Top 25 Lyrics

We haven’t done the guess-the-lyrics thing since I moved over to ScienceBlogs, and that seems like a good thing for a lazy Friday (I played soccer after work on Tuesday and Thursday, and basketball at lunch on Wednesday, so I’m pretty wiped. What a drag it is getting old.).

A little variant on the “Random Ten” thing: the list below the fold is the Top 25 Most Played playlist from iTunes on my home computer. It’s a little quirky, thanks to my habit of putting recent acquisitions on shuffle play for a few weeks to get a feel for new songs, but it’s not a bad representation of my general tastes.

The lyrics quoted are mostly from memory, though some have been double-checked using Internet sources. Googling to find them is cheating.

  1. “The Devil needs money like anybody else, so I give him whatever I can.”
  2. “The radio was playin’ Desmon Dekker was singin’,/ on the 49 bus as we climb up the hill”
  3. “Inside her feeble mind, she is spinning out her time, like a hunter who’s gone blind”
  4. “Up jumped the US representative, he’s the one with tired eyes.”
  5. “With fingernails that shine like justice, and a voice that is dark like tinted glass.”
  6. “Take the Promise Keepers, yeah those righteous creeps, the legend seekers of the Ivy League, let’s put ’em on a ship.”
  7. “I’m dialing time and temperature just for some company.”
  8. “Well dance all night, get real loose, you don’t need no bad excuse.”
  9. “Her blue-green eyes compliment the burnt sienna in her locks.”
  10. “Bad luck comes in from Tampa, on the back of a truck doing ninety up the interstate.”
  11. “Long-distance callers make long distance calls, and the silence makes me lonely.”
  12. “Our conversations are like minefields, no-one’s found a safe way through one yet.”
  13. “I shook the hand of the President, and the Pope in Rome.”
  14. “Flags, rags, ferryboats, scimitars and scarves.”
  15. “Bust the lock off the front door, once you’re outside you won’t want to hide anymore.”
  16. “You claim to know the secret of a kiss and a hug, the secret of the grass and of the trees.”
  17. “And if I ever got another chance, I’d still ask her to dance, because she kept me waiting.”
  18. “I went to the market to realize my soul, ’cause what I need I just don’t have.”
  19. “Double edged and super blue, vertically letting the light from you.”
  20. “Thrilled to be in the same post code as you.”
  21. “If there’s a poor boy on the street, then let him have my seat.”
  22. “She calls my name, pulls my train, no one else could heal my pain.”
  23. “You pick me up when I’m down, and when we go out pretty baby you shake up the whole darn town.”
  24. “I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day.”
  25. “Instead of being my deliverance, she bore a strange resemblence to a cat named Frankenstein.”

16 thoughts on “Top 25 Lyrics

  1. Just heading out the door, but

    6 is Cake, the one about the long jacket.

    2 is 4’33” by John Cage. Again with the 20th century classical again?

  2. 2 is 4’33” by John Cage. Again with the 20th century classical again?

    God damn it. I thought I had fixed that, but the stupid server glitches must’ve wiped out that rebuild. Try it now.

  3. #5 is the Cake song about the long jacket, not #6.

    Both #11 and #18 are “Lost In the Supermarket”, which I think you’ve posted 3 or 4 times in these lyrics posts.

    #17 is “The Rock Show” by Blink 182.

    #8 is the Cars…”Shake It Up”?

  4. #18 is not “Lost in the Supermarket.”

    Aaron was right about the Cake song– the numbering changed when I fixed the HTML.

    8, 11, 17, and 24 are all right.

  5. 25 is Another Saturday Night, but Sam Cooke or Cat Stevens?

    I’m not sure there’s any way to distinguish them. It’s the Sam Cooke version, in this case, as I don’t have a digital copy of the Cat Stevens.

  6. #6 is the Old 97’s Big Brown Eyes. #10 and 12 are both from the Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee album, but all the songs therein run together except “See America Right” and “International Small Arms Traffic Blues” neither of which are correct.

  7. 10 and 12 are indeed the Mountain Goats. I won’t give the titles, in case anybody else wants to guess.

    The other guesses are also correct.

  8. 10: “First Few Desperate Hours”
    12: “Southwood Plantation Road”

    Two of my favorite songs, from one of my favorite albums. 🙂 The only other one I recognize offhand is “Short Skirt, Long Jacket”, which That Other Aaron already identified.

  9. #22 Is “There She Goes” by The Las (or maybe the cover by Sixpence None the Richer).

  10. #22 is the La’s. I don’t have the Sixpence None the Richer version, which is pretty much note-for note identical, as I recall.

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