Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

iTunes, random, twenty-five songs, first lines. Post your guesses. Or, better: if you guess one, post the next line.
1. You've never had a dream like this, never felt the cold, cold steel
2. When I got up at five am to work down at the fill station
3. I must have had a million damn unlucky days
4. In Forth Worth all the neon's burning bright
5. It was a Monday when my lover told me Bif Naked, 'Lucky' (la_dame_du_lac)
6. It was an early morning bar room, and the place just opened up Harry Chapin, 'A Better Place to Be' (meganknight)
7. Drinking black-market vodka in the back of the Scotsman saloon
8. There must be some way out of here Bob Dylan, 'All Along the Watchtower' (sacredchao23)
9. I got a long, long list of things, that no-one needs to see
10. We'll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet The Who, 'Won't Get Fooled Again' (baseballchica03)
11. I've been waiting for you to come back since you left Minneapolis
12. Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed Bob Dylan, 'Tangled Up in Blue' (sacredchao23)
13. Satin saddles and a slow burn, on an old dirt road
14. The clock's running down, the team's losing ground
15. Alone on a train, aimless in wonder Death Cab for Cutie, 'Different Names for the Same Thing' (sefkhet)
16. So you watch the sunrise sinking, and she's talking in her sleep
17. Out under the stars dodging them night cars, baby
18. Meet you downstairs in the bar and heard your rolled-up sleeves and your skull t-shirt Amy Winehouse, 'You Know I'm No Good' (sacredchao23)
19. Do you have the time to listen to me whine? Green Day, 'Basket Case' (sacredchao23)
20. All the love you promised would be mine forever, I would have bet my bottom dollar on
21. You know it's generally known, you got everything at home
22. Won't you scratch my itch, sweet Annie Rich, and welcome me back to town?
23. Well it's Saturday night, you're all dressed up in blue 'Tougher Than The Rest', as covered by Everything But The Girl (spartezda)
24. Don't want to need the way I need you, don't want to feel like this Mary Chapin Carpenter, 'Slave to the Beauty' (mitchy)
25. Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could have 'Always On My Mind', covered by... Ryan Adams! (aerynne, kingtycoon, baseballchica03)

Via chalepa_ta_kala: Is it love, or a mutual strangulation society? Look! It's why I'm single!

Okay, no, it's not, but it is an interesting piece on the fine line between what's coded as 'romantic' and what's needy and suffocating, and it uses love song cliches as an example, which is the kind of thing that makes me point at the monitor and shout "YES!". I don't want to rid the world of love songs, or anything - I don't even want to rid my iTunes library of love songs - but, well, you don't exactly need to go all the way back to 'Stand By Your Man' to think that as a culture, we are going wrong somewhere with this.

Think about it: do you really want the person who'll tell you that they 'can't live, if living is without you'? They exist. They are out there. They will also screw you over in a lot of different ways, because someone who loves being with you is one thing, but someone who really sees their own psychological survival as dependent on you being with them is quite another. That person is going to suffocate you. Ditto, the person who considers you their 'everything'. Ditto, although arguably to a lesser degree, the person who will love you forever no matter what happens - yes, sweet, but really, the world has enough people in it who refuse to get over their ex because some part of them thinks they'd be breaking a contract.

Which isn't to say that I think the world should contain no songs about obsessive, suffocating, needy love. There are lots of ways to love somebody, and we need songs about all of them. The problem, really, is that we take that one kind of love, write songs about it, and present it as The Kind Of Love You Want. (Yeah, my iTunes library has a fair few songs like that too, including 'Without You'. They're not individually bad, they're just rather disturbing as a monopolising collective.)

So, here are a few of my favourite cliche-avoiding love songs. ( These, the world needs more of. )

I wish I could afford any of his books. Since I can't, and Amazon only taunts me:

Daniel Berrigan is a Jesuit priest who once featured on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. He protested against the Vietnam war, most famously by pouring napalm on draft files, and he's been protesting against wars since; he's written poetry, campaigned for social justice, and intermittently served time in prison.

'A parable for today, if not tomorrow'

Some of his poetry

And Dar Williams's beautiful song about Daniel and Philip Berrigan:

( I Had No Right )

It's amazing how much you can find to do when your housemate suggests that doing the washing-up might fill that chapter-shaped hole in your life.

( Favourite line, guess the song, etc )

(Someone told me today that I have, and I quote, "a really nice-sounding accent". Aww. Most people, if they comment at all, just ask me where I'm from in a puzzled-sounding way (in their defence, it does jump about a bit) - the man I nearly married thought it was ugly, but he has no taste whatsoever in anything except girlfriends. I mean, I know that my accent is the default one in which everyone should speak the English language, but it's nice to have some outside validation from time to time. Yes.)

The new prettified icon, anyway, has lyrics from a band that everyone should listen to. I try to avoid saying things like that - favourite lyrics tend to be a very personal thing, and what means something to one person won't mean the same to another, and some people just don't like lyrics, and, well, yes. I don't want to be one of those lj people who does nothing but post reams of teeny goth angst in the mistaken conviction everyone else out there will know what they're trying to say, apart from 'I am an angsty goth teenager'. But the Weakerthans have such beautiful lyrics that I feel the need to evangelise a little.

They sing about belonging to a place so much that you love it and hate it at the same time, and loss and loneliness and recovery. Which might make them sound like one of the angsty bands I've just mocked, but they're really not. Their lyrics are perfect enough that I could quote couplets forever ("How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you / How you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands"), they sing about pamphleteers rewriting love songs in the language of protest songs and the Communist manifesto, and about one of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic explorers meeting Michel Foucault, and about playing on baggage carousels in empty airports. And it all works. It's beautiful.

Their first two albums are about loss, more than anything; their third and most recent album is about recovery and rebuilding. But it's not self-pitying angst, and it's the kind of self-consciouss loss and recovery that works, somehow. The song about Foucault and the explorer, who just wants to get back to "dear Antarctica", is a happy poppy thing. The song my icon's lyrics are from is told from the point of view of a bored cat, who's "tired of this piece of string" and wants his miserable, introspective owner to snap out of it. ("I don't know who you're talking to, I've made a search through every room / But all I found was dust that moved in shadows of the afternoon.") It's not wallowing in cynical angst, or an optimistic call to cheerfulness, and I don't think it's anywhere in between either, really. It's off to the side. Look:

When the one-ways collude with the map that you folded wrong,
And the route you abandoned is always the path that you probably should be upon,
When the bottle-cap ashtrays and intimates' ears are all full
With results of your breath, and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull,
One more time, try.

You should listen to them.