Thread by @perpetua

What are your favorite opening lines in songs? Ideally, something that just immediately sets up an interesting idea/scenario/feeling, but you do you.

I want to see how many people end up writing out the opening line from "All Star"

Here are two off the top of my head that I love: "I was dressed for success, but success it never comes" and "I'm so sick of [fill in the blank]"

Here is a very dirty one from Arab Strap's "Packs of Three" - "It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen, but you've no idea where that cock has been"

"Now take me daahncing at the disco where you buy your Winnebago"

"History repeats the old conceits: the glib replies, the same defeats"

This is probably the best of all time:

“Yo pretty ladies around the world, I got a WEIRD thing to show you”

So be it, I'm your crowbar if that's what I am so far until you get out of this mess

I want you to know that I'm happy for you, I wish nothing but the best for you both

"They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within"

It's been 7 hours and 15 days since U took your love away

My lover, I've been donating time to review all the misinterpretations that define me and you

Pride no longer has definition – everybody wears it, it always fits

So I typed a text to a girl I used to see sayin' that I chose this cutie pie with whom I wanna be

Now, if you can stand I would like to take you by the hand and go for a walk past people as they go to work

How many special people change?

The waiting drove me mad, you're finally here and I'm a mess

Later at lunch with the taco lettuce crunch crunch she sets herself apart the bunch

Here's the thing, we started out friends - it was cool but it was all pretend

There's blood in my mouth cuz I've been biting my tongue all week

Creepy and sullen and running out of room in my little tomb

And when I asked for a separate room it was late at night and we'd been driving since noon

In the corner of my eye I saw you at Rudy’s - you were very high

Roddy’s daddy Denny saved every penny to buy a guitar for Rod

I remember how the darkness doubled

You look like a perfect fit for a girl in need of a tourniquet

I may not always love you

I believed that someone would take care of me tonight

I'd like to know completely what others so discretely talk about when they leave me, not that I notice when they're gone

I can't see anything at all, all I see is me - that's clear enough, and that's what's important: to see me

Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone

My love must be a kind of blind love, I can't see anyone but you

Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom – well, who am I to keep you down?

I really love you, and I mean you

Someday I hope for a lover to kill me, it’s the closest I can hope to get to anybody

I’ve been trying to make you love me but everything I try just takes you further from me

Devastation, at last, finally we meet

Embrace the senile genius, watch him reinvent the wheel

Why is it every time I think about you something that you have said or implied makes me doubt you?

Not supposed to do whole verses, but Scott Miller was an unsung genius:

So you've got a new girl, better tell us all about her
Well, we met—
No, we were thinking of lascivious detail
Well, she's a little like tendon-slash dimension crash entropica
Cryogen magenta kevlar ebola

Sometimes they say that love is blind but I think that dumb is what they had in mind

I wrote a song for America, they told me it was clever

Shot like an arrow through my heart - that's the pain I feel whenever we're apart

We need so damn many things to keep our dazed lives going

I thought I'd probably die in prison

Every time that I sell myself to you I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to

The sound of God is the screech of tires, lights and magnets, bolts and wires

Music is a world within itself with a language we all understand

This is another example of the “thesis statement” opening line

I think I've reached that point where giving up and going on are both the same dead end to me

Well, she was just 17 and you know what I mean

Wise men say only fools rush in