I'll start! for me, it's "Does anyone know/where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours" from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.
Though on review, Zevon's corpus is ...often composed of whole songs that paint amazing pictures but where the individual brush strokes of lines don't really hook you. But like you go listen to "Keep Me In Your Heart" and you can absolutely feel the loving goodbye of a dying man from like...the inside. Amazing.
Warren Zevon
- "I lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the EE. / The railroad don't run no more, poor poor pitiful me." -- Poor Poor Pitiful Me (there's a lot of fun in that song)
- "Carmelita, hold me closer, I think I'm sinking down. / And I'm all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town." -- Carmelita
- "Hold me in your thoughts, take me to your dreams, touch me as I fall into view. / And when the winter comes, keep the fires lit, and I will be right next to you." -- Keep Me In Your Heart
Stan Rogers
(It's Stan so like, come on, go listen to Mary Ellen Carter and Barrett's Privateers and Northwest Passage, they're essentials.)
"But I told that kid a hundred times, don't take the lakes for granted; / they go from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted. / But tonight some red-eyed Wireton girl's starin' at the wall, / and her lover's gone into a white squall." -- White Squall
"It's dark inside this evil place / clouds on the moon hide her disgrace / this whiskey hides my own." -- The Last Watch
"And even afloat she's a hole in the water where his money goes, / every dollar goes, and it's driving him crazy. / He pounds his fist white on the dock in the night and cries "I'm gonna win!" / And licks the blood away / and he's gonna raise the Dolphin." -- Man with Blue Dolphin (which I recall reading was written in part to help raise awareness of the guy's effort featured in the song.)
Garnet Rogers
"All they say when I'm done is 'He had a busy life.'" -- Frankie & Johnnie. (this is probably just hitting extra right now)
"Hurtling westward through the prairie night / Under the spell of motion / Your eyes were clear and bright in the dashboard light / Dreaming of the western ocean" -- Night Drive (which just beautifully captures both the longing for someone gone and the feeling of driving late at night with many miles to go but nothing getting in the way)
David Mallett
- " There's four of us home, but we're not quite alone, there's a host of ghosts livin' upstairs, / for house doesn't shelter and then let you pass after standin' for two hundred years." -- Fire
- "There's a silence that falls in the midst of storm as the elements wait and decide / to unleash their forces on mortals like me or to move on and let us survive." -- Fire
- "Nothing is sacred, no nothing is saved, 'cause there's fire and there's flames to be fed." -- Fire
- "And now like some beggar, I stare at your window. / Your candles are burning and your love is inside. / But doors can't be opened by wishes nor tokens / and all things have endings and beggars have their pride." -- Inches and Miles
Ed Miller
"And old Edinburgh town upon the hill / you have my heart and you always will / and I'll be back from time to time / to recharge my batteries." -- Home Away From Home (wonderful song about loving a place you don't live anymore)
Rudyard Kipling
(So many of his poems have been set to music because so many of them are inherently musical. And goodness but he was an evocative poet.)
"For I have dreamed of a midnight sky and a midnight call to blood! / And red-mouthed shadows racing by that thrust me from my food. / Tis an hour yet and an hour yet to the rising of the moon / but I can see the blackwood tree as plain as it were noon." -- The Only Son (great rendition on Norman & Saxon from Michael Longcor) (Also I mean it's basically a werewolf poem and like...yes)
"There was no one like 'im, 'Orse or Foot,/ Nor any o' the Guns I knew; /An' because it was so, why, o' course 'e went an' died,/ Which is just what the best men do." -- Follow Me 'Ome (Peter Bellamy did a huge album out of Barrackroom Ballads and this is one of the tops...and doesn't have any awkward slurs in it)
"When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters / And the horror of our fall is written plain, / Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,/ Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?" Gentleman-Rankers (Also on Bellamy's Barrack Room Ballads album. One day I'll get back to the story this poem keeps kindled in me.)
