Colter Wall
A young musician recounts to a preacher his roadside encounter with the Devil, reimagined as a sharp-dressed man cruising…
temptation and damnation the crossroads myth musical inheritance and corruption
Ramones
A cover of a 1960s surf-pop tune, blasted through the Ramones' buzzsaw guitars and deadpan delivery, turning a sunny travelogue…
escapism nostalgia and pastiche repetition as ritual
Vashti Bunyan
A brief, hushed instrumental-scale miniature that treats a single autumn day as a small ceremony, pairing seasonal images with a…
seasonal change rural pastoral life folklore and superstition
Brian Eno
Deep Blue Day is a slow, pedal-steel-laced instrumental from Eno's soundtrack to a documentary about the Apollo moon missions.…
weightlessness nostalgia Americana in space
Andrew Bird
A folkloric, fever-dream narrative about a giant who dies from an untended wound after a day's walking, sliding into visions of…
mortality and neglect of the body childhood cruelty and innocence lost folklore and myth-making
Billy Joel
Billy Joel builds a mock-heroic Wild West ballad complete with outlaw legend and hanging, then in the final verse reveals it as…
mythmaking self-deprecation Americana pastiche
Fleetwood Mac
A drifting, unhurried meditation on the pleasure of unexplained phenomena, built from a series of loosely connected anecdotes…
the appeal of the unexplained imagination versus proof folklore and hearsay
George Jones
A novelty rockabilly tale about a moonshiner and his lethal homemade whiskey, told by his admiring kin in a comic, exaggerated…
Appalachian folklore outlaw defiance of authority masculine bravado
David Bowie
A restless, jittery portrait of American life told through fragmentary vignettes of couples, sex, race, and disillusionment, all…
Americana and disillusionment race and appropriation consumerism and identity
Bob Dylan
Dylan's version of the polka novelty song plays it almost entirely straight as a call-and-response Christmas romp, building…
holiday tradition Americana kitsch absurdist humor
ZZ Top
This is a Texas boogie built around a wink and a rumor rather than a plot. The song circles a well-known brothel outside La…
local legend/rumor masculine boasting regional pride
Run the Jewels
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess
Rodney Crowell
A rockabilly-style car song that celebrates a 1956 Plymouth Fury as an icon of speed, style, and small-town swagger from the…
Americana nostalgia masculinity and status regional pride (Texas)
Paul Simon
A breezy, sing-song surface hides a small, deadpan love story about a sailor and a small-town girl. Paul Simon builds the song…
nostalgia innocence and Americana romantic idealization
Grandaddy
A hazy, melancholy meditation on burnout and displacement, set against images of decaying American car culture. The narrator…
exhaustion and burnout alienation from home decay of Americana
T. Rex
This is the closing track of Electric Warrior, a squall of surreal boasts, half-glimpsed characters, and jammed-together images…
performance and fraudulence sexual bravado surreal Americana
Bert Jansch
A late-period Bert Jansch song that treats courtship as sorcery, built from a wandering, almost dreamlike set of images rather…
enchantment and desire the limits of language to capture love folkloric imagery
Louis Armstrong
Armstrong's version turns Brecht and Weill's ballad of a genteel serial killer into a genial swing number, letting the horror of…
moral hypocrisy charm masking violence urban crime as folklore
A comic prison narrative told in George Jones's late-career storyteller voice, in which a convicted murderer talks his way into…
cunning versus authority folk-hero outlawry trust and betrayal
Tom Petty
This is Tom Petty in full blues-rock costume, cranking up a swaggering come-on riff with lyrics so absurd they tip into parody.…
parody of blues machismo sexual bravado as performance absurdist humor
Misfits
A doo-wop teenage-heartbreak song gets hijacked by murder-ballad menace, with the Misfits layering slasher-movie violence over…
violence disguised as romance nostalgia and loss teenage Americana corrupted
Richard Thompson
This is Richard Thompson's arrangement of the traditional American folk/sea shanty "Shenandoah," recorded for his "1000 Years of…
longing and distance migration and westward movement love across separation
Bessie Smith
This is Bessie Smith's rendition of W.C. Handy's classic, a comic-tragic tale of a woman named Susie Johnson pining after a…
romantic abandonment itinerant lovers and railroad culture communication and waiting
Loudon Wainwright III
A novelty song built entirely around roadkill, this track finds Loudon Wainwright III turning a squashed skunk into an extended…
mortality played for laughs sensory disgust rural/highway Americana
A novelty-tinged story song built on a bait-and-switch: an old man's admiring description of a car turns out to be a description…
nostalgia lost youth double meaning/wordplay
Soundgarden
A tribute to a real Seattle street performer becomes a compressed meditation on rhythm as communal salvation, with the song's…
music as ritual/salvation street performance and urban folklore community through rhythm
Little Feat
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
A boozy, tall-tale narrative about a drifter drawn in by a radio siren's voice and then by a woman (or maybe a car, or a storm,…
seduction and danger the open road as myth radio as folklore/siren call
A loose, dreamlike vignette that drifts between a woman dancing near a mysterious tree, a boastful fisherman, and a sick…
escapism surreal storytelling transience
The Human League
A synth-pop inventory of consumer-era wish fulfillment, this closing track from Dare reads like a shopping list for the good…
consumerism and desire the commodification of romance and adventure postwar/pop-culture Americana as fantasy
The Band
A rambling, half-comic narrator addresses a woman named Molly amid some domestic crisis involving a gun, while spinning loose,…
restlessness and departure domestic tension masculine bravado and evasion
Vampire Weekend
A frantic, pitch-shifted pop song about young mortality dressed up as car-crash Americana. Beneath its manic energy and title…
dying young recklessness fatalism
Sarah Jarosz
This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1989 song, urging church bells to be rung as an alarm against a world sliding into moral…
moral decay religious urgency apocalyptic imagery
PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…
obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention
XTC
A hymn-like invitation to submit to an ancient nature spirit, framed as both courtship and worship. XTC build the song out of…
paganism vs. Christianity nature as deity surrender and devotion
Frank Ocean
Frank Ocean's 2018 cover strips the classic Mancini/Mercer standard down to its skeleton, treating the original as a found…
longing transience companionship
Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds an entire meditation on time, memory, and mortality around a single river metaphor, letting a childhood image…
mortality and release memory and impermanence folk religion and redemption
Genesis
Genesis take the folkloric Squonk—a creature of Pennsylvania legend so ashamed of its own ugliness that it weeps constantly and…
shame and self-loathing the cruelty of pursuit despair and self-destruction
Todd Rundgren
Rundgren takes an old proverb about a chain of small failures leading to catastrophe and grafts it onto a personal confession…
loneliness cause and effect personal responsibility
Guided by Voices
A brief, dreamlike sketch of a girl's day rendered in candy-colored Americana imagery -- doughnuts, ice cream trucks, strange…
childhood innocence American ephemera/nostalgia absurdist non-sequitur