Hi All,
As stated earlier, a much more exhaustive effort than what I had in mind was demonstrated once again by B4real, so I refer you to her posting and the wealth of information and quotes available there. For what they are worth, here are the answers I prepared in advance, a few of them slightly modified:
31. Broken (basically, 26 songs):
SLC: Suzanne
SFAR: The Butcher; The Old Revolution; You Know Who I Am
SLH: Diamonds In The Mine; Sing Another Song, Boys
NSOC: Take This Longing
RS: The Guests; The Window; Came So Far For Beauty
VP: Hallelujah; If It Be Your Will
IYM: Take This Waltz; Everybody Knows
TF: The Future; Democracy; Light As The Breeze
TNS: Alexandra Leaving
OI: Come Healing; Banjo
PP: Born In Chains
YWID: You Want It Darker; If I Didn’t Have Your Love; Treaty
TFDD: Happens To The Heart; The Night Of Santiago
32. No mention of war: My answer was
Dear Heather, but B4real added
Ten New Songs, and I believe she’s right.
33. Torture: One of Us Cannot Be Wrong; The Butcher; The Future; Almost Like The Blues.
He is being interrogated: A Singer Must Die & Waiting For The Miracle are two quite clear cases, but there may be more.
34. Insects:
spider (So Long, Marianne);
butterfly (Listen To The Hummingbird);
fireflies (The Night Of Santiago);
crickets (A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes; Ballad Of The Absent Mare; Night Comes On). This is one of the questions which I should have checked more carefully before posting it; added now: I can’t believe I forgot the
mosquitoes in One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong; B4real also located
flies (Nevermind),
moth (Humbled In Love),
hornet (The Traitor) and a French
bee (La Manic).
35. Animals: “dog” or “dogs” appear in three songs, but there is also the German Shepherd in Master Song, so the total is in fact 4; “snake” and “snakes” appear 4 times too, but one of them is “snake-eyes” (a dice term) in The Captain, so one might say that the snakes come second to the dogs; and if we add together the cat (2), kittens (1), pussy (1), and even the panther (1), the felines may have taken first place with 5. There are also the lamb (3), ape (2), monkey (1), sheep (1), horses (1), mare (1), ponies (1), turtle (1), mouse (1).
36. Chains and being chained: Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye; The Old Revolution; Love Calls You By Your Name; Sing Another Song, Boys; Who By Fire; Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On; The Law; I’m Your Man; Take This Waltz; Show Me The Place; Born In Chains; Samson In New Orleans.
37. Prison: The Old Revolution; The Partisan; Light As The Breeze; The Land Of Plenty; Happens To The Heart.
For the extra ones I was mainly thinking of the Tower, a synonym for a famous prison where he is “doing time” in Crazy To Love You, “Had to go down to the pit / Had to do time in the tower”; therefore, also Tower Of Song, “They’re moving us tomorrow to that Tower down the track”.
38. Suicide: mentioned in Stories of the street & Field Commander Cohen; alluded to or portrayed in One of Us Cannot Be Wrong, “he drowned himself in the pool”; Seems So Long Ago, Nancy, “a forty five beside her head, / an open telephone”.
The song many believe to be about suicide but I believe they’re wrong: Dress Rehearsal Rag; I think it’s about shaving (yes, while self-depreciating, but no one is cutting anything in this song). Now, clearly LC himself, as quoted by B4real, says the opposite, but sometimes even the author is wrong
.
39. Dancing: Probably 18 (B4real has 21, but one song is mentioned twice, and two are covers).
40. Green night: I should probably apologize for this question, because it isn’t a matter of facts and knowledge but of interpretation that can be arbitrary, especially with such a song which is one of LC’s most mysterious and hard to define, but I would still like to offer some possibilities.
First option: Lorca has a famous poem in his
Romancero gitano (from which LC picked up “The Night of Santiago”), “Romance Sonámbulo”, which begins (in William Bryant Logan’s translation): “Green, how I want you green. / Green wind, green branches”. The theme of the poem is death, the scene is night, and “green” is repeated again and again, so it is possible that this image is after Lorca.
Second option: The song also has the line “before I turn into gold”. Now, the poem “Bermudas” by Andrew Marvell has the lines: “He hangs in shades the orange bright, / Like golden lamps in a green night”. This poem, which praises the seventeenth-century colonists who are supposed to have discovered a new paradise island with the grace of God, was rebuked in modern times, among others by Derek Walcott, in his collection
In a Green Night (1962). It is likely that LC knew either Marvell’s or Walcott’s poems (or both), and the image floated over into his song from there.
41. Shakespearean characters: Sing Another Song, Boys, “The money lender’s lovely little daughter / ah, she’s eaten, she’s eaten with desire” (Shylock & Jessica); Is This What You Wanted, “I was the money lender”.
42. The binding of Isaac: To A Teacher, “When you glinted in every eye the held-high / razor, shivering every ram and son?” (I hinted it was a poem).
43. The Plague: Everybody Knows, “And everybody knows that the Plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast”; Tower Of Song, “And there’s a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong”; The Future: The whole song!
44. A line from a popular song: Field Commander Cohen, “working for the Yankee Dollar”.
45. A famous commercial: Closing Time, “Where’s the beef?”.
46. East Asia: China (Suzanne), Tiananmen Square (Democracy), Hiroshima (The Future). I somehow managed to forget about Saigon (The Captain).
47. Religious organizations: Salvation Army (Suzanne), Rosicrucians (Dress Rehearsal Rag). (Someone had mentioned to me privately Voodoo as an option; how about it? “Sisters of Mercy”, another nice idea).
48. Most mentioned flower:
rose (Stories Of The Street; Famous Blue Raincoat; The Window; The Traitor; Everybody Knows; A Street; Thanks For The Dance).
49. Other flowers:
lilac (So Long, Marianne);
lily (Take This Waltz; A Thousand Kisses Deep [live version]; The Night Of Santiago);
daffodil (The Night Of Santiago);
hyacinth (Take This Waltz). I missed
Morning Glory…
50. Questions with a twist:
The first and most obvious one which made me think of questions with a double meaning or a twist:
Who By Fire: “And who shall I say is calling?”
Other examples that stand out:
Famous Blue Raincoat: “Did you ever go clear?”
Hallelujah: “But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
The following may also be included:
Master Song: “And now do you come back to bring / your prisoner wine and bread?”
Teachers: “are your lessons done?”
Story of Isaac: “Just according to whose plan?”
The Faith: “O love, aren’t you tired yet?”
It’s Torn: “Why did you leave us? / Why did you leave?”
And probably more… It’s a matter of the right definition, which is tricky, as I said.
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Now as for the challenge offered by B4real about food in the songs, it made me realize how much more difficult it is to answer a question you hadn’t thought about, rather than create your own questions (the answer for which you often already now when you created them). But I’m trying to be a good sport, so here are some answers, probably only partial ones:
Food: bread (The Stranger Song), crumb (Waiting For The Miracle; Lullaby; Avalanche may also be mentioned), crust (Lullaby), oranges (Suzanne), apples (Master Song; Stories Of The Streets), lamb (The Butcher), beef (Closing Time)
Beverages: tea (Suzanne, Half The Perfect World), wine (probably 13 songs), brandy (Take This Waltz), cider (Closing Time), alcohol (Democracy; The Darkness)
Animal’s food: grass (Stories Of The Streets, Ballad Of The Absent Mare)
Eating human flesh: Diamonds In The Mine, “He was eating up a lady”; Lady Midnight, “the stars eat your body”.
Is bubble gum food?
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That's it for now. Take care, everyone!
), I shall read and enjoy your latest marathon post!