There are 2 songs I've been listening to over and over and over for the past 3 days. Both are by Phil Lynott (from Thin Lizzy).
The first one is Old Town, which he wrote about four years before he died of septicemia (arising from complications from drug overdose). It's basically about a broken romance; the background music is very eerie/sad and the music video is quite melancholy for the most part, too. The lyrics say things about the broken romance from both points of view (but the chorus keeps stating that "this boy is crackin' up; this boy has broken down."). Parts of the music video show things like Phil playing the flugelhorn (while the camera pans around him) and then him on a garbage scow, and then as the song ends, it shows him turning around and walking down a long pier as the song's chorus repeats over and over. It's very sad and haunting in some ways, knowing that Phil died not long after. The part at the end where he walks away from the camera, especially.
He wrote a song called "Sarah" back in the late 70s (actually, he wrote another song with the same name about 5 years prior, but it's a different song and it's about his grandmother. This version I'm talking about now is about his, at the time, newborn daughter). The song is basically just one big love letter to his daughter, and most of it shows him singing to a little girl who is supposed to represent his daughter. About halfway through, all 7 (!) guitars kick in at the same time for a solo, which shows Phil in a dream dancing with the adult version of his daughter. Then when it comes back to Phil, the pitch of the song changes and as he sings each line of the chorus, a different girl comes up who represents each milestone of Sarah's life up until adulthood. Then the drummer for Lizzy actually comes on stage and mimes the lyrics until the song ends. It becomes so much more sad when you realize, again, that Phil died about 7 years after the song was written. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd2kcZXFU_c
Joined: 1 Aug 2010 Age: 40 Gender: Male Posts: 1,364 Location: Blackburn
08 Dec 2014, 12:20 pm
Deals with isolation, despair, loneliness and death. A very sad song.
_________________ "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time; like tears in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
02 Dec 2014, 10:40 pm
