A good opening line might reel a listener in, but a closing line can have even more staying power, lingering in the mind long after the song is over. These parting words offer an opportunity to summarize the entire song’s message or feeling, introduce a plot twist, or a little bit of both.
There’s a reason why we want to get the last word in an argument. These sentiments are powerful, enduring, and within a poetic context, often the heaviest lines of the entire work.
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Here are some of the most emotionally devastating closing lines of the 1960s and 70s.
“Chelsea Hotel #2” by Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen’s 1974 track “Chelsea Hotel #2” is a contemplative, nostalgic, and mournful reflection on a one-time fling with fellow musician Janis Joplin. The affair happened, as one would expect, in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Cohen’s lines about Joplin looking at herself in the mirror and eventually “getting away,” referring to her premature death, sound like a lover who is still grieving. But just when you buy into the sentimentality, Cohen delivers a striking blow.
“I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best / I can’t keep track of each fallen robin / I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.”
“The Bridge” by Dolly Parton
Throughout the first half of Dolly Parton’s 1968 track, “The Bridge”, the song’s narrative sounds like a scorned woman reflecting on the place where she fell in love. That seems harmless enough, even as it falls in line with country music’s standard heartbreak fare. But the closing lines in this late 60s track prove to be the most emotional, pushing the storyline of a woman abandoned by her man one tragic step further.
“Tonight, while standing on the bridge, my heart is beating wild / To think that you could leave me here with our unborn child / My feet are moving slowly closer to the edge / Here is where it started, and here is where I’ll end it.”
“Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd’s seminal album from 1975, Wish You Were Here, is famously a tribute to their former bandmate, Syd Barrett. Songs like “Welcome To The Machine” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” are powerful in a grandiose, large-scale way. But there’s something especially cutting about the intimate feel of the album’s title track. The closing lines of this mid-70s hit describe how time affects us all with glaring honesty.
“How I wish, how I wish you were here / We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year / Running over the same old ground, what have we found? The same old fears?”
“The Needle And The Damage Done” by Neil Young
Neil Young wrote his 1972 song, “The Needle And The Damage Done”, after watching multiple colleagues and musical idols succumb to addiction. In a tragically ironic twist of fate, Young’s Crazy Horse bandmate, Danny Whitten, died of a h***** overdose the same year this song came out. In the song’s closing lines, Young’s reluctant acceptance of any kind of addict’s plight makes the entire song even more bleak.
“I’ve seen the needle and the damage done / a little part of it in everyone / but every junkie’s like the settin’ sun.”
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