Kurt Vonnegut would write one worders e.g. Listen.
I can't remember the name of the film, but a troublemaker is warned "That attitude will get you in trouble someday"(sic)
followed by an instant punch to the face, and the words "Welcome to someday".Am I a bit off the thread here?

Oh says Red Molly to James "That's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like"

1952 Vincent Black Lightning

but America by Simon and Garfunkel is my favourite story song. Hitch hiking through New Jersey, the Greyhound bus, looking at the other passengers and wondering if they are spies. The boy and Kathy, are they just friends or perhaps more? The days when you could smoke on the bus even. A lovely song but then he wrote so many.

Another favourite is Billy Joel - Theme from an Italian restaurant.

"It was in the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." in 'Earthly Powers' by Anthony Burgess

Sometimes you're better off dead.
There's a gun in your hand
and it's pointing at your head.

...is The Hold Steady. Well, always if you're me. I think Craig Finn is the best lyricist working today, bar absolutely none.

Charlemagne In Sweatpants:
When he's holding, then the streetlights seem an awful lot like spotlights.

Hot Soft Light
I was not involved down at the Northtown Mall.
As a matter of fact, I didn't even know that's where it happened.

Your Little Hoodrat Friend
Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick,
But after I get sick I just get sad.
Because it burns being broke and it hurts to be heartbroken,
But always being both must be a drag.
She's been calling me again.

First Night
Charlemagne shakes in the streets
And Gideon makes love to the suites.
Holly's not invincible -
In fact, she's in the hospital
Not far from that bar where we met
On that first night.

I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door "Y'all remember to wipe your feet"
And then she said "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge
"Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

...is the cracking first line from Jace Everett's 'Bad Things' (theme from True Blood).

a public service announcement... With geetar"!
Blam!

The Clash ~ Know Your Rights

Ballad Of Bitter Honey;

'That was my ass you saw
bouncing next to Ludicris
It was only on screen for a second
but it's kinda hard to miss'

or words similar

SONG: "It's a quarter to three, there's nobody here 'cept you and me, so set 'em up, Joe," followed by a song about a lonely drunk.

FILM: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster", followed by a film about a gangster remembering how he was a kid who turned into a gangster.

as they raced against the ground...............

she'll be rising

Country music is so good at the self-contained three-minute drama, see also Ode to Billie Joe above. Or Lucille by Kenny Rodgers. Or Jolene by Dolly Parton. The list goes on.

The screen door slams.....and in two lines Bruce sets up Thunder Road and the whole story.

...she can make her own way home.

- in her golden phase almost everything sounded like the opening of a novel or a movie

"He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on the hill..."

"The Hissing of Summer Lawns"

Decemberists

Heart-carved tree trunk, Yankee bayonet, a sweetheart left behind (Yankee Bayonet)

teenage love, a civil war setting and loss in 10 words

And under the boughs unbowed, all clothed in the snowy shroud (Crane Wife 3)

Pride, winter, menace and death.

I’m made of bones of the branches, the boughs, and the browbeating light, while my feet are the trunks and my head is the canopy, high (The Queen's Rebuke)

...er...a big tree person. He does love his boughs, does Colin.

Bowie

It's safe in the city, to love in a doorway, to wrangle some screams from the walls (Sweet Thing)

Dystopia, fear, sex, anarchy

Wake up, you sleepy head, put on some clothes, make up the bed" (Oh, You Pretty Things)

Pretty much what it says on the tin, really.

Lately, I've been breaking glass in your room again. (Breaking Glass)

Unease, mental illness - it's the "again" that's the killer detail, as well as being a cheeky rhyme for "been"

'Well I was rolling down the road in some cold blue steel
I had a bluesman in the back and a beautician at the wheel'

Oh yes.

Courtesy Gibbons/Hill/Beard

"Well the first thing I'd like to say is, mandate my ass"

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you ?

Mercury mouth - how much more can you say with just two words?

but not mine.

the sun was a demon.

and

Reluctantly crouched on the starting line, engines pumping and thumping in time.

long shot of jungle, whup-whup-whup-whup of helicopters, smoke, sitar-like guitar playing, percussion cuts in, bass cuts in, Jim Morrison cuts in singing "This is the end..." and the treeline explodes into flame, Martin Sheen's face is superimposed and finally, after more than four minutes, you hear the first dialogue: "Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon.."

"Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields"

Political correctness aside, the song opens with short, sharp, percussive fricatives as descriptors - in perfect symmetry with the angular riff. Fires the imagination and inflames the senses. A perfect lesson in the objective correlative.

ibid. Professor Sheev. A. Shilly-Arsh: Stupid Girl. Corruption and The Romantic Ideal in the Work of The Rolling Stones: University of Nellecote Press.

Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall

You just know this is going somewhere good.

Journalist: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

It's as much Richard Burton's voice as what he says, but it just chills. And just about everyone now has the sound of strings running through their mind.

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights,
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around

Falls down on a humdrum town.This town has dragged you down...
You just know it's fucking grim up north and the Scissors Sisters are two decades away....

Rockafeller Drugstore Blues (Felice Brothers):
The exhaust from the prison van's going to heaven
But I'm going to Attica
Gonna put a hundred miles
Between me and my dealing habit

Hungry Heart (Springsteen):
Got a wife and kid in Balitmore Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back

Ain't Living Long Like This (Waylon Jennings):
I looked for trouble and I found it son
Straight down the barrel of a lawman's gun

What's he building in there? What the hell is he building in there? He has subscriptions to those magazines. He never waves when he goes by. He's hiding something from the rest of us.

What´s He Building? by Tom Waits.

"Standing in the ruins of another black man's life..."

"It's a God awful small affair, said the girl with the mousey hair"

Book: 'It was a cold bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen...'

Song: ' I could have been most anything I put my mind to be, but a cowboy's life was the only life for me..'

Film: 'Red Three-Six, this is Red Three-Six Alpha ... we are taking automatic weapons fire from our right flank. Request support from Cold Steel Cobra...' fades into Philip Glass' majestic theme tune.

Big Country - Porrohman

Bullfrog Blues - Rory Gallagher. Brilliant!

'The hangman's in the noose
The prisoner is loose'

- from 'Twisty Bass'

"Arseholes, bastards fucking cunts and pricks..."

Always a pleasure.

The distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains
To take them home to the ones that they love and who love them forever . . .

"sup up your beer and collect your fags,
there's a row going on down near Slough"

"I come awake with the gift for woman kind,
you're still asleep but the gift don't seem to mind"

On a dilemma between what I need and what I just want

"I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist"
"It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well"

'I never knew it could happen
with me and this girl from Clapham'

Scene set for unplanned pregnancy tale.

One of the greatest rhymes appears a bit further on :

Incubator/thirty minutes later

She was frigid like the bible
When she met her boyfriend Michael
He took her in his Zephyr
Where they sat like salt and pepper

Slap and tickle

Will nature make a man of me yet?

...The day the cops bust into her lonely nest. In the cheap hotel upon Hollywood West. July 29 .

What follows is a genius piece of black humour reportage about the sad true life suicide of a Hollywood silent movie starlet - and the unfortunate doggy-related chapter that followed

is just one of Smokey Robinson's great lines

...we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.

My wish was to walk down the isle to this wearing purple DM's!

"At night only crickets. No prowlers, no sirens."

From 'Somewhere in America (There's a Street Named After My Dad), off the What Up Dog? album.

That's one of my all-time favourites.

You and your family should take cover

It's one o'clock and time for lunch. Bom-de-bom-de bom.

Well she was just seventeen, you know what I mean.

The British police are the best in the world, I don't believe one of these stories I've heard.

There's only one way of life and that's your own, that's your own, that's your own.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Song:

The festival was over and the boys were all planning for a fall
The cabaret was quiet except for the drilling in the wall
The curfew had been lifted and the gambling wheel shut down
Anyone with any sense had already left town
He was standing in the doorway looking like the Jack of Hearts.

Book:

Call me Ishmael

Go and tell Lord Grenville that the tide is on the turn,
It's time to haul the anchor up and leave the land astern,
We'll be gone before the dawn returns,
Like voices on the wind...

or

On a morning from a Bogart movie,
In a country where they turned back time,
You go strolling through the crowd like
Peter Lorre contemplating a crime...

or

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight