Laura Nyro
A woman addresses her partner directly, laying out years of loyalty and affection while pressing him toward a proposal that…
romantic impatience commitment and its absence gendered expectations of marriage
Laura Marling
Laura Marling narrates from the outside of a relationship, watching a woman she's fascinated by perform for others while…
watching versus being seen inherited family damage artistic self-consciousness
This is Laura Marling's recording of Neil Young's 1972 song about heroin addiction, written after Young watched a bandmate…
addiction loss complicity of the witness
This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…
itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow
A folk incantation that reads like a spell against dread, moving from natural imagery of isolation into a defiant, almost ritual…
control versus surrender fear personified self-possession
A song about romantic damage told through a slippage between third and first person: a man presents a new lover with the…
emotional baggage fear of vulnerability unreliable narration
A meditation on ecological dread and personal complicity, built almost entirely from the phrase 'it feels like,' as the narrator…
environmental collapse complicity and denial self-reproach
A ritualistic breakup song that treats an ex-lover, or an old version of the self, as an intruding spirit to be exorcised.…
exorcism of desire boundary-setting self-possession
A quiet meditation on loss and self-accounting, where the narrator processes the departure of someone close by returning…
heartbreak and abandonment self-reliance as coping mechanism fate versus choice
A song addressed partly to a goddess and partly to an absent man, this piece uses classical and religious imagery to explore a…
silencing and voice betrayal religious/mythic guilt
A brief, elegiac song about a fading connection remembered mostly through fragments of landscape and season, arriving at a…
impermanence memory and forgetting depression and emotional numbness
This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1963 apocalyptic ballad, structured as a call-and-response between a questioning parent and a…
apocalypse and prophecy witness and testimony social collapse
