What piece of song lyric you can really relate to?
I'm not talking about the full lyrics, but just a phrase or a sentence that you feel is right up your alley.
One of my personal favourites is from Barmy by The Fall: I got everything I want except for money.
"Sometimes I feel, oh yes, I could do
Almost everything I wanted
And it makes me cry"
-- Yoko Kanno, Flying Teapot, Cowboy Bebop soundtrack
“Your death it won’t happen to you, it happens to your family and your friends, I pretend.”
From the song “I Always Wanna Die Sometimes” by the 1975.
Got me out of a very dark place and made me realize how much it would hurt my friends and family if I went through with it.
We all have suicidal thoughts at some point. It’s when you actively think about how and when you’ll do it that you need help.
I was in a similar spot a long time ago. Even though in such a situation it's incredibly hard to see it from outside your black bubble of depression, from your family's and friends' POV, it really does help to try.
Tool - Ænima
This line from Uncle John's Band by Grateful Dead is really simple and maybe kinda cheesy but it's given me motivation and kept me in check a few times:
Well the first days are the hardest days, don't you worry anymore. 'Cause when life looks like easy street there is danger at your door
Paul Simon, Crazy Love. The line is "sad as a lonely, little wrinkled balloon." Even as a kid, I always found that image so evocative.
Paul Simon has so many hard-hitting lyrics across his entire catalog. I'm sure I could find something from just about any album, but for me, what comes instantly to mind is this line from "The Cool, Cool River": "And sometimes, even music/ Cannot substitute for tears".
From the same album...
"Losing love is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you're blown apart"
Such a devastating lyric.
The deadly, yellow snow from right there where the huskies go.
Frank Zappa - Nanook Rubs It
Always makes me smile :)
Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow!
As she abused a sausage patty
And said why don’t you treat me mean?
“Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache”
Synchronicity II, The Police
Pink Floyd, Time
On an evening such as this It's hard to tell if I exist. Pack the car and leave this town. Who'll notice that I'm not around?
I can hide out under there... I just made you say underwear! I can leave but I'll just stay. All my stuff's here anyway.
Pinch me - Barenaked ladies
"I've been on fire, and yet I've still stayed frozen"
CAKE No Phone
"A heart that's full up like a landfill"
No Surprises by Radiohead
Makes me think of someone who's so empathetic that their heart is just always overflowing with thoughts of other people's misery. It hasn't gotten better.
"Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain"
"You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today"
"But then one day you find, ten years have got behind you"
"No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"
I think that the truth is I'm scared
I think I'm just scared to live
I think that that the truth is I'm scared
I think that the truth is I'm everything that I hate
“Music of rebellion makes you wanna rage;
But it’s made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age”
-The Sound of Muzak by Porcupine Tree
Also, People=Shit by Slipknot. lmao
"I'm not suicidal I don't wanna fuckin die. I just wanna be able to close my eyes and feel alright, but everyday I feel like dyin."
Suicidal Thoughts - Josh A
"Any waste of effort isn’t part of my design."
Human League - Tell Me When
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse? - Bruce Springsteen
Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we'd like to be
Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee
~Losing It, by Rush
Pretty much any Joanna Newsom lyric could qualify but this line,
"Scrape your knee it is only skin."
Goosebumps every time. It's such a cathartic lyric that the song has been building to for almost 12 minutes.
"Not everyone understands house music,
It's a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing."
House Music - Eddie Amador
“Do You Believe In Shame” by Duran Duran
I heard you speak my name
Heard you singing The Stones
Maybe heard you laughing in a line of static
On my telephone
So why your eyelids are closed
Inside a case of rust
And did you have to change
All your poet's fire into frozen dust?
I try to justify it
To learn from your mistake
But where's the stupid lie that has to make its point
With such a pointless waste?”
Simon wrote the lyric for the song about his friend Dave Miles, who tragically died of a drug overdose.
https://youtu.be/n_Io3CtmdoQ?si=x6ybn7QWd8eoUR41
Obligatory T-Swizzle lyrics incoming:
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem it's me."
I feel this whole song so fucking hard. But this line specifically because I form codependent relationships with people like crazy, and I always feel like a fuckin' burden/like my friends or husband don't truly like me. Like I'm stressing people out or putting too much pressure on them, so I'm not worth the effort of maintaining a relationship with.
There's an enemy
Living inside of me
And he's been wasting my time, wasting my time
-waste by David Vertesi
(Adult diagnosis of ADHD)
I'm a Barbie girl, in this Barbie world. -Aqua
From Chris Cornell - Preaching the End of the World "If your intentions are pure I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world"
TV on the Radio - Lazerray
I like to imagine this song being a fever dream of the band, them writing it down and recording it on the same evening. It’s a psychedelic banger with this cute message right at the end.
Break me with that truth
Take all my fractions
Shaping something new
Out of the fragments
Light up this old soul
I was broken, now I'm golden
Fractions - Juniper Vale
How I feel about meeting my SOs and the subsequent years.
I was 18 Didn't have a care Working for peanuts Not a dime to spare But I was lean And solid everywhere Like a rock
Bob Seager
You gotta hold on, ready or not You live for the fight when that's all that you've got
Bon Jovi, Livin' on a Prayer
The older I get the farther I get from this, but it was true for a very long time:
I'm so scared of getting older, I'm only good at being young, So I play the numbers game, To find a way to say my life has just begun.
Im not here This isnt happening Im not here, im not here.
How to disappear completely-Radiohead
Such a simple lyrics, but it resonate with me
[I wanna] Be the ice cream left out in her sun
Gimme that canvas, let me paint some shit/ Pass me some poison, let me take a hit/ I'm just embarrassed and comfortably numb/ But failure is painful and lying is fun
Dress code, cocktails, looking so fancy/ We feel like we're a little bit classy/ Cheers to the fact that we're not dead/ Swimming with the sharks, but we're still not dead yet
Psycho I go right to buy those/ Optimistic magic fix it pills/ I'm so right though, that's my life, bro/ Underwater, coughing with my gills
Don't let this moment go to waste/ You don't know when the feeling could happen again/ Don't let this moment go to waste/ You don't know when the feeling could happen again
Touch me, taste me, tell me I'm not fading/ Tell me that I look just like a man/ 'Cause lately, baby, I've been going crazy/ Trying not to be an embarrassment
I'm all alone
Leslie Parrish- Save me
Oh god so many I could ruin this post. Music is my most important processing art, and many of the musicians I listen to are very important to me. So I'll limit myself:
"We took a weekend, drove to Provo.
The snow was white and fluffy.
A weekend in Utah won't fix what's wrong with us
The grey sky was vast and real cryptic above me."
The Mountain Goats ~ The Mess Inside.
Because the work to get better and overcome truama isn't easy or short. I've done a lot of wonderful things with my wife, and we've both come incredibly far from our truamas. But most of the nice things we've done had very little impact on that recovery. To paraphrase a Ray Ramano bit from SNL, you're still gonna be you in Italy.
"I don't fall in love, I plummet." ~Ashley Virginia ~I Don't Fall in Love
"You can't stay everywhere you leave a piece of your heart." ~Little Mazarn ~Vermont
These two go together. I fall in love--with people, places, things, experiences--with abandon. I can be slow to let things in, especially people, because once I do it is quickly a no holds barred environment. It's what the Uhaul key on my necklace means. Because of that, I can't stay everywhere or keep everyone I love. I have to know when and what to let go, when and where to hold on.
Finally I guess I'm gonna wholly belie all notions of brevity with a whole god damn Diane Cluck song:
"Somethin' loosened around my heart
From where it was bound, it fluttered around
This funny motion first mistaken as attack
I realize and step back
With real eyes, I step back
And let it happen
Knitted so snug inside my chest
Iron lungs, ribs as rungs
Those who care to try and climb me
Sometimes say it's hard to find me
Still, in reflex, I would shout
When I began spilling out
Weeping clearly as a blister
"Hey, I'm here, " you almost missed her
And I have so much for you (Na-na-na-na-na-na)
Do you know how I get shy to show you?
I fill up, tender, with a glow (Na-na-na-na-na-na)
Fluff and puff as I try to show you
Display my falling feathers
As they leave me in this weather
The days, they go so quickly
Can't even stop them
Don't even want to"
Diane Cluck ~Heartloose
I usually have to listen to this song twice. It's so short, but so dense. Every bit of it shakes me. I don't have time to enumerate the ways this song applies, appeals, affects, and relates to me. Diane Cluck is so important to me.
Heaven is a kiss and a smile. George Michael.
Show me your strength,
it's more than you know.
You'll never what you're made of
until you set foot down the road.
~Where the Skies End, by Starset
Leonard Cohen, Tower of song
Let me fly once again / Like I did way back when / I would gamble and win / To lift me high above the din -
Given and Denied - Poets of the Fall
"I need to make you understand, girl: I'm a man not a disco ball!"
Rift - Singularity ft. Jenn Lucas
Now you come to me and you've got green streaks in your hair
You walk like Greta Garbo, but you talk like Yogi Bear
What's going on? What's going on?
I really don't believe what's going on; what's going on?
— Al Stewart
"The world made me feel like I lost myself, my own homies tellin me that I need help, if you got a solution for me you probly HOLLA AT YA BOY IF YA KNOW SOMEBODY" Hopsin
Mr. Highway’s Thinking About the End by A Day to Remember
- Carnival of Rust by Poets of the Fall
EDIT: Another line I find to fit the bill, from the same song:
Throw yourself into the unknown, with pace and a fury defiant. Clothe yourself in beauty untold, and see life as a means to a triumph
I'm on a hovercraft to Paris with my former best friend. We have to get to the cinematheque. We're not alone, but no one speaks english so we're free to look into each other's minds and see what we're thinking like we always used to. I miss talking to you.
"Private Helicopter" -Harvey Danger
"I'm just tired and bored with myself. Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help".
You ever heat the Little Mazarn version of that song? Lindsey Verril just breaks me.
Hadn't heard it before no, but it's not my favourite of covers I've heard. The original song itself is very nostalgic for me with childhood memory attached so I love it as is. Only as an adult did I find any real meaning in the lyrics though. Can easily be palmed off as a shallow pop song I guess, but it has depth to me.
There is a deep, deep love for Springsteen in Americana and country. Elizabeth Moen does whole Springsteen shows dressed up like him and everything. Anyone who doesn't see the depth in his lyrics isn't looking. And Little Mazarn is probably my favorite band. I prefer their original songs, but awkward banjo girl and Jeff with the singing saw are a religious experience for me.
There are so many. Father John Misty, the cheeky bastard, writes lyrics so well. In Goodbye Mr. Blue -
When the last time was our last time, if only then I knew that the last time was our last time, would have told you that the last time comes too soon.
And from The Head and the Heart back when they were making magic with Josiah Johnson -
The world keeps spinning, a little too fast. If we don't slow down soon it might not last. So just for a moment, just for a moment, let's be still.
weezer buddy holly riff