While I enjoy the recording, America's "A Horse With No Name"  fits into this category.  I've gone in several directions listening to it, depending on my mood.

Another of those songs is "Macarthur Park".  There have been so many different interpretations of the lyrics to this song.   
When Jimmy Webb was asked about all these various perceptions people had about his song, he replied, "My fallback position after all these years is I will tell you that I've told deliberately false stories to people.  I've also tried to tell the truth, which is that it's just a song about a girlfriend of mine, Susie Horton, and this place on Wilshire Boulevard where we used to have lunch, which is called MacArthur Park. And the truth is that everything in the song was visible. There's nothing in it that's fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it's a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park.
His wife, Laura Savini, added "When people see he's my husband," she says, "that's always the first question I get: 'What's "MacArthur Park" mean?' And I always say it's an abstract painting, an impressionist painting. It's art, but in a musical form. You make it what you want it to be. Jimmy plays it down, but it's a heartbreaking song when you listen to just him sing it and you hear all the words without all the orchestrations. It blows your mind -- oh, my God, all the pain in that song."

Jim Southern wrote:

While I enjoy the recording, America's "A Horse With No Name"  fits into this category.  I've gone in several directions listening to it, depending on my mood.

We could probably do an America subthread here ...
"But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didn't, didn't already have
And cause never was the reason for the evening
Or the tropic of Sir Galahad
So please believe in me
When I say I'm spinning 'round, 'round, 'round, 'round
Smoke glass stain'd bright colors
Image going down, down, down, down
Soapsud green like bubbles ..."
What really gets me is that they also thought that those lyrics were worth repeating again in full, and then again in part one more time. 

Lorne wrote:

Jim Southern wrote:

While I enjoy the recording, America's "A Horse With No Name"  fits into this category.  I've gone in several directions listening to it, depending on my mood.

We could probably do an America subthread here ...
"But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didn't, didn't already have
And cause never was the reason for the evening
Or the tropic of Sir Galahad
So please believe in me
When I say I'm spinning 'round, 'round, 'round, 'round
Smoke glass stain'd bright colors
Image going down, down, down, down
Soapsud green like bubbles ..."
What really gets me is that they also thought that those lyrics were worth repeating again in full, and then again in part one more time. 

You beat me to this one.  I always hated this song and perhaps it's because of the weird lyrics.

It's me Karen wrote:

You beat me to this one.  I always hated this song and perhaps it's because of the weird lyrics.

I feel the same way about it. It sounds as if they just randomly threw together lyrics that don't even rhyme properly, but couldn't be bothered to come up with enough to fill out the song and so they just kept repeating them instead. And it doesn't sound like they spent much time on the tune either. For me, it also didn't help that I had already thought that the lyrics to Ventura Highway weren't that great either, and of course there was the aforementioned A Horse With No Name as well. 

Another song that I disliked almost as much as Tin Man, and for similar reasons, was Let 'Em In by Wings. I couldn't understand why on the one hand he mentioned Martin Luther and Phil and Don on the one hand, but a bunch of other people I had never heard of on the other. It actually made me wonder if Phil and Don wasn't a reference to the Everlys, since it didn't seem that any other musicians were named, and I even wondered if Martin Luther happened to also just be someone McCartney knew who had those names. But according to Wikipedia, the references were indeed to the Everlys and the theologian, whereas the others were to relatives -- except for Uncle Ernie, which was a reference to "the character Ringo Starr sang in the London Symphony Orchestra's recording of the Who's rock opera, Tommy." I kept wondering at the time if there was any deeper meaning to the song, or indeed whether it had any meaning at all, and even after looking at Wikipedia's explanation I still feel much the same way. It's surprising that he didn't throw in Oz, the Tin Man, and Sir Galahad while he was at it. 

The grand daddy of all, Ballad Of A Thin Man,, even for Dylan that is so impossible to decipher.  Also Rick Nelson doing a Dylan on The Palace Guard, love the song, but as to what it all means..../

IIRC is a well known short form for "If I recall correctly." And yeah, I hate those Internet short forms, too. I was just being lazy. 

Last edited by aflem (December 22, 2019 7:38 pm)

just heard "Venus by Shocking Blue", what the hell are they saying.