Someone to Love

So I got into a Fountains of Wayne kick last night after listening to Tinted Windows.  One of the first songs I came across on Youtube was "Someone to Love".  Watch it; it's a beautifully bittersweet video, and has Demetri Martin in it.

While this has become one of my favorite depressing pop songs, it got me thinking about common song titles.  "Someone to Love" or "Somebody to Love" pop up all the time, and they're often great songs.  Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody..." is my favorite song of theirs, narrowly edging out "Volunteers"; Queen did a "Someone to Love" which is pretty good.

How about "Dance the Night Away"?  Cream did a song with that title, and Van Halen's is my favorite of theirs.  Note I'm not talking about covers - these are all different songs with the same title; sometime a kind of unlikely title.  Wikipedia also brings up a Europe song and a Mavericks song called "Dance the Night Away."

"Fire" is a title that has been used time and again, and never seems to work quite as well as people thought it would.  You'd think a song called "Fire" would be this explosion of killer rock and roll, and somehow it always falls flat.  Hendrix's "Fire" is one of my least favorite Hendrix songs; Arthur Brown, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and U2 all gave it a shot, and I can't think of how any of them go.  Probably the best is Springsteens, which works mostly because he makes it a ballad rather than a scorcher.

The internet showed me a bunch of songs called either "Rock and Roll" or "Sunday Morning" but I've got to give the win to the Velvet Underground on both.

I had a thought, a long time ago, when I read that song titles couldn't be copyrighted, and that I could write a song called "Every Breath You Take" and Sting couldn't touch me (this is also back when most of my rich and famous dreams involved writing brilliant albums).  My thought was to take a famous album, like the White Album, and create an album where the track by track listing would be exactly the same, but the songs would be totally different.  You'd have your own song called "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" etc.  The idea being to use the titles as a stepping off point for creativity.