Friday Random Ten

Eno - Bottomliners
84 Rooms - Wild Young Winos from Planet Earth
Link Wray - Flying Wedge (Drag Race)
Nick Cave - Hiding All Away
Duane Eddy - Rebel Rouser
Zombies - She's Not There
Kurtis Blow - Basketball
Wailers - Wailin'
Television - The Fire
Tom Waits - Dirt in the Ground

They tell me April is National Poetry Month. Whatever; I'm a prose guy. Sure, there are a few poets I like--your basic Eliot, your basic Yeats, whoever wrote those Burma Shave signs--but when you get right down to it, narrative is where the action is.

So of course it'll surprise exactly nobody that I'm a big fat sucker for songs that tell stories. Songs like Hush by the Pine Box Boys (a four-minute horror movie), or Peg & Pete & Me by Stan Ridgway (a perfect little noir, with a last line that sums up the genre: "Never trust a rich dead man's wife"), or Haley's Comet by Dave Alvin (the final days of "some guy who was famous long ago"), or (in a wholly different vein) The Other Window by Wire (an elegant, minimalist tale of crushing alienation).

So this week's question is: what are your favorite songs-that-tell-stories?