Songs with dance as metaphor
There are tons of songs about dancing, for obvious reasons. But that’s not the subject matter of this post – songs about dance for the sake of dance. This is about songs that use dance as a larger metaphor for life or love.
Here are just a few:
Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life
For a Dancer
Dance Me to the End of Love
Don’t Forget to Dance
I Hope You Dance
Dance With Me
Oh Very Young
One of the very very best dance-as-metaphor song is “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. Here he is at the beginning of his career. It’s very intense, especially the expression in his eyes:
The song’s lyrics have different meanings to the listeners. Some relate it to the pain of illness and death ending a happy relationship. Others (and I’m in this latter group) see it as describing a once-promising love gone sadly wrong, with all the pain and heartache that entails.
Brooks says it’s his favorite of all his songs, but you may be surprised that he didn’t write it. Here’s songwriter Tony Arata, who tells the story of writing the song here:
The theme – of deep appreciation for even a relationship that has an unhappy ending – is not uncommon in poetry and song. For an example of the latter, we have Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which celebrates what Cohen called the broken Hallelujah:
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah …… And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
For me the ultimate dance as metaphor song is Jean-Jacques Goldman’s:
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I made the list of all the things we will never be again
When you dance, when you dance
But what becomes of lost lovers?
When you dance, do you think about that?
When you dance, do you think about that?
–Jean-Jacques Goldman, “Quand tu danses (When you dance)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EpQxCdUyLw
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The video is gorgeous in deep sepia, shot from the inside of an acoustic guitar, of various couples seated on a leather couch, while JJG sings.
What becomes of lost lovers?
I always tear up for this one.
huxley:
That’s easy; they’re with the snows of yesteryear.
OK, I cried when I listened to Anne Murray, and Huxley’s contribution, especially with the Older Couple on the Couch. Things are still so very fresh for me.
I love the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love.
https://youtu.be/NGorjBVag0I?si=O3vNwpyAKw_W5zAt
I really like “Oh Very Young.”
The theme – of deep appreciation for even a relationship that has an unhappy ending
One of my favorite poems is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Well, I Have Lost You”:
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish–and men do–
I shall have only good to say of you.
And, in my little family, my kids call “I Hope You Dance” “the mommy song” and know it will always make me cry while I’m singing it at the top of my lungs in our kitchen dance-offs.
For a Dancer covered by Clive Gregson and Christine Collister is one of my favorite covers of all time.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6K190KglBbIyybV7bj8bjr?si=5a2ab4c052214b95
The final verse has always struck me as a really deep reference to the effect you can have on the world without intent, for good or ill.
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know
That reminds of something I mused on a while back. I had been out driving through the countryside, and I happened to be eating an apple as I did, and when I reached the core of the apple I tossed it into some weeds in the woods. It occurred to me later that the seeds might take root there, grow into an apple tree, and that someone fifty years from now might come along and pull an apple from that wild tree and eat it. The threads that link us across time are beyond mortal comprehension.
SHIREHOME:
Glad you appreciated JJG’s “When You Dance.”
Best wishes.
Leonard Cohen also wrote “Take This Waltz.” The waltz is the central image; however, the lyrics are essentially a sequence of surreal metaphors. It’s not exactly “Twist and Shout.”
Here Cohen puts a surrealist poem by Lorca (“Pequeño Vals Vienés” — literally “Little Viennese Waltz”), into English and 3/4 waltz time. It is a remarkable technical achievement as well as a great song of romantic longing.
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Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallway where love’s never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With it’s very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging it’s tail in the sea
–Leonard Cohen, “Take This Waltz” (1998)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSUHkWd44vU
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Lorca was sacred to Cohen. He named his daughter Lorca. He laughingly blamed Lorca as “the man who ruined my life” on account of Lorca’s mesmerizing poetry.
Changing gears just a wee bit here….
From the “Just Another Little Breath of Honesty, Baby” File
(to be sung to Janis Joplin’s hit love song about cardiological theft…):
“DHS’s New Election Integrity Czar Has Receipts On Pennsylvania’s 2020 Fraud”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dhss-new-election-integrity-czar-has-receipts-pennsylvanias-2020-fraud
Opening grafs:
Cause don’t forget who’s takin’ you home
And in whose arms you’re gonna be
So darlin’, save the last dance for me, mmm (save the last dance for me)
Doc Pomus and Mort Shulman
First sung by the Drifters
Theme song for the film by Juzo Itami “The Last Dance”.
One may have flings but most of us have one core relationship in our lives.
“Could I Have this Dance” is likely the second most requested song of my band (behind “In the Mood”). Which is odd, because it’s not even the style of music we play. But we do have it in our repertoire. “Give ’em what they want.”
It is quite boring to play, and may be my least favorite song in our over 300 tune Book. I get it. It’s not about the music, it’s the lyrics. And I do enjoy watching couples waltz and spin in front of the bandstand when we play it.
neo: “… songs that use dance as a larger metaphor for life or love.”
Which is logical since humans are not the only animal species who use dance as a courtship ritual. No matter how erudite and cultured we become, dance remains fundamental to the human concept of romantic pairing. The court of Louis XIV, Victorian England… dance was foundational to co-ed events. I met my wife at a dance club. My in-laws met at a dance. Dancing was a big part of my parents’ relationship.
A little humor on the theme:
Q: Why can’t Baptists make love standing up?
A: Because they might start dancing.
Are we human,
Or are we dancer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4jR9P9YJGo
Moving pop with artistic lyrics.
What do they mean? It’s art—how do they make you feel?