SONGS WHERE/SONGS THAT/SONGS WITH/SONGS IN WHICH

Hadn’t remembered this at all but I just happened to stumble on it in the wild in “Over the Hills and Far Away” - very simple rhythm guitar chords hold while everything else fades out and do a pretty little coda

Madness: "Turning Blue"

songs of archaeological importance

Steely Dan - Caves of Altamira
The B-52's - Mesopotamia

Spinal Tap - Stonehenge

king tut

"You Belong to Me"

See the pyramids along the Nile...

Peter Gabriel, "Digging in the Dirt"

Songs which they completely fucked up for the single mix

Emilíana Torrini - Unemployed in Summertime
Hot Chip - One Life Stand

got to be some better examples

Peter Gabriel, "Digging in the Dirt"

... and "Solsbury Hill".

CaaL, not a single but the mastering error that made Cold Spring Harbor sound like a Chipmunks record seems to be related

^ the inverse of sorts to the Cure's Bananafishbones, which was mastered too slowly and a semitone lower, and not even corrected until the 2006 remaster.

songs of archaeological importance

In "Wondering Where the Lions Are", Bruce Cockburn mentions "thousand-year-old petroglyphs", but I think he's just observing them, not discovering them.

songs where the singer "duets" with their younger self in a way that calls attention to their growth/maturity and/or the ravages of age. Donny Osmond did this live in the early 2000s (before hologram concerts were really a thing 😔), but I can't think of any examples on record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3CleKY36c

well here we go:

In 2020, Cat Stevens released a re-recorded version of "Father and Son". This version, which appears on Tea for the Tillerman 2, features the original recording of Stevens' vocals (at the age of 22) alongside the present-day voice of Stevens (age 72).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_H5XuIb5WM

oh wow

makes you wonder if david crosby ever recorded "tetrad"

12 Monkeys-core

Paging Natalie Cole

would the Jig of Life count?

'Jig of Life' would only count if an elderly Kate Bush were to re-record the parts delivered by the character's future self and replace the original vocals for those parts with the re-recording

(and I hope she never indulges in that kind of legacy-tarnishing gimmickry)

this Jacko Pepsi commercial is pretty poignant though. the ghost of baby MJ pops back into existence to sing a few lines with grownup MJ, only to dematerialize and leave his older self alone with his piano as the scene fades out

Songs with police / ambulance sirens?

the best use of a police siren in a song, What is

Songs whose title(s) were the title of the band's preceding album, rather than the album they appeared on:

Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy
Sleepyhead - Punk Rock City U.S.A.

― Scam Likely (morrisp), Thursday, September 24, 2020 12:24 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sinead O'Connor - the song "How About I Be Me" appears on I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss, and not the album How About I Be Me (and You Be You). Slightly different titles but the lyrics of the song include the parenthetical part.

Carcass - Reek of Putrefaction

PJ Harvey - Dry

Screamadelica sort of counts

Mostly it doesn't count but it's still something

Maybe this has been done before - songs that are about former band members who left to start their own bands.

Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel - Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)
The Sisters Of Mercy - This Corrosion

Suede - Animal Lover is about Justine Frischmann, possibly Animal Nitrate too.

Nine Inch Nails - Piggy (about Richard Patrick, who left to start Filter)

! Really?

if true that is definitely the most disproportionately butthurt of all the examples.

Springsteen - "Bobby Jean" and "No Surrender" are both partly about Steve van Zandt leaving the band, though I don't think either of them is entirely about that.

Elvis Costello's "How to Be Dumb" and a stray line in "Hurry Down Doomsday" are both apparently directed at Bruce Thomas.

That probably doesn't fit the criteria here but it's what I thought of. One could bring up various Lennon/McCartney solo swipes at each other as well.

Grateful Dead "He's Gone" is about percussionist Mickey Hart's father embezzling money from the band and absconding, which precipitated Hart leaving the Dead, though he returned a few years later. Sort of a corollary to the category

Songs in which the artist refers (by name) to a manager or other non-performing member of their “team”:

R.E.M. - Little America (“Jefferson” (Holt), the band’s manager at the time)

Billie Eilish - I Didn’t Change My Number (“Laura” (Ramsay), her assistant)

Ramones - Danny Says (manager Danny Fields)

lots and lots of rap songs

eminem's manager paul rosenberg is a recurring character in his catalog, for example. list grows even bigger if we're talking about label execs

I believe that the main character in the Who's never-completed Lifehouse, Bobby, was named for their soundperson Bob Pridden (that's him in the photo on the back of Odds & Sods). But no Who songs have the name "Bobby" in them.

Always wondered what inspired this as it's something Blur did a lot more than Oasis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FRAeFyBX1w

Ray Davies shading various managers in the Kinks' "The Moneygoround."

Songs whose title(s) were the title of the band's preceding album, rather than the album they appeared on:

Marmoset - Record in Red

Songs in which the artist refers (by name) to a manager or other non-performing member of their “team”:

Spoon - Laffitte Don't Fail Me Now, &
Spoon - The Agony of Laffitte

I thought that was about an A&R guy.

The Ballad of John and Yoko (Peter Brown)

John Fogerty "Zanz Kant Danz"

(Saul Zaentz)

would bet that The Beta Band Rap does this more than any other song ever recorded

Zaentz was also a label guy (and not quite what I had in mind with the query, though this is def a category in itself).