$%#$!, It’s Still Raining

So I was hacking away on the laptop this afternoon when “In the Rain” by the Dramatics came on. It happened to be raining at that very moment, which was not as much of a coincidence today as it might otherwise have been, because it’s been raining pretty much continuously since last Saturday, so much so that August 2007 is now supposedly the rainiest month in Madison history, and there’s still a week of the month remaining.

And so, while I was looking out the window watching for the little animals to begin lining up by twos, I got to thinking, just how many rain songs do I have on the laptop anyhow? The easiest ones to find are the ones with “rain” in the title:

“The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin
“Another Rainy Day in New York City” by Chicago
“I Made it Through the Rain” by Barry Manilow (cripes, what’s that doing on here?)
“Wash in the Rain” by A Band of Bees
“Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters (guilty pleasure)
“Kentucky Rain” by Elvis
“Let it Rain” by Eric Clapton
“Tell it to the Rain” by the Four Seasons
“Coloured Rain” by Traffic

A good start. But only a start.

After “moon” and “june,” the rhyme every green songwriter hits next may be “rain” and “pain,” and if not that precise rhyme, then rain as a metaphor for sadness—rain = tears, see. (Dan Fogelberg has made a career out of this.) Plus, being a one-syllable word, “rain” fits in lots of places in a lyric, and being caught in it is an experience we’ve all had. The wonder is that there aren’t more songs about pouring rain, driving rain, crying in the rain, dancing in the rain, crying in the pouring rain, etc. But there’s still a boatload of songs with “rain” in the lyrics, far more than there are with “rain” in the title.

And if certain performers on my laptop have lots of songs that mention rain, it’s not necessarily because they have a Fogelbergian obsession with precipitation—it’s probably because I’ve got a lot of their songs on the laptop. I’ve got Bruce Springsteen approximately out the ying-yang, but he probably belongs here on the merits anyhow. In “Point Blank,” he sings, “You were standin’ in the doorway out of the rain/You didn’t answer when I called out your name.” That’s another familiar use of rain as romantic metaphor. It’s raining, honey, you’re getting wet, but you love me so little that you’d rather stay out in it and catch your death of cold than notice me and accept an umbrella, or a lift, or another pledge of my undying love. (If you remember, in “Point Blank,” after the girl snubs her lover in the rain she gets capped, which seems a bit harsh, but love’s like that.) And in “Linda Let Me Be the One,” which appeared first on Springsteen’s fabled bootleg War and Roses (the alternate version of Born to Run) and officially on the Tracks box, he sings, “In the basement of St. Mary’s Eddy hides from the rain/In with the stolen sisters til the streets are dry again,” which is noteworthy mostly because the song popped up just now, out of 3,239 songs that could have popped up in the shuffle mode, at the precise moment I happened to be writing about Springsteen lyrics and rain.

Van Morrison is my most-played artist, if you check LastFM. I’ve got more tunes by Van on the laptop than by anyone else, and as a result, it’s raining all over the place:

“Half a mile from the county fair/And the rain came pourin’ down” (“And It Stoned Me”)
“I played a gig in Salzburg/Last night in the pouring rain” (“Go Down Geneva”)

On Astral Weeks, it’s raining like, well, Madison in August:

“Say goodbye in the wind and the rain on the back street/In the backstreet, in the backstreet/ Say goodbye to Madame George” (“Madame George”)
“We shall walk and talk/In gardens all misty and wet with rain/And I will never, never, never/Grow so old again” (“Sweet Thing”; that one might be the best rain lyric I’ve got by anybody)

Rosanne Cash has her share of rain songs, too. On Black Cadillac, featuring songs written after the death of her parents and her stepmother, she sings:

“Every drop of rain that falls/Falls for those who mourn” (“God Is in the Roses”)
“There was a black sky of rain/None of it fell/One of us gets to go to heaven/One has to stay here in hell” (“Black Cadillac”)

And from King’s Record Shop, a line Rosanne sang but John Stewart wrote:

“Flashing red warning/Unseen in the rain/This thing has turned into/A runaway train” (“Runaway Train”)

And while we’re on the subject of female country singers, there’s Crystal Gayle (who was never especially twangy, like Rosanne has never been) who, back in the late 70s, sang, in “Ready for the Times to Get Better,” “I’ve had enough of this continual rain.” We hear you, Crystal.

Coming tomorrow: More rain songs. Why not? It’ll still be raining up here.

“In the Rain”/Dramatics (buy it here)