Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.

This category contains lyrics that have sometime meant something

Saturday, 2006-05-06


Lawyers, guns, and money

I went home with a waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians too?

<TangerineJeemH> Have a fun journey gustaf
<TangerineJeemH> don't do anything you'll regret..

No fear, Jim, I didn’t end up

[…] hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan.

— Warren Zevon

Saturday, 2005-12-03


Brilliant mistake

He thought he was the King of America
But it was just a boulevard of broken dreams
A trick they do with mirrors and with chemicals
The words of love in whispers
And the axe of love in screams
I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this lovin’ feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
I was a fine idea at the time
Now I’m a brilliant mistake

— Elvis Costello

This article says that the album King of America made the top 50 list of 2005. WTF ? I have that album as an LP.

Sunday, 2005-10-16


Godspell

You can hear it in the beat they march to
and you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance.
You can tell by the way they move you
it’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.
And as the world moves faster
whip-lashing us around and round
it’s quite a slow disaster
and people keep on falling down.
Yes we wait…

— The Cardigans

Words don’t make this amazing song justice, must be heard to be believed.

Saturday, 2005-08-27


These are days

These are days
you’ll remember.
Never before and never since,
I promise,
will the whole world be warm as this.
And as you feel it,
you’ll know it’s true
that you
are blessed and lucky.

— 10,000 Maniacs

Today we were at the christening of my niece Cornelia Wei-Bao Davida Bergqvist.

Wednesday, 2005-08-17


Summerlong

All the nights and wasted time
trying to get my head to change its mind
all the talk of what it could be
when it never was

Kathleen Edwards gets another fan.

By the way, Michael Kaplan’s blog is a recent aggy addition and has not disappointed so far.

Friday, 2005-01-07


The Second Coming

Turning and turning
Within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold
And a blood dimmed tide
Is loosed upon the world

Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion
Without mercy

— Joni Mitchell

This is Mitchell’s interpretation of the first verse of W. B. Yeat’s The Second Coming.

Her version was the first I heard, and I still have the first verse imprinted in my brain.

The closing, however, is better in the original:

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Tuesday, 2024-12-14


Beyond belief

So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice

You know she has no sense
For all your jealousy
In a sense she still smiles very sweetly

— Elvis Costello

Winamp threw this up when ramdomly walking through ~10 GB of mp3s.

I first heard this song covered by Suzanne Vega in Lund circa 1990, and it made me go out and buy Costello’s Girls Girls Girls double-CD “greatest hits”. Those songs kept me sane during military service a year later, and Beyond Belief was one of the best.

Anyway, the point is that I loved Vega’s cover, but I’ll probably never hear it again. That’s the charm of live performances I guess.

Friday, 2024-11-26


4th of July

Today’s the 4th of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky.

— Aimee Mann

The road not taken

Everytime I see her face
On the street in the hollow of on the hill
Another time and another place
I feel her in my heart still
Everytime I see her face
On the street in the hollow in the bend
I see her in my mind and then
I go down the road not taken…again

— Bruce Hornsby

Thursday, 2024-11-25


Reason to believe

<JimH_Taco> There's a dead fox on the track outside my window

Seen a man standin’ over
a dead dog lyin’ by the highway in a ditch
He’s lookin’ down kinda puzzled
pokin’ that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open
he’s standin’ out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough
that dog’d get up and run
Struck me kinda funny
seem kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard earned day
people find some reason to believe

— Bruce Springsteen

Cassell Webb’s cover was the first version of this song I heard, and I’ve still got the cadences of that in my head.