Lyrics to
Lonely Street

This version of Lonely Street was released by Kansas in 1975.

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Sometimes when I’m walking down this lonely street,
Well, it sure don’t seem like twenty years,
Since I went walking down this lonely street
And the smell of perfumed ladies filled the air

This street ain’t got no name, dead end is in the river,
And I lived where I hated life day by day,
There wasn’t nothing I could do to shake a cold night shiver,
‘Cause to move up Lonely Street you had to have some say

Gambling is bad luck down on Lonely Street
And it sure ain’t no place to be when a man gets sore
You know I killed a man and I paid all I can,
With twenty years on a chain gang,
For the flesh and the blood on that jailhouse floor

Sometimes when I’m walking down this lonely street
I get caught up in a dream that won’t let me go
And as the bright lights flash up and down this lonely street
My mind rolls back the years long time ago

I see my baby stumblin’ around with tears in her eyes
And as I reach out for her she falls on the floor
She mumbles through bloody lips about a bad man, robber, raper,
And in my gut I know I got one to score

The word was comin’ down, down on Lonely Street
That the bad man was a dead man if he crossed my trail
Every night I’d walk up and down this Lonely Street
I get stinkin’ drunk, and always in jail,
One night they threw me in with a man they called the mangler
He was caught on the street makin’ some old whore,
I remember he was quite proud of that,
So half-crazed I shot him,
And I cried in the blood on that jailhouse floor.

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Kansas has released many songs over the years besides Lonely Street. Kansas released songs from 1974 to 2000 spanning across albums like Kansas, Masque, Song For America, Leftoverture, Point Of Know Return, Monolith, Audio-Visions, Vinyl Confessions, Drastic Measures, Power, In The Spirit Of Things, Freaks Of Nature, Always Never The Same, and Somewhere To Elsewhere. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Kansas.

If you're a fan of lyrics from 1970s songs looking for more songs from 1975 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and Lonely Street by Kansas

When you decide to study the lyrics to Lonely Street, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1975 song by Kansas. Some of the lyrics to Lonely Street have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only Kansas and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

You can understand the lyrics to Lonely Street if you take apart the structure of the words. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to Lonely Street" means the words set to the music of Lonely Street, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Kansas. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to Lonely Street and the lyrics to Lonely Street are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Kansas who came here looking just for the lyrics to Lonely Street, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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