Song Lyric Sunday – Stones

Good morning and welcome to another Song Lyric Sunday. This week our host Jim Adams has asked us to find a song that mentions bones, sticks or stones. Lucky for me I remembered an old favorite of mine by Neil Diamond called ‘Stones’. It is from his 1971 album of the same name. I had this album and played it until the grooves were gone! In addition to the title track, it also featured his version of Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song ‘Suzanne’. In my opinion it is better than Cohen’s as his voice is easier to listen to. Just for fun I included it at the end. Of course you don’t have to listen to it.

The Song

It was difficult trying to find information on the song itself. The only referencee to it on Songfacts was this:

Diamond said about “Stones” in 1971: “I’d call it a desperate love song… Stones, to me has always meant things that hurt people, things that cause pain and that’s what the song is about.”

Diamond has not performed this live since 1972.

The album, for which it was named, was more about some other better known Diamond songs along with some covers of the aforementioned Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, and Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell. I found this review of the album by BBC Music. It gives more information on the album itself.

Cornball on top, but pulsating with intensity down below. By Chris Roberts 2010

Neil Diamond, normally a quick worker, spent four months agonising over the lyrics of I Am… I Said, and it shows. That’s why the song lingers. There are lines which don’t quite ‘fit’ at first, and seem almost fragmentary coming from such a craftsman, but they’re the lines which – once the penny drops – give it its confessional greatness. People magazine hailed the song as “Art at its best, which moves the audience to self-investigation”. Certainly it’s a masterpiece of introspection which transcends conventional pop limitations. Diamond himself rambled, “It tells of feeling lost and questions and doubts and insecurities… and realising that you can never go back home”.

As the opener to his seventh album – and, in reprise form, the finale – it tends to overshadow the rest of this sumptuous 1971 release. Like Touching You, Touching Me, Stones contains its share of string-soused covers, and in places tilts Diamond towards MOR. Yet there’s nothing phoney about the way his proud baritone commits to Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning or Tom Paxton’s The Last Thing on My Mind. Each has depth beneath the slick veneer. Later, the angst is overt as Neil nails Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and Jacques Brel’s If You Go Away. He’s aesthetically closer to Scott Walker than any lounge crooner.

While I Am… I Said was a hit with huge gravitas, the other hit here, Crunchy Granola Suite, seems its polar opposite, praising a healthy diet in very Californian fashion. He’s claimed it’s “meaningful”, but it’s a loony cereal jingle. Then there’s the title song, a durable Diamond gem in which “she would ache for love and get but stones”. It’s the quintessential Neil song – simple, laced with neo-religious imagery, yet powerfully sincere. Stones is, like much of Diamond’s oeuvre, cornball on top and pulsating with intensity down below. As I Am… I Said attests, he was coming to terms with fame (“you ever read about a frog who dreamed of being a king and then became one?”) while battling internal demons (“I’ve got an emptiness deep inside”). In his fight to keep both his career and spirits ascending lays the magic of Stones.

Review courtesy of Creative Commons Licence

The Lyrics

Stones would play
Inside her head
And where she slept
They made her bed
And she would ache
For love and get but stones
La-lah la-lah la-lah la la la lone

Lordy child
A good day's comin'
And I'll be there
To let the sun in
And bein' lost
Is worth the comin' home

La-lah la-lah la-lah la la la
On stones

You and me
A time for planting
You and me
A harvest granting
The every prayer ever prayed
For just two wild flowers that grow
La la la la la la la la
On stones

Writer/s: JIMEAU HINSON, JON MICHAELS, KIM TRIBBLE
Publisher: CHECK PLEASE MUSIC, CONEXION MEDIA GROUP, INC., DO WRITE MUSIC LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind