Best opening lines

"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" - Van Morrison

"All of your friends are cunts" - Mclusky

"When you have no one no one can hurt you" - Will Oldham

- Felt, Declaration.

Guns'n'Roses, Use Your Illusion 1

isn't that patti smith?

from 'you've really got a hold on me

for albums, the start of 'searching for the young soul rebels' is pretty hard to beat

crackly radio montage of holiday in the sun/smoke on the water/rat race/a couple of other things, then

rowland "[incomprehensible shout]"

dexys blokes "YEAH!"

rowland "[another incomprehensible shout]"

dexys blokes "YEAH!"

rowland (sounding spectacularly brummie) "for god's sakes burn it down"

oh wait...

uh-oh! i hereby report you to your local misheard lyric thread!

but the actual meat puppets lyric is indeed a classic opening line:

a long time ago
i looked at myself
and said, "you, you are my daughter"

Love, "Live And Let Live"

Nick Cave, "Up Jumped the Devil"

"Grandma sitting in a corner with a person in her hand going 'No no no no no.'
It only goes to show."

person? i don't think that's exactly what grandma had in her hand. (or were the frogs releasing clean versions of their albums?)

"Here's a penny for your thoughts...incidently, you may keep the change."

You Made Me Feel - Trash Can Sinatras

every thousand years
this metal sphere
ten times the size of Jupiter
floats just a few yards past the earth

you climb on your roof
and take a swipe at it
with a single feather
hit it once every thousand years

’til you’ve worn it down
to the size of a pea
yeah I’d say that’s a long time
but it’s only half a blink
in the place you’re gonna be

Built To Spill - Perfect From Now On

IT WAS THE BIGGEST COCK YOU'D EVER SEEN

BUT YOU'VE NO IDEA WHERE THAT COCK HAS BEEN

"Back in the days when I was a teenager
Before I had status and before I had a pager
You could find the abstract listening to hip hop
My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop"

excursions, tribe called quest

"you'll find me in a berlin bar, in a corner brooding" -- kate "saxophone song"

"I'm not a lover, I'm a fighter, and I will burn your house down, I will eat your children alive, and I will turn your lovers bones into tiny violins to play when you die" -Antartica Takes It "I'm No Lover" (fits in the album openers thread, too)

I was dreamin' when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray

"IT WAS THE BIGGEST COCK YOU'D EVER SEEN"
I've always HATED that linee
has Always come off to me as look at how risque we can sound whith this opening line to our album
yheah we're fuckin bad

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song,
I'm twenty-two now but I won't be for long.

I got a letter from the government the other day,
I opened it, and read it, it said they were suckas.

it's britney, bitch

^ yup

I always assumed Jack was shorthand for a state or smth, like Memphis, Tennessee, but I guess that doesn't make any sense, and instead the opening line is setting the scene of the song as a dialogue between narrator and interlocutor Jack?

can't help but feel this is lazy songwriting, that Jack is only there for the rhyme

the next line is all killer though

He is not your run of the mill garden variety Alabama country fare

every night i tell myself i am the cosmos
i am the wind
but that don't get you back again

Feels like I've been through a washing machine

There were 87 Advil in the bottle now there's 30 left, I ate 47 so what happened to the other 10?

it's not music but the opening line to Forrest McNeil's Review is one of the best:

"Life...it's literally all we have. But is it any good?"

Son, I'm 30
I only went with your mother 'cause she's dirty

Teenage angst has paid off well
Now I'm bored and old

life's a nightmare,
i can't stand it

Jens Lekman isn't on my mind or radar all that much, but he certainly his regarding the question of best opening lines:

Yeah I got busted.
So I used my one phone call
to dedicate
a song to you on the radio

(he certainly is)

I love that Jens song, but David Berman should get most of the credit there, and for the chorus too, because those lyrics are based on this bit of Berman's poem "Governors on Sominex":

P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call
to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light
by which he traveled into this and that

iirc one of Jens's friends had included these lines (uncredited) in a letter to him, and Jens paraphrased them in the song thinking his friend had written them.

jens has plenty of candidates for the thread to be fair

It has often been my dream
To live with one who wasn't there

Life is dull, life is gray
At its best it's just OK
But I'm happy to report:
Life is also short

I like opening lines that set the scene.

"You opened my mail apart at the seams / Now you know I live beyond my means"

"The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68 and he told me / all romantics meet the same fate some day / Cynical and drink and boring someone in some dark café"

"I got a letter from the government the other day / I opened and read it / It said they were suckers / They wanted me for their army or whatever"

I like second lines that are critiques of opening lines, like in "Lovergirl" by Teena Marie:

Coffee, tea, or me, baby? Touché au lait
My openin' line might be a bit passé, yes

God knows you ain’t pretty, God knows its true

I think the first 5 seconds of Destroyer's Streethawk are some of the best opening seconds of any album. You could turn it off right there and have a clear idea of what the next 40 minutes are going to entail.