In addition to my love of the short story, I love music, love good song writing.  Though there are many genres and many reasons to love various songs, I want to list a particular group of my favorites – songs that advance a good story.  There are many great songwriters and many inspiring songs (4,436) in my oops-20-gig-isn’t-big-enough-anymore iPod, but here I want to capture songs that advance good stories.  A quick look at the artist’s names might make the list look sterile  - of course Tom Waits belongs on a best songwriter’s list! - but this list is about the story in the song as much as the song itself.  Names that constantly are recorded as the best songwriters are spread throughout my list here, which tells me this: great songwriters are necessarily skilled in storytelling. 

1) Birches, Bill Morrissey.  This might be the perfect story song.  The song recounts a very mundane event – an older married couple planning to load firewood in the stove to pass a cold winter night.  The choice of wood – oak vs. birch – perfectly captures the years of their marriage.  Happiness, sorrow, and disappointment crackle in the story the way wood does in a stove.  Not a wasted word in the story.  As for the story’s ending – perfectly bittersweet in both image and word.

2) Fish and Bird, Tom Waits.  This is the perfect song in a story in a song song.  A sailor form out of town shares a song with those who welcome him into their tavern.  The listener cannot help being pulled back a forth between the tavern, the tale sung by the stranger, and the story that undoubtedly inspired the song which he sang for them.  The layers found in the lyrics remind me of Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead, but the song of the fish and bird is, if not more universal, at least more approachable.  Any sailor in any port city in any corner of this round earth could sing of the fish and bird and have the listeners respond with a knowing smile.  “Ah, yes,” they’d think, “that poor sailor.”

3) Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen.  If I added a tally mark to the wall every time a literary magazine touted the importance of the first line of a story in hooking the reader, I’d have some pretty mucked up walls.  And this story (it is difficult to separate the story from the song with this one) knows the importance of the hook.  Every time I hear the song, I hear the screen door slam, I see Mary’s dress wave, Roy Orbison starts up in beneath the Springsteen song.  The Boss gets you into this story all the way, makes you feel the desperation, the faint glimmer of hope offered.

4) In Germany Before the War, Randy Newman.  A short short story which just happens to be set to music.  No editorializing, no background, no conclusion; nothing except the detailed description of a chance encounter between a man and a lost girl, and a huge void in the story which the listener is forced to fill.  I once saw it described as “creepy” and I agree completely.

5) Boom Boom Mancini, Warren Zevon.  Warren Zevon had a knack for seeing every story from a couple of steps to the left – it was a form of genius that set his songwriting apart.  Here he is recounting the true story of an American boxer from the 1980s, Boom Boom Mancini and his opponent, Duk Koo Kim - who died of brain injuries sustained in his fight with Mancini.  Zevon’s step to the left here: he is telling it from the voice of someone who cannot wait to get home to watch Boom Boom’s next American fight after the Duk Koo Kim tragedy.  Here the narrator confesses his bloodlust in the first words of the song, “Hurry home early.  Hurry on Home.  Boom Boom Mancini’s fighting Bobby Chacon.”  Bob Dylan wrote Who Killed Davey Moore? in critical response to that boxer’s death in 1963.  I don’t know Zevon’s intentions, but - for me - the narrator in his story embraced the violence associated with boxing so enthusiastically that it actually served as better attack on the violence of the sport than Dylan’s finger-wagging approach.       

6) Brand New ’64 Dodge, Greg Brown.  This song captures the innocence of America in the weeks before JFK was assassinated by recounting the innocent ramblings of a teenage boy trying to figure out life.  You sense the boy is at the tale end of his innocence, just as you - the listener - know that the country’s innocence is about to be shattered.  The song never slips up though, never lets on that tragedy is impending; just listens in as the boy thinks through his day - his friends, his girlfriend, his dad’s new car, the fact that God loves the president “even though he is a catholic.”  Listening to the song, you feel not only empathy for the boy, but pity, pity based on the fact that you know something horrific that he cannot. 

7) Crazy Mary, Victoria Williams.  Victoria Williams is a great storyteller in song, always capturing the setting in great detail, with great authenticity.  I love the story in this song about small town teenagers and a crazy woman living on the outskirts of town.  The setting for the song is set completely with this image “a little country store with a sign tacked to the side said no L-O-I-T-E-R-I-N-G allowed.  Underneath that sign always congregated quite a crowd.”  The story in the song tells how Crazy Mary- afraid of cars - would refuse the occasional rise someone offered, and how one of the loitering teens has a dream about Crazy Mary one night only to discover the next morning that a car had veered off the road that night and smashed right into Crazy Mary’s house.  The story ends  with the somber thought, “That which you fear the most will meet you half the way.”              

8) Brick, Ben Folds.  This song tells the real, and real sad, story of a young man sneaking his girlfriend to an abortion clinic.  On a live album intro, Ben Folds indicates that it is a true story from his high schools days.  The song’s title as expounded in the chorus – “She’s a brick and I’m drowning slowly” - tells you exactly where the story is headed. 

9) Country Dead Song, Violent Femmes.  It’s sick, but it is a good story in song.  A father intentionally shoves his youngest daughter into a deep well – somehow thinking it was an act of love to kill the children he could not afford to feed.  No happy ending either.  When he realizes (after the fact) the error in his logic, he plans to kill himself in shame, certain he has guaranteed his own place in hell.

10) Roller Derby Queen, Jim Croce.  Jim Croce starts with full and fair disclosure on this one – “I’m gonna tell you a story you won’t believe.”  He proceeds to explain how he was just about to leave the local watering hole when his eye caught sight of a roller derby skater and fell in love on the spot, so much so that he had to settle in for a couple more shots and beers.  The story is more telling about the narrator than his “bleach blonde bomber with a streak of mean.”