Curtis Mayfield
A eulogy that refuses to sentimentalize its subject, using the death of a small-time hustler named Freddie as a blunt instrument…
addiction and exploitation urban poverty complicity and blame
Elliott Smith
A quiet, almost lullaby-like address to someone (or something) that promises comfort while actually describing a kind of…
addiction and dependency seduction and control erased identity
Harry Nilsson
A short set of declarative lines about escape and entrapment dissolves into a chant that repeats itself into…
entrapment disguised as freedom codependency compulsion and addiction
Emmylou Harris
A narrator looks back at a childhood friend, Lillian, whose life in a small Southern town never escapes the gravity of that…
rural poverty and stasis female friendship the cost of unfulfilled ambition
John Prine
Prine elegizes a real Kentucky town erased by strip mining, using a child's plea to his father as the frame for a broader story…
environmental destruction loss of home/place industrial 'progress' vs. nature
Laura Marling
This is a cover of a mid-1960s folk standard, sung here in Laura Marling's plainspoken, weary register, about the impossibility…
itinerancy and escape addiction as self-medication romantic longing and loss