Results for “Midnight Oil”

Artists

Midnight Oil Midnight Oil were an Australian rock band formed in Sydney in 1972. The band was…

Songs

Midnight to Midnight

The Psychedelic Furs

A glossy, synth-driven love song that dresses up romantic uncertainty in urban glamour imagery, trading the band's earlier…

romantic ambivalence urban loneliness glamour as emotional armor

Outbreak of Love

Midnight Oil

A spare, chant-like song built on repeated images of collapse—sky, walls, stars closing in—that resolve into a single…

impending collapse transformation through crisis ambivalence toward change

Child of Midnight

Jim Croce

A quiet, unhurried account of a one-night encounter that the narrator can't quite let be casual. Croce frames a woman known for…

casual intimacy vs emotional attachment reputation versus private experience transience and memory

Rockin' After Midnight

Marvin Gaye

A late-night dance-floor come-on built almost entirely from repeated affirmations of desire, this track functions less as a…

desire nightlife/escapism romantic pursuit

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's take on this traditional American folk-blues song reworks a prison-camp lament into a swampy rock anthem, keeping its cast…

incarceration and forced labor folk tradition and inheritance longing for deliverance

Midnight Blue

Electric Light Orchestra

A late-Discovery ballad from ELO that trades the album's disco sheen for a slow, yearning nocturne about loving someone who is…

unrequited or unspoken love emotional distance night as a state of mind

Walkin' After Midnight

Patsy Cline

A woman turns nightly solitary walks into a ritual of longing, hoping that the same restlessness that drives her out into the…

unrequited longing loneliness nocturnal wandering as ritual

Midnight Special

Lead Belly

A prison work-song built around the recurring image of a train's headlight sweeping across a cell, used as both literal detail…

incarceration longing for freedom surveillance and policing

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

Rosanne Cash

This is a traditional 19th-century Christmas hymn, written by Edmund Sears in 1849, performed here by a young Rosanne Cash on a…

longing for peace weariness and labor spiritual hope

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

Jackie Wilson

Jackie Wilson applies his soaring, gospel-trained tenor to a mid-19th-century carol text that is less about Bethlehem than about…

war and weariness hope deferred peace as unfinished promise

The Celtic Soul Brothers (More, Please, Thank You)

Dexys Midnight Runners

A brash, almost ceremonial announcement of arrival, this track functions less as a conventional song than a declaration of…

self-assertion earned confidence overcoming fear/doubt

Testify

Rage Against the Machine

"Testify" is a furious indictment of media complicity in war, framed as a kind of confession the speaker demands from a…

media manipulation oil and war complicity and consumption

Total Invasion

Killing Joke

A snarling, satirical broadside against resource-driven militarism, written from the perspective of an imperial power stating…

imperialism and resource war propaganda and manufactured consent cultural destruction

Need You Now

Lady A

A late-night relapse song: the narrator, drunk and alone, breaks a self-imposed rule and reaches for the phone to call an ex.…

post-breakup longing loss of self-control loneliness and isolation

Moon Over Marin

Dead Kennedys

A dystopian beach vignette in which environmental collapse has become so normalized that a gas mask and an oil-slicked shore are…

environmental collapse denial and normalization consumerism and false comfort

Everybody's Talkin'

Harry Nilsson

A song about tuning out the noise of other people in favor of an interior fantasy of motion and escape. Written by Fred Neil and…

alienation escape/wanderlust isolation amid crowds

One Good Well

Don Williams

Don Williams uses the image of an oil well as an extended metaphor for enduring love, contrasting the restless accumulation of…

contentment versus greed love as sustenance critique of materialism

Baby It's Christmas

Bananarama

A straightforward seasonal love-longing song in which a narrator waits by the fire for an absent partner to return home for…

longing and absence hope for reunion nostalgia for a past romantic moment

Everybody's Talkin'

Bill Withers

This is a cover of Fred Neil's song, best known from Harry Nilsson's version on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, reworked here in…

alienation escape and wanderlust sensory numbness

Terraplane Blues

Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson builds an entire song out of a single dirty joke, using a 1930s automobile as an extended stand-in for a woman's…

sexual jealousy infidelity and possession mechanical/automotive metaphor

The Pony Man

Gordon Lightfoot

A gentle bedtime fantasy in which a magical figure called the pony man collects children at midnight and leads them on a…

childhood imagination nighttime and dreaming safety and return

America's Boy

Broadcast

A clipped, collage-like portrait of American masculinity and militarism built from stock Americana imagery — oil, rockets,…

American mythology militarism masculinity

We Can Get Down

A Tribe Called Quest

A loose, celebratory posse-style track from Midnight Marauders in which Q-Tip runs through defenses of hip hop's authenticity,…

hip-hop authenticity anti-commercialism group identity and pride

Everybody's Talkin'

Glen Campbell

A cover of Fred Neil's 1966 song, best known from Harry Nilsson's version in Midnight Cowboy, recorded by Glen Campbell for what…

withdrawal and isolation escape and departure love as anchor amid confusion