Where can i find meanings of songs

A highlight from the McCartney songbook and written at his kitchen table in Scotland , Sir Paul penned "Blackbird" about the American Civil Rights Movement, drawing inspiration from the racial desegregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school system.

It wasn't necessarily a black 'bird,' but it works that way, as much as then you called girls 'birds' A perennial choice for the best prom song , Green Day's acoustic ballad was originally meant to be anything but a romantic affair. Brooding frontman Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the number about a girlfriend who was moving away to Ecuador, and titled the song "Good Riddance" out of frustration with the breakup.

Not that the misinterpretation of the ballad as a high school slow dance number fazes Armstrong. That's fine. No list of misunderstood songs is complete without " Born in the U. As Songfacts points out , "Most people thought it was a patriotic song about American pride, when it actually cast a shameful eye on how America treated its Vietnam veterans Springsteen explains that the song's protagonist is "isolated from the government, isolated from his family, to the point where nothing makes sense.

Another song whose meaning was obscured by its party anthem vibes, this Calypso-lite tune featured a delightful and then annoyingly ubiquitous call-and-response question that never got answered. Asking who let the dogs out became low-hanging comedy fruit after the song's release in , which meant most people missed that it was "a man-bashing song. Everyone's having a great time Yippie-Yi-Yo , and then jerks start treating women like objects, and it ruins everything woof, woof, woof.

The surface-level reading of the flighty pop song is pretty standard: Forbidden young love, the thrills of disappointing your parents, and a boyfriend imploring you to run away with him.

So it's not exactly Taylor Swift's "Love Story. There's an entire subgenre of music whose lyrics are ignored because the instrumentals are so fun, and "Macarena" may be its queen. Not understanding Spanish also gave listeners another reason to gleefully swing their hips while the duo sang about a young woman who cheats on her boyfriend with two of his friends while he's enlisting in the Army. Not great, Macarena! Sadly, our well-meaning soul mate is preparing their romantic overtures to a song about a stalker.

But I tried to inject a little bit of levity into it to make it more lighthearted. Psy's crowning earworm with its invisible horse dance was Korea's first massive global musical export, and it came with its very own goofy music video where the elements of Psy's big-money lifestyle are revealed to be something absurdly pathetic.

Without knowing Psy or Korean culture, it's easy to think he's simply making fun of himself, but the song and the video are both mocking a specific lifestyle of chasing the appearance of wealth without taking care of your core needs.

The hollow commercial attitude is typified in the song by the Gangnam district think Beverly Hills where trust-funders eat cheap food in order to afford expensive coffee that they conspicuously down in one sip instead of savoring.

As the song satirizing the pointless pursuit of material reached unseen YouTube success, Psy told The Atlantic , "Human society is so hollow, and even while filming [the music video] I felt pathetic. You just donated to your local pet shelter. Next time you want to get lyric interpretations for a song, you can turn to the internet. Here are the best sites for looking up the meanings of songs, whether official or through someone else's perspective.

Arguably the best song meanings website, SongMeanings, has been around for decades. Look up any song, and you'll find lyrics and hopefully comments discussing them. In , the site partnered with LyricFind in order to officially license lyrics for many songs. On the main page, you'll see top artists, trending songs, and recent comments. If you aren't interested in any of those, simply search with the bar at the top.

This will show songs, albums, and artists that match your query. If you browse an artist page, you can easily see how many comments each of their songs have. You can read comments without logging in, but you'll need to make an account to contribute to the site. The site allows you to respond to other people's comments, as well as add your own.

If you register, you can also edit lyrics if you find a mistake. At the time of writing, the site contained over a million lyrics and some 1. It's a great first stop when you want to see what other people think of a song. This one provides something a little different than lyric interpretation websites. Instead of people offering their thoughts on what a song means, it collects interesting bits of info on specific music tracks.

The homepage has highlighted artists and songs, as well as interesting categories such as "songs with beverages in the title". Search for a song or artist using the bar at the top—just note that Songs is the default, so you'll need to switch to the Artists tab manually if you search for one.

Once you select a song, you'll see various "Songfacts" about it. As he explained in a Tonight Show interview, the song was about his divorce.

Don't hang up,'" Collins said. There's obviously a lot of anger in there. Few songs in music history have seemed as innocuous as "Jump," a song in which David Lee Roth implores us to jump a lot.

Not a lot of layers going on there. But Roth revealed that the song's origins are actually much darker than anyone could have guessed. There was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs, yelling 'Don't jump, don't jump. Just like that, the song that always made us smile because it was silly good fun has become the most depressing song about suicide ever recorded. When John Hughes decided to base his movie about teenage love on an obscure Psychedelic Furs song, he maybe should've listened a little more closely to the lyrics.

To be fair, we always thought the song was about a girl who, um… looked pretty in pink? Not so, says Furs singer and lyricist Richard Butler, who explained that the song was "a metaphor for being naked.

That was the idea of the song. And John Hughes, bless his late heart, took it completely literally and completely overrode the metaphor altogether! According to Mellencamp, Jack wasn't meant to be a white guy. The record execs were not impressed, and purportedly told Mellencamp, "Whoa, can't you make him something other than that? He eventually agreed to cut the lyrics making it explicit that Jack is African-American, and focus instead on him being a football star.

Mellencamp's most successful hit single may not be remembered as a celebration of biracial relationships, but that's definitely where it began. It was Neil Diamond's first 1 hit , and most people just assumed that Cracklin' Rosie, described in the song as a "store-bought woman" and "poor man's lady", was a prostitute. Turns out, Rosie wasn't even meant to be a person at all. Diamond revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that the song was inspired by a Native American tribe in Canada which had more men than women.

But the guys who weren't able to find a girl "get a bottle of Cracklin' Rosie instead ," he said. It's a song that conjures images of lazy summer days and drinking too many margaritas.

But if you've ever sung along to more than the "some people claim that there's a woman to blame" part, you might've noticed that the lyrics actually paint a bleak picture. The song's narrator isn't on vacation, but "wasting away" in a beach resort community, getting tattoos he doesn't remember, looking for lost salt shakers, and drinking endless cocktails to "help me hang on.

It sure seems like it, and as the song unfolds, he goes from insisting "it's nobody's fault," to "hell, it could be my fault," to finally "it's my own damn fault. When you think of the Village People song "Macho Man," two words that probably don't spring to mind are dark and serious. But that's apparently what the French songwriters had in mind, according to David Hodo, otherwise known as the construction worker.

We don't remember that being quite the case, but whatever, some people had fears that masculinity was under attack, and the world needed a song championing men who weren't afraid to dress like sexy Indians or shirtless bikers.

Fans of prog-rock legends Rush might be tempted to overanalyze a song like "The Trees. But when Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart was asked during an interview with Modern Drummer magazine to explain the song, he said it was much, much, much simpler than any of the theories. Everything about this catchy one-hit wonder sounds like '80s synthesizer fluff.

C'mon, it's a song about balloons… Ninety-nine balloons! Has there ever been a song more inconsequential? Well, if you think that, you might want to listen to it again. There's a bigger story happening in this tune than just a bunch of balloons taking flight. I'll never forget that image. Yes, that's right, "99 Luftballons" is about nuclear devastation caused by a innocent bundle of balloons released into the sky by Mick Jagger.

Some think it references the music industry, which traps you with promises of wealth. Others think the hotel is a gateway to Hell, trapping wayward sinners. A few believe it is just a fictional story of a dangerous place. None of them are totally wrong and none are totally right. What is most important is that you can defend your position with evidence from the song. As long as you can back up your meaning with actual lyrics or stories, it is a valid meaning. Most artists will even admit that they don't know the song's full meaning.

Writing lyrics can be subconsciousness, and the meaning people get from listening to a song is just as important as the meaning when writing it. Method 2. Listen to the album the song came from for clues to larger themes. While not all songs are part of a larger message, many songs make more sense in the context of the whole album. Are there other songs that hint at a similar meanings or themes?

Are there characters, images, or ideas that keep cropping up in other songs? What songs come before or after the song you're listening to? Do the shifts in mood or tone between songs tell you anything?

The first song and last song generally set the theme. If the song came first, what kind of mood does it set for all the songs after it? If it comes last, what kind of tone does it leave the listener on? Read into the song's historical context. Charles Mingus's famous jazz song "Fables of Faubus" means very little if you don't know that Governor Faubus tried to prevent desegregation in Arkansas. The famous Fleetwood Mac album Rumors makes much more sense once you realize that, at the time, everyone gossiped that the band members were secretly dating.

Many songs only make sense in the year they were released, as they explicitly address current events. Look up the year the song was released or written, as well as any major current events from that period.

Does anything seem familiar? Sometimes artists will talk about personal issues that influenced songs years after they were released. For example, Kanye West's second album, Late Registration , talks a lot about fame and money, whereas his first album, The College Dropout , talks about the struggles of a starving artist. Consider how the tone of the instruments matches the song's lyrics. How do the instrumentals make you feel -- dark and moody, happy and bouncy, slow and contemplative, high-energy and rocking?

Sometimes there will be a disconnect between the lyrics and music, which points to more meaning. For example, if there are melancholy lyrics but a happy backing track, you can often assume that the lyrics are supposed to be funny. They could also show an interesting contrast -- the world around the singer might be happy, but the singer is not. The happy background music symbolizes the quick but high-tempo high the characters get, even as they are ruining their lives.

Note how the song changes from beginning to end. A clue to many songs' meanings comes from their progression. If you think about the song as a speech from a friend, what was the point of the speech? How did their mood or perspective change from the first line to the last? If you have noticed a change in the song, go back and find the line or lines where it occurred. A sudden twist or change is often called a "turn. Watch the song's music video, but be careful of added confusion.