Great Expectations

None of my own stuff in this blog post - just one of the most beautifully crafted lyrics I think I've ever heard, and it's been inspiring me lately. It's called Great Expectations, by the band Elbow, and according to frontman Guy Garvey, is about "a wedding that took place on the bus." Some people have said that this is a wedding that takes place in his mind with a woman on the bus he has fallen in love with from afar, but I prefer to think it actually happened.
And if it rains all day
Call on you, I'll call on you
Like I used to

Slide down beside and wrap you in stories
Tailored entirely for you
I'll remind you

We exchanged a vow
I love you, I always will

(Ooh)
A call girl with yesterday eyes
Was our witness and priest
Stockport supporters club kindly supplied us a choir
Your vow was your smile
As we move down the aisle
Of the last bus home
And this is where I go
Just when it rains

Blinking and stoned
Rain in your hair
You only smoke
'Cause it's something to share

Singing, bring on the night
To have and to hold
The sodium light turning silver to gold.

Spitfire thin and strung like a violin, I was
Yours was the face with a grace from a different age
But you were the sun in my Sunday morning
You were the sun in my Sunday morning

Telling me never to go
So I'll live on the smile
And move down the aisle
Of the last bus home

And if you're running late
This is where I'll go
Know I'll always wait

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0MrMRf1CW0
S.

In defence of the cliché

Hello there fellow bloggers.

It has always been a bad habit of mine to overcomplicate lyrics - using five words where one will do in the fear that people won't get what I'm trying to say - and yet in most lyrics, economy is key. Besides, we need only look at SongMeanings.com to see that fans love an obscure lyric - some of the debates on there get pretty vicious! So I put pen to paper and wrote a fairly sparse lyric very quickly.

Stretched out in the sun

You are here

We are one

Safe in your arms

With the trees as our witness

Lie in the grass

My husband to silence

In our house of earth

No one can hurt us

We hide from the world

And bury our secrets

My love

The ground is taking our shape

In the dying light

You held me so tight

As usually happens when I ditch the self-conciousness component of my writing - a few clichés crept in. In fact I've written close to twenty songs since I first started writing and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've used the word "love" in any of them. With that in mind, I suppose it's time I let myself off the hook. After all, in the words of the legendary Tim Minchin:

"The weirdest thing about a mind

Is that every answer that you find

Is the basis of a brand new cliché."

I suppose that at some point, phrases like "we are one" and "hold you in my arms" were genuinely original at some point in history - someone had to be the first to write that down. And I guess that in the end, clichés are all about context - one line saying "we are one" is fine as long as it doesn't sit in the same verse as "you make me complete," or the creatively suicidal rhyme of "fire" with "desire" or "higher." Or, the classic: "down on my knees, beggin' you please"...

So, there you go. For one song only, I am embracing the cliché. So I shall stick my radio on, hope the DJ plays my favourite song, and keep dancing... all night long.

Did I mention that it's Wednesday night and I'm feelin' alright?

S.

What on earth rhymes with "mouth"?

...aside from "south"? I hate words that seemingly have no rhymes. Could be worse - could be "purple."

Bleaching Pigeons

Do not confuse
obsession with love
bleaching a pigeon
does not make a dove