Do you think of coming up with good song titles as an important ability for a songwriter? Almost all songs are named after a few words in the song’s lyrics, usually in the chorus or hook. There are some notable exceptions, such as Moby Grape’s “Omaha”.
Today I got in the mail the Rhino Handmade reissue of T-Bone Burnett‘s Proof Through the Night/The Trap Door/Behind the Trap Door. There are a few very clever song titles on there. “Having A Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Her” is my favorite, but “The Law Of Average” and “My Life And The Women Who Lived It (No. 1)” are good too.
This is just kind of a time-waster kind of thread. What are your favorite song titles, irrespective of the value of the song itself? Albums too, I guess, since the name of this thread comes from the title of the most recent Autechre album.
you realize the headline of this piece says UnTILTEd, don’t you?
before i ever heard it, i thought “your funeral, my trial” was a great title. not sure if it’s a great tilte, however.
Saturn, you have once again tilted a perfectly untilted thread.
saturn yes I do. It’s what’s called a joke. The latest Autechre album is titled Untilted. That was why I called attention to it.
Every now and then, it’s fine if a song has no title. But when a CD has no title? I give my students a pass sometimes when they name a particular poem/song “Untitled,” but when they try to call a collection the same thing, no.
This is all a very old and obvious art joke, by the way, in whatever context. “What’s the name of your band?” Rock Band.” And what’s the record called? “Rock Record.”
New tricks, please. Although I must say I’m 4.2% impressed that someone thought to switch it up by messing around with the difference between capital and lower case letters. Oh wait, that’s just Saturn, conquering Intergalactic Worlds…
Favourite Album Titles:
1/Billy Bragg – Talking To The Taxman About Poetry
2/The Lyres – On Fyre
3/The Television Personalities – They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles!
4/Velvet Crush – Teenage Symphonies To God
5/The Senseless Things – The First of Too Many (ha!)
Song titles:
1/Shake Some Action by The Flamin’ Groovies
2/Little Dudes by Pee Shy
3/Wouldn’t It Be Nice by The Beach Boys
4/Jesus, Etc. by Wilco
5/Between The Wars by Billy Bragg
Important, yes, but not absolutely necessary. Although, admittedly, if a song title sounds interesting, and I’m flipping through an album for the first time, the name of a track is likely to tweak my interest until I’ve heard the first few bars of a song – for a while when I was dj’ing I had a theory that every album’s last track is either the worst on the album or the best and would go to that first to get it out of the way and cue it up to see if it struck genius, sometimes it did… but – okay, so my theory has as many holes as swiss cheese, but how about this question: best LAST song to end an album/best FIRST song to start an album… to each his/her own…
Best first song: Gimme Shelter off of Let It Bleed (one of my 3 fave stones albums)
Best last song: Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, Pretty In Pink soundtrack album…
It may be that a merciful God has kept me from knowing anything about Travis Shredd & the Good Ol’ Homeboys, or just possibly I’m missing something great. But I would bet a pricey lunch on the fact that they’ve never done anything half as well as the naming of their album, “668: the Neighbor of the Beast.”
I love that “668: the Neighbor of the Beast” album title, but I don’t put too much value on song titles. If the title is too witty, I’m suspicious that the artist is going to be cramming some schtick down my throat. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the cryptic “Zeppelin” song title, as Andyr and I have long called it, which has little it anything to do with what’s on the surface of the song. Of more direct song titles, I do like “Two of Us” and “Why Can’t I Touch It”. Of course, I love both songs, but I also find the sentiments of the song titles something worth standing by. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, which Sally had on her list, is a good one like that too. I like the way the title “Kid About It” is used in the Costello song. “Teenage Kicks” promises greatness by the title alone…
Here’s a witty title I do like, “The Once Over Twice”. That often comes up in my head as a description of real life events taking place.
I’m going to suggest A House Is Not A Home, but that’s mainly just because I want to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6C4xn_5YGQ
I’ve been waiting for this to show up on youtube forever. It’s Dusty Springfield singing the song on some 60s TV show with the man himself Burt Bacharach at the piano. Even with the cheesy overdubbed orchestration and even with Burt ill advisedly croaking along to the final chorus, it’s an awe-inspiring performance.
New York Mining Disaster 1941 is a good one, explaining the setting of the song without having to waste lyrics on exposition.
I asked if BigSteve realized the title of the thread was “untilted” and he wrote:
“saturn yes I do. It’s what’s called a joke. The latest Autechre album is titled Untilted. That was why I called attention to it.”
Steve, i sense the slightest, comic book guy-ish annoynance in your response. i didn’t mean to wrankle. i genuinely thought it was a typo. i didn’t know that about the new Autechre album so your statement that “the name of this thread comes from the title of the most recent Autechre album” didn’t eliminate the possibility, in my mind, that you had switched up the L and T in haste.
their song titles tend towards the minimal, don’t they?
things like : “glitch” “flutter” “bike”, etc. i always liked those one word titles.
i was also fond of the minutemen’s titles:
“shit from an old notebook”, “political songs for michael jackson to sing”, etc..
I don’t think there’s a bigger fan of the Warwick/Bacharach/David combination on RTH but still I gotta ask the question: why wasn’t Springfield/Bacharach/David as successful a combo?!?! Thanks for the link, BigSteve.
saturn, you fell into both of my traps — not recognizing the dyslexic tilt I gave to naming the thread and also falling for my comic book guy persona. I am never in haste, since it makes watse.
And yes Autechre even gets all Anthony Braxton sometimes with ‘song’ titles like VL Al 5 and P.:Ntil.
Well Bacharach was working directly with Warwicke, right? Dusty had the hit with Wishin and Hopin, but it was just a carbon copy of the Warwicke version. Did Dusty get first crack at The Look of Love?
steve, if you think i’m not aware of your comic book guy persona by now, THINK AGAIN!
i enjoy it!
and braxton…didn’t he also go through a period where song titles where little drawings, almost ideograms?
what did that stuff sound like?
Like ideograms.
Btw doing soime background research on Dusty, I found this in the Wikipedia:
Damn!
What sprang to my mind were titles that have gone from descriptions in my head to actually being adopted and used verbally:
-The Once Over Twice
-Shake Some Action
-Pure Pop for Now People
and perhaps coincidentally
-Jesus of Cool
BigSteve wrote: “Like ideograms.”
oh…like this is where braxton had been going all along. cool. are they beautiful pearls of notes and instruments thinking together and talking to each other? do they make your heart and soul swell? more to the point, do they put pictures in your mind? do they make you think?
or do they just make you think about what the musicians were thinking?
do you like them as ideas or music or both?
i like braxton, but i don’t have the ideogram music.
off topic…i know…
Perhaps I shouldn’t pretend to have wider knowledge of Braxton’s oeurve than I do.
But seriously, if you’re doing non-programmatic instrumental music, why do you have to give it a title like Avenue D or something poetic? Differentiating instrumental pieces by associating them with drawings or formulae or designations like String Quartet No. 3 in D makes at least as much sense as using evocative phrases.
Abstract music that resembles nothing but itself is kind of like an ideogram in sound, isn’t it?
Map Ref. 41 °N 93° W is a cool title for a song with or without lyrics.
I liked that Dusty video, and I was especially drawn to her hair. My Mom used to wear her hair like that way back in the day. Weird but kind of cool. When was the last time a woman teased her hair, the way that style required?
Al, I like Dusty’s Bacharach/David songs, but I think what makes Dionne the more popular performer of those songs is her reserve. She’s so proper and closed up that the longing, lonlinees, and raw emotion that manages to squeeze through carry added weight. Dusty can really sing, but her comfort with singing the songs, which one would think would be a strength, I think takes away a little bit from them. That said, it’s not like she’s all loosey-goosey; I just think she’s a couple of notches less wound than Dionne Warwick.
I once owned an Anthony Braxton album with all those mathematical symbols. Sheet music came with it. The lines were in a circle, and the notation looked like something Dustin Hoffman might have written on that blackboard in Straw Dogs. The music itself, like the sheet music that led up to the recording, was in dire need of Susan George’s eraser.
Hey BigSteve, I love that song – have you heard the Mavis Staples version too (probably, right?) that’s my favourite version…
yeah, that’s a GREAT song!!!
hey steve, i’m with ya on the title / ideogram thing.
i was serious about my braxton question though. do you dig it? i can’t find myself in that stuff…
i also really wondered if it sounds any different from his other stuff.
sally, i forgot to give you my japanese picks. bump it on over to that thread. they’re over there now.
Continuing the “X” theme,
“Your Phone’s Off the Hook but your Not”
BTW – I hate titles like “OU812” or many Prince titles
I actually haven’t heard Braxton in a while. It doesn’t reach into my heart, but now I think that may be ok. Some music may just appeal to the head or to the ear.
Titles are very important. If you can’t come up with a decent word or phrase, are you going to come up with a decent set of lyrics?
Titles don’t have to be funny (though they can be); they don’t have to be clever (though they can be). But they do have to be fitting and cool in some way.
For funny titles, Death by Stereo, a band I never particularly liked, must get props for titles such as “You’re a Bullshit Salesman With a Mouthful of Samples” and “I Wouldn’t Piss in Your Ear If Your Brain Was on Fire.”
Fall Out Boy might be heirs to the Minutemen tradition: “Chicago Was So Two Years Ago,” “Of All the Gin Joints In All The World,” “Tell Mick That He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today,” “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More ‘Touch Me’,” “The World’s Not Waiting (For Five Tired Boys in a Broken Down Van)” and, perhaps inevitably, “I Slept With Someone in Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me.”
I rarely dig one-word titles. The lack of melody implied in a one-word title is reflected in the accompanying song too often to be a coincidence. (Yeah, I know, “Help,” etc. But recently it seems to hold water.)
I was talking about interesting titles of songs yesterday with friends and these came up –
Belle & Sebastian * Judy Is a Dickslap (Legal Man ep)
* Step Into My Office, Baby (Dear Catastrophe Waitress) — Beaulah * A Good Man is Easy to Kill
* Popular Mechanics for Lovers 😉
I like that Fallout Boy title “Tell Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today” good one;)
I always thought the album title/song titles on Wire’s Pink Flag would make someone want to listen to it.
I finally got around to joining the website after lurking on the Yahoo Group.
The first great song titles that come to my mind are all by the Replacements. I don’t if I’m ready to take the position that they were better at coming up with song titles than anyone else in history, but there has to be a good reason that I immediately came up with these.
I Hate Music
God Damn Job
If Only You Were Lonely
Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out
That’s a good one. Here are a few more X titles I’ve always loved:
“In This House that I Call Home”
“Blue Spark”
“What’s Wrong with Me”
“See How We Are”
“The World’s a Mess, It’s In My Kiss”