Billy Joel's "Piano Man"

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking about Billy Joel's "Piano Man," and I realized something about this verse:

He says, "Son, can you play me a memory
"I'm not really sure how it goes
"But it's sad, and it's sweet, and I knew it complete
"When I wore a younger man's clothes"

The "complete" in the third line is a flat adverb, devoid of its usual -ly ending.  Part of this might be to avoid an overload of syllables in that line.  More likely, it's so that there's a perfect internal rhyme between "sweet" and "complete" (as there is between "joke" and "smoke" in a later verse).

Aside from technical considerations, as a flat adverb, "complete" indicates the degradation of the old man's memory.  He himself says that he's "not really sure how it goes."  In the same way that his memory isn't intact, neither is the word completely.

Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman"

Last week, I happened to hear Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman" while at the store, and it occurred to me how parallel two of the lines are:  "Oh--and she never gives out / And she never gives in."  Except for the "out" and "in" (prepositions acting in verb-adverb combinations with "give"), which are opposites, the lines are virtually the same.  It's interesting that those two words can provide such an opposition while - individually - the lines are saying distinct things.  So you can understand that "she never gives out," "she never gives in," and - like the language used to describe her - she's seemingly contradictory and embodies opposition.  The next line ("She just changes her mind") confirms this.

I looked in the liner notes of The Stranger (the album on which "She's Always a Woman" appears) to find the lyrics (it's faster than transcribing them myself, although I did notice some small discrepancies between the printed lyrics and the sung lyrics), and I found two other similar instances.  The first is the first two lines:  "She can kill with a smile / She can wound with her eyes."  Both lines are structured the same way and indicate the woman's hostility.  Later, there're the lines "She is frequently kind / And she's suddenly cruel," which - along with their structural parallelism -  demonstrate her erratic nature.  However, I don't think either of these pairs of lines has the same sort of implication as "Oh--and she never gives out / And she never gives in."