“The greatest opening line to any song ever written”, according to Paul Rodgers
The first line of a song can do so much in terms of giving a good impression, and given the number of hits that Paul Rodgers delivered with Free and Bad Company, he should know this better than most.
Take, for example, the opening line of Free’s most famous song, ‘All Right Now’: “There she stood, in the street / Smiling from her head to her feet.” Are you instantly turned off by the line because it doesn’t say anything to you, or are you wondering more about why this woman is standing in this location and how she’s managing to smile anywhere below her mouth?
This may be a daft overanalysis of a rather straightforward line that doesn’t need to be broken down, but what it immediately does is give you a picture of how the song is going to pan out. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid ever hearing the song before, then just by reading or hearing this line, you know you’re going to be in for a no frills rock song that doesn’t bother getting bogged down by dense and meaningful lyricism.
The opening line is a first impression that can make or break a song, and while we’re often told we shouldn’t be too quick to pass judgment on things, this is exactly what we’re hard-wired to do when we hear a piece of music for the first time.
While ‘All Right Now’ isn’t exactly poetic enough to be likened to Tennyson, Byron or Keats, the more florid and poetic the opening lines of a song are, the more staying power they’re likely to have as examples of great lyric writing.
However, when it comes to Rodgers’ favourite opening line of a song, it may be one that has been repurposed by contemporary artists, but dates back to long before the concept of popular music even existed. Speaking to NME about the brilliance of Yusuf/Cat Stevens in honour of the songwriter’s 75th birthday, Rodgers proclaimed that it was one of his songs that possessed the finest introductory lyric of all time, even though it wasn’t something that Stevens was responsible for coming up with in the first place.
“I feel that ‘Morning has broken / like the first morning’ is the greatest opening line to any song ever written,” Rodgers surmised. “It is almost biblical and sends me back in time to the very first morning when the earth was fresh, new and unspoiled.”
Of course, ‘Morning Has Broken’ isn’t just “almost biblical”; it’s actually taken from a Christian hymn first written in 1931, which Stevens chose to adapt into his own arrangement 40 years later. That said, the entire purpose of the song is to evoke these feelings of joy and wonder at the creation of the world, and to get the listener to find a sense of gratitude for how they’ve come to exist in such a beautiful world.
It may not be something that Stevens can lay claim to having come up with, but the manner in which he delivers it in his rendition will immediately make you feel something, and that’s exactly what an opening line should do.
