The Shins
A survivalist's bunker monologue set to an oddly buoyant melody, this song imagines nuclear or environmental apocalypse as a…
apocalypse and isolation denial and coping through routine loss of a loved one
Alice in Chains
A short, stark meditation on isolation and self-erasure, built from two spare verses and a wordless, keening refrain. The song…
isolation loss of autonomy despair
Son House
Son House recounts the death of a lover through a series of stark, repeated images: a letter, a wake, a burial, a failed prayer.…
grief and loss delayed recognition of love religious doubt
Pearl Jam
This is a cover of The Who's 1973 track, rendered here for a film soundtrack about grief and recovery. Pearl Jam's version leans…
longing emotional drought catharsis
Burial
Built almost entirely from pitch-shifted vocal samples looping a handful of phrases, this track uses repetition and vocal…
isolation longing for belonging fragile intimacy
Cream
Cream's version compresses Robert Johnson's Delta blues into a lean, high-velocity rock performance, turning a song about…
isolation spiritual desperation the blues tradition
Rosanne Cash
A classic torch song built on a single sustained nautical metaphor for heartbreak, recorded by Rosanne Cash as part of an album…
romantic abandonment isolation longing for rescue
Roxy Music
A quiet plea for romantic risk-taking from a narrator who has been burned by love before. The song trades Roxy Music's earlier…
romantic vulnerability emotional fatigue hope after disappointment
Pink Floyd
A grown man addresses his mother in the anxious, needy voice of a child, asking permission for things no adult should need to…
overprotective parenting infantilization fear of the outside world
Portishead
Mysterons opens Dummy with a woozy, disorienting address to someone caught between denial and defiance. Beth Gibbons' vocal…
denial and repression guilt and judgment futility of desire
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
Jimi Hendrix
This is Hendrix's take on a blues standard about fatalism and hard luck, stripped down to a single circling complaint. The song…
fatalism poverty and hardship isolation
Johnny Cash
A cover written originally as a young man's meditation on self-harm and numbness becomes, in Johnny Cash's version, an old man's…
mortality regret addiction and self-destruction
Robert Johnson
A slow, aching invitation built on a repeated refrain about shelter from rain, the song fuses seduction with mourning for a lost…
loss and abandonment sexual invitation as consolation poverty and hard times
A slow, dread-soaked meditation on despair that borrows apocalyptic language to describe private, unrelenting psychic pain. The…
despair and depression isolation biblical/apocalyptic imagery
Nirvana
A hushed, almost inert closer to Nevermind that trades the album's loud-quiet-loud dynamics for a single sustained murmur. The…
isolation destitution moral numbness
Rodent is built almost entirely around a single vocal fragment, looped and re-pitched until a simple declaration of dependency…
dependency and loss isolation repetition as emotional state
Nick Drake
A hushed address to a fragile, almost otherworldly listener, offering reassurance while quietly confessing the singer's own…
isolation transcendence versus earthbound suffering fragility and reassurance
Wilco
A short, disoriented piece about someone trying to locate himself through self-deception and memory failure, using the image of…
self-deception disorientation distorted memory
Hüsker Dü
A song from Hüsker Dü's original run recast here as a live document, this track builds a bleak inventory of loss — a broken…
mortality emotional numbness aging and decline
Al Green
A young man begs a train conductor to reverse course so he can return to a lover he left too hastily. Al Green, still developing…
regret and reversal longing isolation
This is a track built almost entirely from a single vocal fragment looped and pitched into a kind of emotional smear, more mood…
betrayal emotional numbness isolation
A woozy, image-dense monologue about self-protection and emotional avoidance dressed up in surreal, almost dreamlike language.…
emotional avoidance self-deception aging and inertia
A restless, fragmented blues built around the image of pursuit — weather, hoodoo, and dread all fused into a single sense of…
pursuit and dread restlessness/displacement folk magic and superstition
David Bowie
A dramatized radio transmission between mission control and an astronaut becomes an extended metaphor for detachment and…
isolation fame and alienation dissociation
Arcade Fire
An early, unpolished Arcade Fire track that turns highway traffic signals into a private code for a relationship's uncertain…
distance and longing uncertainty about the future isolation
Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…
judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse
The Who
A single, almost liturgical plea builds around one pun -- love as both sovereign force and literal downpour -- to dramatize a…
spiritual thirst emotional exhaustion love as redemptive force
Waylon Jennings
A short, obsessive breakup lament built almost entirely around one plea repeated over and over: some accusation aimed at a…
heartbreak escape and flight self-destruction
Etta James
Etta James takes the 1933 Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler standard and strips it down to raw, aching testimony, using weather as an…
heartbreak and abandonment weather as emotional metaphor spiritual longing
Harry Nilsson
A traditional-blues lament about the aftermath of a lovers' quarrel, delivered as a loose, almost improvisational vamp built…
heartbreak and regret isolation blues tradition
St. Vincent
A woman narrates a summer of collapse—medication, isolation, avoidance of family and mail—while a chorus repeats a request to be…
depression and isolation medicalization of the self desire for external repair
Bill Callahan
A closing statement for an album called Apocalypse, this song imagines departure as both a literal ride into open country and a…
mortality departure and retirement personal apocalypse
Gillian Welch
A solitary traveler addresses an unnamed companion and, implicitly, God, laying out a life stripped of family ties. The song…
orphanhood and isolation religious faith as substitute family longing for belonging
Nina Simone
Nina Simone's "Blackbird" is a bleak lullaby-like address to a bird who is repeatedly told it cannot fly. Beneath the simple,…
racial identity and constraint internalized despair isolation and abandonment
The Replacements
A wallflower's confession dressed up as a party invitation, this song uses the image of a never-ending bash to talk about…
social anxiety self-deprecation isolation within community
Phoebe Bridgers
A road-trip through American landscapes and personal apocalypse, where the singer's private exhaustion with a relationship and a…
apocalypse (personal and national) homesickness and rootlessness burnout and exhaustion in relationships
Frank Ocean
A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…
isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia
Gorillaz
A collaboration between Gorillaz and Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan, the track fuses a patois-inflected verse about hard-won…
survival and upward mobility fame's emptiness isolation within relationships
Lead Belly
An old Appalachian murder ballad, filtered through Lead Belly's version, that interrogates a woman about a night spent away and…
accusation and evasion death and dismemberment isolation/exile