The Age Old Question: A Podcast for Music Fans · Rich Price and Clint Bierman

What Is The Most Profound Lyric Of All-Time?

·37 min·2 clips

An undertaker is disappointed because no one died: "Seeing no one else had come."

1. The Age Old Question asks what the most profound lyric of all time is, with Rich Price and Clint Beerman framing the show around music-fan debates they have had since college. 2. Rich Price is the host who brings the opening example, and Clint Beerman is the co-host who reacts to each lyric and helps test the candidates. 3. The episode is built as a search for one lyric that can compress love, despair, learning, and human nature into a few words. 4. Rich starts with Paul McCartney’s "Band on the Run," which was released in April 1974 after being recorded in Lagos, Nigeria in September 1973. 5. He explains that McCartney chose Lagos from an EMI list of studios outside the UK and wanted "a sort of rhythmic African feel" for the record. 6. Rich also notes that the original demo of "Band on the Run" was stolen when Paul and Linda were robbed at knife point, forcing them to rebuild it from memory. 7. The lyric that started the whole discussion is "The Undertaker drew a heavy sigh / Seeing no one else had come," which Rich reads as a picture of disappointment at a day without death. 8. Rich says that line made him think about the undertaker’s job in funeral parlors and the strange emotional logic of a heavy sigh when nobody died. 9. The hosts then move to Bob Dylan’s "how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died" from "Blowin' in the Wind." 10. Rich uses Greg Brown’s "If you don't get it at home, gonna go looking" from "If You Don't Get It At Home" as a blunt summary of need and love. 11. The episode repeatedly stresses that lyrics change when they are read on paper instead of heard inside a full song. 12. Rich and Clint cite John Lennon’s "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" as a line that lands hard in isolation. 13. They also point to George Harrison’s "When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting" as another Beatles example. 14. Paul McCartney’s "The love you take is equal to the love you make" from "The End" becomes the line the hosts treat as the strongest contender. 15. Rich says that many of the most profound lines they found are about love, and he treats songwriting as an effort to explain love in the simplest possible form. 16. The episode includes Beck’s "In a time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey," Pink Floyd’s "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year," and Bruce Springsteen’s "We learn more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school." 17. The tone is conversational and comparative, with Rich and Clint reading lyrics aloud, pausing on individual phrases, and reacting in real time. 18. The format is a quick-fire discussion with many named examples, short digressions, and comments from friends and listeners. 19. Listeners who like Beatles lyrics, songwriting craft, and short-form music debate will probably enjoy this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tight, single-topic answer without many examples may skip it.

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