For ‘not very interesting’ reasons I’m putting together a playlist of songs characterised by lots of words sung quickly. The sort that makes you run out of breath when you try to sing them yourself. Not rap (which is almost all rapid-fire words) – but actual songs. An example would be “Ive just seen a face” by the fabs – so you get the idea. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is another I guess but I’m a bit stuck for more. There must be hundreds. Any ideas?
“Breathless” wordy songs
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It’s The End Of The World As We Know It by REM should fit the bill
Dave Edmunds’s version of Get Out Of Denver is pretty full throttle.
Stiff Little Fingers’s “White Noise” is pretty full throttle, too.
Ca plan pour moi.
moi aussi
Big Daddy Kane’s finest moment…
Sorry, that appears to rap, as proscribed the OP. By way of atonement…
Going Underground – The Jam
For those of us that know every word of this song – an attempt at a run-through normally ends well before Weller does due to not being a professional singer.
Word Up! – Cameo
I think this a proper song, rather than a rap. There’s about two minutes of uninterrupted singing and then a long coda to allow Larry to air out his codpiece before the next number.
Getting ready for Candy, you see. She doesn’t appreciate the warm odour of Betty.
Bit of country
There’s that Billy Joel one too whose name escapes me.
Angry Young Man? Bloody love that, for the bonkers piano intro alone.
We Didn’t Start the Fire? Another list song, very similar to R.E. M.’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), which is very similar to Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, which is probably very similar to something by Woody Guthrie.
We didn’t start the fire. Just remembered.
Always been partial to this little piece of nonsense from Gordon and the boys.
Sniffity nominated Dave Edmunds’ version of Bob Seger’s “Get Out of Denver.” You should play that right after this. Plagiarism Schlagiarism. Or something.
Springsteen – Blinded by the Light
Johnny Cash I’ve been everywhere man or if you really want to 8.press your listeners the Jackie Leven version where are all of the places are German.
Or the Oz version:
‘One Week’ by Barenaked Ladies – annoying but a lot of words in the verses.
‘War Baby’ by Tom Robinson – “Only the very young and the very beautiful can be so aloof …” – far too many syllables for the notes.
Annoying? Barenaked Ladies? Shirley Knott!
Meadow Soprano’s favourite band. That’s all you need to know.
Meadows favourite band? What about The Churchills !! ??
Mob family don’t need no car insurance!
Oh, Yes!
There was a ghastly period when BareNakedWordies and those two geeky guys with the accordion seemed to be happening – really annoying wordy songs. That scuzzy looking guy singing about Mrs Jones – another wordy load of gloop – was around at the time too.
That’s no way to talk about Billy Paul.
Do you mean Mr Jones by Counting Crows? Moose LOVES* Counting Crows.
*Possibly not true.
I struggled to keep quiet during the recent fireworks and tickertape parade celebrating 25 years of the mighty and universe-conquering CCs. Dear oh dear oh dear. I love REM but by god they’ve got a lot to answer for.
For added education, try Tom Lehrer’s The Elements song
Quite a lot of Tom’s oeuvre contains fabulous rapid-fire wordery. New Math, or Lobachevsky (clearly in the Danny Kaye style) – which means you could probably have at least one Danny Kaye number as well!
Obligatory Richard Thompson mention – Little Blue Number
Well….
The Trooper by Iron Maiden. Especially live when they play it slightly faster, Bruce can only really breathe between the verses.
Little Feat’s “Teenage Nervous Breakdown”
Good call.
I saw John Cooper Clarke in Berlin this week. I would therefore nominate the amphetamine Maserati drone of Evidently Chickentown
Was Johnny Cash’s ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ the original? It was a big hit for Lucky Starr in Oz…
Written by Oz country muso Geoff Mack in 1958.
A favourite version was by The Farrelly Brothers (ie Graham Bond and the Aunty Jack crew) – hint: they hadn’t been to many places…
Onomatopoeia by Todd Rundgren
I always find ‘Mausoleum’ by the Manic Street Preachers impossible to sing – specifically the chorus that begins with the lines ‘regained your self-control and regained your self-esteem’.
Steely Dan have some rather wordy songs. Use of tricky rhythms to fit them all in, as in the choruses of this one. Or is it writing lots of words in order to put vocals to tricky rhythms?
Reelin’ In The Years was the one that came to mind. The lyrical equivalent of polyrhythmic playing.
Yep.
“Your everlasting summer,
You can see it fading fast.
So you grab a piece of something
That you think is going to last.
But you wouldn’t know a diamond
If you held it in your hand.
The things you think are precious
I can’t understand.
Are you reelin’ in the years?
Stowin’ away the time?
Are you gatherin’ up the tears?
Have you had enough of mine?”
First few that spring to mind…
Faron Young, by Prefab Sprout
1952 Vincent Black Lightning, by Richard Thompson
Big Decision, by Elliott Smith
Del Amitri’s cash cow “Roll To Me” is a short sharp burst of energy that I’ve always thought would need one big breath at the start to get through…
This doesn’t have much in the way of melody, but may top the word count.
this?
or this
I don’t understand why Ultravox! weren’t huge. Great tunes, knotty and preposterous lyrics, often a blistering live act, charismatic frontman. Hugely derivative of course, but since when is that a problem in the mass marketplace? (hello Oasis)
Of course Ultravox were huge, but that was a different band.
Removing that annoying exclamation mark from the band’s name and repositioning it across the lead singer’s upper lip was the equivalent of the Joanne/Suzanne wiggle in boosting this band’s fortunes…
“John Foxx has left, so we’ve recruited this wee Glaswegian who’s currently supply guitarist in Thin Lizzy”
“What? That’s a disaster! Yurrr duuuumed!”
@Moose-the-Mooche – They were huge! 5 nights at the Marquee in 1978 (I was there on the Saturday)
Anyone who has followed “John Foxx” since will recognise the dislocation in that performance. Still neat tho’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayx8mn3i8rU
sorry I have gone off topic. mea tulpa.
They were huge for the people who liked them. They should have been big almost like The Police were big.
But then old Foxxy wouldn’t have left and made those brilliant solo records.
Annie Nightingale used to play Quirks (a track on a limited-edition bonus 7″, given away with early copies of Ha!-Ha-Ha!, which my cousin Simon’s LP was lacking), along with Soft Cell’s Martin, and stuff like Echo Beach.
I didn’t hear Quirks again until the expanded CDs came out in 2002, which must have been about 20 years later. Kids today would not believe it if I told them.
Having been exposed to Cuz’s Foxx-era LPs, I used to wonder how on earth did they got from Hiroshima Mon Amour to Love’s Great Adventure in a few years. Civilians, eh?
Stephen Duffy’s Wednesday Jones always gets me in a bit of a mess. He sneakily sings it as a duet with himself, but when you try singing it all yourself you go a shade of blue by the time the chorus comes round. Here’s the ‘Dixie’ version.
Tongue twisting from the Toy Dolls
Might as well put They Might Be Giants’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” up, then.
I had “Istanbul” on my list. I only recently realised it was a cover.
Me too – it sounds exactly like a They Might be Giants original.
and continuing the TMBG theme, Birdhouse In Your Soul
The “Great American Songbook” is full of wittily word-heavy songs.
Here’s a rather dark one by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, given a bright-and-breezy rendition by the Queen Of Jazz Ella Fitzgerald.
There are many suitable Kevin Rowland songs but this one fits the bill for sure.
None of the above are even trying.
If you sing a capella in the folk world, there is nowhere to hide, no instruments to bridge the gap while you find space to breathe. Deep breath …….
https://jenniferreid.bandcamp.com/track/victoria-bridge-on-a-saturday-night
Jennifer Reid aka the Langley Linnet
An old Wykehamist will never let you down…
Carter USM – Sherrif Fatman
A prospective girlfriend was very impressed with my (slightly drunk) word perfect indie disco karaoke rendition of this one
Surely this good ol’ good one qualifies…
My problem with this number was that, title apart, I couldn’t understand a word he was singing – and until I saw a photo, thought it was a woman doing the lead vocal.
Sleeping Gas by The Teardrop Explodes fits the bill – another of those ‘singer-duets-with-himself’ songs. It’s virtually impossible to sing along to, as the vocals overlap each other, even though they’re by the same person. Great song, though.
Worship You – Vampire Weekend
The champion: Betty Hutton.
Rock’n’Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it any more…
More Costello. He has loads of these: Beyond Belief, Pump It Up and this lesser known one…
I think I had a t shirt with this on. Possibly Fripp earning a few quid on guitar?
I don’t know how he remembers all of this…
I have to add, written by Adam MacNaughtan. And works best if Scots is your natural tongue – no offence to the great man.
About a minute in…
I was the Major General in a school production of Pirates in 1991. Can still remember the words.
Also, that’s Linda Ronstadt there.
My first thought was Barenaked Ladies, but another personal fave is Third Eye Blind and Semi Charmed Kind Of Life
I know the lyrics to this and can’t sing along.
XTC’s ‘Burning With Optimism’s Flames’, from Black Sea. Even the recorded version seems to have Andy running out of breath.
Scritti Politti’s ‘Lions After Slumber’. Not exactly a quick song like the above, but Green gets a bit hectic in the verses.
‘Like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number, oh yeah’. . .
Re: “Green gets a bit hectic in the verses.
‘Like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number, oh yeah’. . .
Yeah, but it was Percy Bysshe Shelley that made Green all hectic, thanks to verse five of “The Masque of Anarchy” (1819)!
If it’s wordy poems your after…look no further than Robert Southey…
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57951/the-cataract-of-lodore
Cheers, duco. I knew it had been lifted from Shelley; the record came out when I was at college, and one of the lecturers on part of the course pointed it out. Great line. Oh yeah. . .
I am now going to take the liberty of posting a song in Swedish.
We’ve just had the first Allsång på Skansen (Community singing from the Skansen Open Air Museum) programme of the summer here and the highspot was this extremely popular song by Timbuktu. It is utterly inappropriate for singing along to, but is a cracking song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8__sCOItBQ
A bit of a borderline case, I confess, as there is a lot of rap there, but also a generous dollop of African highlife. All with an impenetrable Skåne accent.
…”utterly inappropriate for singing along to…”
I’m sure the Allsång… audience were struggling, but on both occasions when I’ve seen Timbuktu in concert, the audience (me included) have sung along enthusiastically and at least partly correct… 😀
Well, Sanna Nielsen, acquitted herself very honorably this evening and was clearly having a ball and the audience did their best. And Timbuktu and Damm were quite stupendous.
Here he is on a previous visit.
And another. He is a national treasure!
But I suspect he would not have got a look in the Bosse Larsson era.
Times have changed!!
A Half Man Half Biscuit number has to go in there surely, so you might want to crowbar either Breaking News or The Referee’s Alphabet in there (the latter even better because Nige manages to balls up S)
https://youtu.be/5b2w_nJLuvw