Archive for Lyrics
Sometime in the past year or two, I was listening to the Sixpence None the Richer song “Kiss Me,” and got curious about the line “Kiss me, out of the bearded barley”; I wasn’t sure what it meant. I poked around online to find out more; I think that all I found was the annotation […]
Yesterday, I happened across my post from a year ago in which I asked an AI (not GPT) to write me a happy pop song about aardvarks. So I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT to do the same. On a side note, I was amused that signing in to use ChatGPT required […]
The noun form, according to the OED, is condignity, although Johnson lists condignness.
Over at “These Lyrics Do Not Exist,” I prompted the AI with the topic “aardvarks,” the genre Pop, and the mood Happy. Here is part of the song it generated for me: Verse 1 When you move like aardvark creature My heart, you belong to me Aardvark, midnight best friends She heard a scream Pre-Chorus […]
I recently encountered the song title Personent Hodie, so I tried to find out what that phrase meant. Google provided me with Latin lyrics for the song, and helpfully offered to translate them for me. Unfortunately, Google’s translation of Latin lyrics appears to be not yet all it could be. But I was amused enough […]
Last night, Ellen Kushner saw that someone had written verses to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” telling the Christian Nativity story. So she asked Twitter to come up with some non-Christian “Hallelujah” variations: I call upon the power of all my genius rhyming friends (and any of theirs) to now crank out a series […]
On Tumblr a year or two back, in a discussion of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” user bigscaryd noted that the phrase “tag your favorite line of hallelujah” scans to the meter of the song. Which led to other people creating new meta-verses to the song. Like this from animatedamerican: you tried to read the words […]
When I was a kid, I occasionally listened to my father’s LP of Oscar Brand’s Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads. One of the songs on the album was “Sam Hall,” which included this line: You’re a bunch of muckers all, damn your eyes. At some point, I asked my father what muckers meant, and he […]
Country songs fairly often do this thing where the chorus or another repeated part of the song (possibly slightly altered each time) is recontextualized in each iteration to mean something different. I recently noticed a particularly well-done (imo) variation on that, in the 1992 song “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane.” The song starts out like […]
The editor of the heavy metal website Invisible Oranges provides a guide to Death Metal English. A couple of sample translations from the article: Normal English: “Commuting to work” Death...