Saturday's music meme

[sabotabby]

Via the_red_shoes:

Put your media player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

I did it twice: once on total random, once on the uber-depressing playlist I've been listening to lately. I think the first is probably more interesting; the second is more thematically cohesive.



What was sent to the soldier’s wife

It’s four in the morning
Canada oh Canada I never been your son
No one to talk with
Show me a prison, show me a jail

You took the best years of my life
Dead is the drunkest that you can get
As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small
Moving near the edge at night

In the nineteen hundred and seventies
Now you caught me off guard
I’m under your spell
Let’s make love tonight

So basically a lot of people ask me how life was then
Outside another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime
Come all you young rebels
Broken glass everywhere

Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
A Silver Mt. Zion, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns”
Phil Ochs, “There But For Fortune”
Sex Pistols, “Schools Are Prisons”
Rheostatics, “Dead Is the Drunkest You Can Get”
Green Day (shut up), “Working Class Hero”
Julee Cruise, “The World Spins”
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, “Satanic Reverses”
Madvillain, “Operation Lifesaver”
Tara & Giles, “Wish I Could Stay”
Queen of Japan, “Sexual Healing” (why do I have this?)
K’Naan, “My Old Home”
Tom Waits, “Downtown Train”
Black 47, “Patriot Game”
Grandmaster Flash, “The Message” (I am old)
P.J. Harvey, “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife”

---

Still Night, Nothing For Miles

Davenports and kettle drums
Death smiles as we paint decay
This was a stormy ending
What will you do when the war is over?

Lay me down the long white line
On the lam from the law
Here on these cliffs of Dover
Even through the darkest phase

Unforgettable, that’s what you are
Many men have loved the bell you fasten to the rein
Send a heartbeat to the void that cries through you
They put angels in the electric chair

One million died to make this sound
And yes I believe in what we had
Why be sweet, why be careful, why be kind?
Entangled in your arms

You may tire of me
If you want a lover
Take me home, you silly boy
Came in from a rainy Thursday


Tom Waits, “Soldier’s Things”
Snark, “Streetlight Apocalypse”
A Silver Mt. Zion, “Mountains Made of Steam”
Billy Bragg, "Tender Comrade"
Sisters of Mercy, “Heartland”
Decemberists, “The Bagman’s Gambit”
Decemberists, “We Both Go Down Together”
k.d. lang, “Constant Craving”
Nat King Cole, “Unforgettable”
Leonard Cohen, “Take This Longing”
Smashing Pumpkins, “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” (I’m embarrassed)
A Silver Mt. Zion, “God Bless Our Dead Marines”
A Silver Mt. Zion, “1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound”
Sisters of Mercy, “Some Kind of Stranger”
Tom Waits, “Everything Goes to Hell”
Snark, “If Romance is Roses and Candlelight”
Death Cab for Cutie, “Brothers On a Hotel Bed”
Leonard Cohen, “I’m Your Man”
Holly Cole, “Take Me Home”
Duran Duran, “Ordinary World”
Sisters of Mercy, “Driven Like the Snow”