The challenge today is picking a lyric that you know “by heart”, one that resonates particularly well (any why).
I find this sort of thing immensely difficult, because I have a trick memory (tricky in a good way, I suppose) for lyrics. I can dredge up One-Hit Wonders with ease, and recite literally hundreds of songs entirely and thousands of lyric fragments. It appears to be one of the only things my memory is really, really good at retaining forever.
And unlike my wife (hi beautiful!), I generally have the right artists attached to the right songs!
Sucks pretty bad when Celine bleeds “My heart will go on” or Whitney craps out “I will always love you“, or one of the many other “Pop tunes I have always hated” gets stuck circling in my head and refuses to be shaken out.
So as you might expect, this sort of thing makes me say “hurmh, huh, well, umm” for quite a while, trying to eliminate song that’s wandered through my head, to narrow it down to only one.
I began to think through the second part, the “why”, while flipping through my 500-favorites. I decided to go with:
Time
(Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
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.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.
Home, home again
I like to be here
When I can
When I come home
Cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones
Beside the fire
Far away
Across the field
Tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
Songwriters: DAVID GILMOUR, NICHOLAS MASON, ROGER WATERS, RICK WRIGHT
One of the more obvious choices, the best song from one of the highest grossing albums of all time, right? That’s not why I picked it .
I chose this piece for the instrumental, one of David Gilmour’s finest (to this day) moments, which is what makes it stand out in an album full of standout pieces.
(Groove to Mason’s Intro, too)
Watch the video and pay attention around 3:00, peaks with the long wail around 4:20. Brilliant, it still catches my breath to this day, and I always reach for the volume knob. Gilmour deserves to be played loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear.
My thanks to the boys in the band, and to Alan Parsons. There’s a fair chance my choice will be duplicated by other authors as a choice one (or many) times. I don’t care. I was a child of the 70s, this piece (and Hotel California) embodied the 70s, to me.
Hmm, Hotel California also has a long (and excellent) lead guitar break–do we sense a pattern?
ParkInkSpot 