55. 10 Songs of Song

This Song - Badly Drawn Boy
Tower of Song - Leonard Cohen
Your Song - Elton John
Redemption Song - Bob Marley
Sing a Song - Jenny Lewis
This is Just a Modern Rock Song -Belle and Sebastian
Sing a Song For You - Tim Buckley
Sing Me Spanish Techno - New Pornographers
Songs My Mother Taught Me - Paul Robeson
I Write the Songs - Barry Manilow

Some people hate self-referential songs - the smugness, laziness in the lyric, the rhyming with long ... the apotheosis of this awfulness perhaps being Robbie Williams, in the song Strong using the line "and that's a good line to take it to the bridge".
I can understand that - researching this list made clear to me just how many songs there are with "song" in the title, and many of them are about song (as opposed to say Song 2 or Song for Sunshine, which is perhaps just lazy titling) or whatever, so perhaps it's an overused theme.
However, I think this is a nice bunch.
Your Song is often cited as a terrible lyric, but i think it's very bold, very well-controlled and funny, not a bad lyric at all.
A lot of these songs are about the power of a song to act as comfort or whatever - some work better than others. I don't really like the Jenny Lewis lyric, but it's a pretty tune (that reminds me of the Regina Spektor song On the Radio (On the Radio, we heard November Rain, the solo's awful long, but it's a pretty song).
There's a famous scene in Don't Look Back where Donovan sings a pretty song of the name 'To Sing For You' and Dylan replies with 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue', which is meant to be a master putting the novice in his place, but i quite like the Donovan song and don't think Baby Blue is one of the great Dylan songs.
The B and S song contains one of my all-time favourite lyrics "This is just a modern rock song, this is just a sorry lament, we're four boys in our corduroys, we're not terrific but we're competent". It may be smug, it may be self-referential, but it'll do for me.
On the subject, might I highly recommend Nick Cave's The Secret Life of the Love Song, a lecture thing he gave around 10 years ago. I think I'll come to it in more detail down the line, but it's really interesting and has hung over plenty of my thoughts about songs. Including this ... which is really about the absence of songs

SONGS I COULD WRITE

The listed have few titles
The words they have no chords
to help convey their meanings
and lift them from the wornout pages
to the readiest hearts and ears.

And i would write you secular hymns
Balm in the broadest minor key
But I have written no songs
And i have found no church for me.

Or I would write you children's songs
simple rounds to sing along to
but i have written no such and
have found no children to belong to.

The catalogue has no index
For no reader strays upon it
Dead verses have no critics
to mould and shape their future
and give merit to their past.

And I could write some folk songs
borrow form from the common hoard
But I have written no songs,
to be trusted or be ignored.

Or I could write punklove songs
bold, three-chord, starshaped gems
but I have written no songs
and nor does anyone await them.