#50) "14 Years" by Guns N' Roses - Not only is this not much of a road song, it might very well be considered the anti-road song....all that 'the road' is not. Nothing good is going on here - no high spirits, no joy, no wanderlust, no revelry; an urge to escape from something surely, but no opportunity to do so, at least at the moment. In the moment this song creates, you got a real mess on your hands.
In researching it, I discovered something I never knew in 22 years: Izzy Stradlin sings lead, not Axl Rose. I had no idea! But it doesn't change anything; the song is still one of G-n'-R's more emotionally complex numbers, a haunting portrayal, in my mind, of the deep-rooted anger that divorce can bring. I say divorce, because that's how the song has always read to me. It's significant that it's 14 years on trial here, not 2 years or even 5, nothing that could be dismissed as a come-and-go relationship, a mere break-up, but well past a decade of (presumably) marriage that crashes and explodes in an acrimonious fireball. We can all spare a year or two...but 14 years? That's when the best you can probably hope for from anger is that it cools down and crusts over into regret.
I've always liked the wicked piano riff too. And though it may not be a road song, on the album (Use Your Illusion II), it leads directly to one...a monster, in fact:
"Don't get back 14 years, in just one day..."
#51) "Yesterdays" by Guns N' Roses - Not much to say, leaving town, baby...leaving town, getting out. Because yesterday's got nothing for me.
"Some things could be better, if we'd all just let them be..."
#52) "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by Tom Waits - Also not much of a road song, but a deceptively simple lament of the sorrowful reality that is the adult world. I really like singing along with this. My voice is almost as smooth as Tom Waits'. ;-)
"I don't wanna live in a big old tomb on Grand Street..."
#53) "So It Goes" by Tom Waits - From the early years, when Tom Waits (who looms large in my musical consciousness, mind you) could still carry a tune, So it Goes is quiet and folk-oriented, speaking nothing of the long experimental miles he would travel musically in decades to come, instead speaking its truth within the framework of a singular emotional moment. Always makes for powerful stuff.
"And so it goes, nobody knows how to get to the sky..."
#54) "Ship of Fools" by Bob Seger - This song does away with the bare bones roots rock Seger made himself famous with, and takes an intriguing allegorical approach to the subject of identity, and - I think - solitude and how the two relate to one another. It leads to a tragic (or not so tragic, depending on your point of view) finish, and twenty-five years later I've never been able to figure out just what is being said.
But I keep listening; all told, I think I've spent more time trying to interpret this song than any other, and somewhere lost on a long highway with miles before and miles behind is the perfect place to try figuring just what's going on in the song, and my life.
And how the two relate to one another.
"Well he stood there like some idol, and he listened like some temple, and then he turned away..."
