. So when I graduated from high school, I went to the library and I stayed there, I went to the library two or three days a week for 20 years. I graduated from the library when I was about 28 years old. Through writing, you educate yourself. You write every day and you read every day. And at the end of 10 years or so you’ve become a writer. That’s the way you rush it, by doing it. FB: The sound and the vibrations of the typewriter are virtually gone now, and I realize that since your stroke you may be writing a different way now, but up until that time, was the feel and the sound of the typewriter machine an important part of the writing experience for you? RB: I think it is, but I suppose if you’re used to the computer, it doesn’t make any difference. After all, the pencil and paper, or a pen and paper, are quiet too, so you can write just as well. It doesn’t matter how you write, just as long as you write. So you don’t need the sound, but it’s very nice. FB: Last year, 63-year-old Mike Melvill flew the first privately built craft into space. Do you think that it’s individuals, or groups of individuals, rather than governments, who will finally colonize space? RB: First of all, it’s too expensive. It’s hard to guess if there will be enough crazy people in the future to do it. I think you require the government to do it, because the government needs to do it. Crazy people are not that frequently to be met. So I think it will be a government thing as far as I can see. Ray Bradbury appears at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena at 6 p.m. on April 29. The Pixies tour begins May 26 and comes to L.A’s Wiltern on June 2. |
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| Frank Black – The Cult of Ray Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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R.I.P. Ray Bradbury. http://forum.frankblack.net/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12838 I is for Interview Indie-rock hero Frank Black goes one-on-one with his literary hero, the indomitable Ray Bradbury. BY FRANK BLACK I got an email from the editor at the L.A. Alternative Press asking me to call up the one and only Ray Bradbury to ask him some questions for a casual Q&A. I avoided responding. When my high school English teacher said I could write short stories instead of doing homework, Ray Bradbury was my main source of inspiration. Years later I would absorb what Ray had to say at personal appearances he made at libraries and gymnasiums. I named a record after him [1996’s “The Cult of Ray”] and squeezed as much of him as I could into my own work. Once I got an autograph and mumbled garbled, humbled praise. I was totally intimidated to speak with the beyond-famous and beloved writer, and yet I thought myself a fool to pass on the experience. I called Katherine at the Press back right before the deadline and was given Ray’s home telephone number. She told me he would pick up the telephone when I called. The first two times I called I was very satisfied to hear the ancient sound of the busy signal. I was not surprised that Mr. Bradbury had no use for call waiting. Then, on my third attempt, he answered after one ring... RAY BRADBURY: Good morning. FRANK BLACK: Good morning Mr. Bradbury, this is Frank Black representing the LA Alternative Press publication. I was hoping I could speak to you today, perhaps...or whenever it’s convenient. RB: Um, let’s see what time it is here...Could you do it right now? FB: Absolutely. RB: Put on your tape recorder... FB: It’s going! [Laughs.] |
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| Pink Floyd – Keep Talking Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the Stephen Hawking voice is very reminiscent of the "caller" who appears on several tracks on Waters's album Radio K.A.O.S. |
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| Ween – Bumblebee Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This song makes me want to go to film school so I can become a big Hollywood director, just so that I can make a movie with a scene where someone gets stung by a bumblebee, and use this for the music at that part. |
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| Camper Van Beethoven – When I Win the Lottery Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Pretty sure it's "unknown communists" not "a known communist." | |
| Ween – If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All) Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This song feels like a bookend to "Even If You Don't". The singer in that one is putting a lot of effort into propping up a relationship with an emotionally unstable person, possibly an addict. "I'm goin' crazy - trying to keep you sane" Here, he realizes that it's all collapsing and his efforts were wasted. |
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| Robyn Hitchcock – My Wife and My Dead Wife Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| No, he's clearly interacting two different women -- he gets their coffee mixed up. I guess you could say his wife stopped taking sugar in her coffee at some point, but why go to such trouble to make the song less creepy? | |
| Porcupine Tree – The Creator Has A Mastertape Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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In addition to all of the serial killer connotations, this might be a shout-out to indy comics creator Matt Howarth and his "Post Brothers" universe. The god of this universe appears to be Professor Ed, a normal-seeming guy with a studio full of tapes containing all of the data that makes up reality. Howarth is a huge fan of progressive and experimental rock and has probably mentioned Porcupine Tree in his music review comics. |
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| Self – Having Dinner With The Funk Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| I don't think it means much of anything, but it's ironic that this song is not in any way funky. | |
| Alanis Morissette – You Oughta Know Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Sure the emotions are raw and authentic, but I always think about the poor dude she dates next... I mean, she blasts her ex for thinking about her when he bangs her replacement, and yet with her next guy, she's gonna be scratching her nails down his back and screaming, "DO YOU FEEL THAT, JOEY?!?! DO YOU?!?!" I don't want to be that guy, personally. Plus, you'd always have to help her get her cross into and out of the car any time you go someplace. Wouldn't be fair to deny her that. |
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| Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Piña Colada Song) Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I can't believe how many people think this song is "sweet". It's about two horrible people who decide to cheat on each other because they're "bored". In the end they get exactly what they deserve -- each other's lying, cheating asses. How long till they get bored again? |
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| Ween – It's Gonna Be A Long Night Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| woxy.com just played this song and then followed up with Motorhead's "Ace of Spades", and at first I thought it was an extended version of the Ween song. Dead on. | |
| Hawkwind – Needle Gun Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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It's a reference to Michael Moorcock's character Jerry Cornelius, who uses a needle gun. |
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| Steve Miller Band – Take The Money And Run Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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As stories go, it's kind of sketchy. It introduces the detective, and then never does anything with him. That always bothered me. And I bet if someone broke into your house and shot you, you'd be pretty glad that we have taxpayer-supported police to track them down. |
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| Jerry Harrison – Rev It Up Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Wouldn't that be "Screeches and swerves," not "Creatures and swerves"? Also, I have a hunch that this song might possibly be about sex, and yet also about a woman driving a car. Pretty deep! |
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