Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Greg Lake's holiday single dresses disillusionment in the trappings of a carol, using the language of childhood Christmas wonder…
loss of innocence disillusionment with religion and consumerism war and unfulfilled peace
Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Lightfoot's ballad reconstructs the 1975 sinking of a Great Lakes ore freighter as a modern folk legend, moving from myth…
man versus nature the indifference of the natural world labor and industrial life
Grandaddy
A stranded astronaut, long resigned to isolation on some barren world, walks toward a mirage of swans on a lake he's never seen…
isolation longing mortality and acceptance
Animal Collective
A short, quietly unsettling piece that starts as a simple pastoral scene of watching a seal in a half-frozen lake and slides…
environmental collapse tourism and spectacle of nature impermanence
Big Thief
A hushed, image-driven lullaby-elegy that moves between addresses to different women (Caroline, Violet, an unnamed elder),…
impermanence and mortality comfort without explanation nature as memory
