For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song “that relates to Dads or Grads.” This is to reflect the fact that today is Father’s Day in many parts of the world, including the UK and the US, and also that this is the season for university and college graduation ceremonies. His post explains further.

Having in the past played some tunes for fathers I thought I’d concentrate on the ‘grads’ part of the prompt today. I’m playing two songs, neither of which relates specifically to the theme, but both of which take stock of a situation in terms of looking back at the enjoyable parts of what had happened, with the hope that this will lead to a happy and successful future.

Today’s first song is by Taylor Swift. Although it wasn’t for SLS I have previously played a fantastic version of this in which Taylor drops into a Paula Fernandes concert on the big screen to play the song as a duet. I went for that again, only to find that copyright blocks the video in the US and Canada! But I did find a great alternative, in which Paula joins Taylor in concert in Rio in 2013. This is Long Live:

And, as usual, here are the lyrics (the original English ones) from genius.com.

As with most of her recordings, Taylor wrote Long Live herself, and it was originally released as the closing track on her Speak Now album in 2010. Whilst not about graduation, it reflects on how events had combined to bring her to where she was at that point in her career, as she herself has said:

“This song is about my band, and my producer, and all the people who have helped us build this brick by brick. The fans, the people who I feel that we are all in this together, this song talks about the triumphant moments that we’ve had in the last two years. We’ve had times where we just jump up and down, and dance like we don’t care how we’re dancing, and just scream at the top of our lungs, “How is this happening?” And, I feel very lucky to even have had one of those moments, nonetheless all the ones that I got to have. Long Live is about how I feel reflecting on it.”

So it is a kind of graduation for her, I think. The guest artist, Paula Fernandes, may be unfamiliar to you, but she shouldn’t be! Paula is a very popular singer in her native Brazil, with a string of massive hit albums and singles there. She has shared other guest collaborations with the likes of Shania Twain and Michael Bolton, and has toured many other countries, including the UK, the US, and across Europe and South America. And in case you didn’t notice, she can sing a bit herself, and is drop dead gorgeous.

Today’s second song is in a slightly different vein, in a more reflective mood:

Green Day, with Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), of course, and here is genius.com with the lyrics.

Go on, admit it, you didn’t know that was called Good Riddance, right? The song was written by Billie Joe Armstrong after a breakup with his girlfriend, who went to live in Ecuador. He said that it was written from a position of bitterness – hence the title – but the song’s sentiments of “I hope you had the time of your life” have become less sarcastic over time, and it has been adopted as a graduation song by many: taken at face value, the lyrics can be seen as hoping that people enjoyed their college experience, can’t they? The track was released in October 1997 on Green Day’s fifth album, Nimrod, which peaked at #10 in the US and #11 in the UK, going Platinum in both, as it also did in Canada, where it reached #4 and in Australia, where it got to #3. The song was released as a single in December 1997 and became a chart hit, peaking at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart and reaching the top 20 in Australia, Canada, Iceland, and the UK. As of November 2022, the song had sold over five million copies and was certified quintuple platinum in the US, sextuple platinum in Canada, triple platinum in both New Zealand and the UK, and double platinum in Australia, making it Green Day’s most commercially successful single.

To the band’s surprise, the song became a hit at prom dances: because of its lyrics, which many graduating seniors interpret as nostalgic and reflective of their time in high school, it has become a staple song at proms. Armstrong remarked that, in retrospect, the lyrics make sense when viewed that way: “The people that you grew up and braved the trials of high school with will always hold a special place. Through all the BS of high school, you hope that your friends had the time of their life, and that’s what the song is talking about.”

That’s me done for today. I’m off to enjoy the music others are playing for these themes, before I settle down with an evening of the World Cup – it’s wrecking my sleep patterns! Thanks as always to Jim for his great stewardship of SLS, and I’ll see you again for some Tuesday Tunes 🎶