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I have it on good authority that the song is about a felching accident that occured in 1970. Apparently a small bird with downy feathers was inadvertenty lodged in the songwriter's rectum.

Attempts to entice the bird out only made it twitter and crawl deeper into the cavity.

Hence the line "killing me softly with his song".

A good fart can be a great relief ...

Good authority. My a.. ! For some words i am not sure if i want to explain their meaning. I was hoping to learn some of the deeper meanings of English lyrics for sure but I hope not everyone will interpret 'deeper' like this.

that's a very difficult task because by their very nature, many lyrics are open to interpretation by the listener. ask three people, get three different answers.

i recall vaguely a comment by a Beatle (John?) about how fans were reading all these deep mystical meanings into the lyrics of a certain song, but he said "we chose them simply because they sounded good."

Different answer and interpretations are all interessting. In my book 'Killing me softly' means to talk about something bad or cruell in such a way that it souns like a lovesong so that the listener is bot shocked and enchanted at the same time. Scarborough fair is a great example. What a beautifull way to tell someone you won't have nothing to do with them anymore !

While there are a lot of songs out there with sexual context, connecting 'killing me softly' to different forms of torture (felching/gerbilling/pushing pencils in peoples temples) is a matter of choice more than anything else. We are who we are by the choices we make. I choose a nicer meaning to this song.

I would still like to discuss the 'chocolate cake' lyrics with anyone who is interested. I'm sure i have missed some interpretations.

I always thought Killing Me Softly was about smooth jazz.

to me i'd always thought of it as being a song so sad, that while listening you felt as if a part of you was dying inside. sort of like listening to my last ex.

back in the late 70's i used to be an apprentice audio electronics technician and ironically that album was the ONLY record we had to use for testing record turntables. after about 3 years of listening to Ms. Flack through headphones (killing ME softly,) she was eventually thrown against a wall and i can tell you now, it wasn't fucking softly either. i've never been so happy to watch something shatter into a trillion bits. to replace it they bought Santana, so i learned to hate them too after a couple of years of Black Magic Woman 3 hours a day...

I always thought that song was about false promises

I loved the Lennon quote about things being written just because they sounded good. My favourite example of this was when McCartney played Lennon an early version of "Hey Jude". There was a line near the end of the main verses that went "The movement you need is on your shoulder" which Paul said he was going to change. Apparently, Lennon told him that it sounded great as it was and so it was never changed.

That's great but does that mean we should all ignore lyrics and just go for wat sounds right ? Maybe we can just sing what we think we are hearing. I have heard a lot of strange sentences from people who thought they knew the lyrics ...

That would be me...

nah, in my opinion you can put in as much meaningful wording as you like. but don't feel devastated if you need to fall back on a word play here and there to help a rhyme or alliteration work properly. OR you can just use pleasant-sounding crap for the whole thing; the current radio playlists are proof that crap sells just as well

'bridge over troubled water' is an example of a song that used very little in the way of clever lyric devices and 'american pie' is full of what appears to be nothing but word tricks - both are considered classics. meanwhile, in the 80's a song called 'da da da' proved that anyone even without a single brain cell could still write a hit single. - 'great gig in the sky' by pink floyd - lots of vocals, no lyrics apart from 'Oh' and maybe an 'Ah'... still a great song (in my opinion)

a good friend of mine once put things into perspective for me as regards songwriting, lyrics and music in general: another friend of ours went through the conservatorium here in perth, and was required to write an analysis of a 'classical recording' - this consisted of NO MUSIC. you'd hear the guy walk up to the piano, sit down and and open it, then a bit later crack his knuckles etc. etc. - the part of interest was the crowd; hanging on every little event and anticipating the start of the concert, and the murmurs of disquiet when it was clear he wasn't about to start, and so on.

the point my friend made was this: this was a valid released recording. people - admittedly not very many - went into record stores and BOUGHT this record. this is the bottom line to use as a yardstick, all you have to do is do better than this record. play one note and you've already beaten it for musical content.

we can put as much or as little into it as we feel like. there are no wrong answers.

Love the discussions about 'Come Together', to me the epitome of gathering syllables that sound good but make sense only to those who desperately want them to.

It's a religious treatise
It's a racial slam
It's a racial lament
It's a John Lennon biography (he got Ono sideboard)
It's a collection of the four Beatles' biographies
It's a warning that the band was breaking up
It was a campaign song for Timothy Leary
It is a eulogy for Paul, who actually died at age 28
It's a tribute to George Martin
It's a collection of unused lyic lines

I have never heard the words epitome or eulogy before...

Let me put it this way. I wasn't exactly seeking to put an exact meaning to each song i come across but native english speaking people usually get a general feel for the meaning of a song even if the writer did not exactly put a lot of thought in to it or just went for something that rhymed. If your not English or American or Australian to name a few one often has no clue at all what a song could be about.

I for one have no idea what i should read behind 'bey bey miss American pie' or 'drove my chevy to the levy but the levy was dry' although i know the meaning of each word by itself.

I still hope that someone could explain these things a bit. That is what i am after...

You would need to have a good understanding of Kiwi if you want to decipher Crowded House lyrics.

I think that most songs mean what you think they mean. ie what it means to YOU. Remember that a lot of writers obscure very personal stuff in order to avoid pissing off their friends and loved ones. As such, they are open to interpretation.

This does not, however, apply to "Louie Louie" which I reckon has no meaning at all but can apparently be interpreted to mean all sorts of things. I don't know how (I stay away from the bucket bong these days).

I would suspect that the writer of "Killing me softly" came up with that phrase first 'cause it fit the melody & then built the rest of the song around that. It probably doesn't mean anything at all, except a pile of cash for whoever wrote it & some dough for Gladys Knight.

You will also find that most Brill Building type songwriter lyrics are fairly meaningless as they have to sell a song to someone. EG You would probably not get far trying to peddle a lyric to Shakira that said "I am fat & ugly and hate myself". Kurt Cobain, however, made a mint doing this kind of thing.

Rambling ends here........

I always loved Queen's Bicycle Race.

This was the clearest rambling i have ever read. Thanks Oscar !

I'll still ask peoples meaning abouth the meaning of certain songs. It does ring a bell every now and then ...

Does anyone care to talk about American pie and what it means to them ?

Peoples opinions can be so different, discussing the meaning of lyrics can be a world in its own. "You hear this, I hear that". That's really cool.

Believe it or not, there are actual, honest to God courses devoted to the analysis of the lyrics of American Pie in certain American colleges. FOR CREDIT, EVEN!

...And some wonder after what's wrong with American society...

it could be worse. i remember reading years back that some US colleges were conducting courses to teach the Klingon language. if that's true, their school desks must have had a special saliva-resistant paint