Modest Mouse
A song that lurches from confessional self-loathing into cosmic speculation, treating personal collapse and the birth of a child…
self-destruction and dishonesty surveillance and paranoia birth and creation
Neutral Milk Hotel
This two-part suite opens with a plainspoken, almost liturgical declaration of love to Jesus Christ before erupting into a…
religious devotion and doubt birth and rebirth language and inarticulacy
Nat King Cole
This is Nat King Cole's rendition of "Las Mañanitas," the traditional Mexican birthday and saint's-day serenade, sung not as a…
birth and renewal communal celebration dawn as symbol
Death Cab for Cutie
A song about distance rendered as flood myth: the ocean between two people is imagined as newly created, cutting off any…
long-distance separation longing creation myth as metaphor
Emmylou Harris
This is a straightforward Nativity carol built around simple exhortation and refrain, casting the singer as one voice among a…
nativity/birth of Christ communal worship guidance and light
Stevie Wonder
A new father's unguarded celebration of his infant daughter's birth, structured as a series of rhetorical questions that answer…
fatherhood and new life gratitude love as creative force
Sam Cooke
A first-person testimony of endurance under racial oppression, built around a single hope that refuses to die even as evidence…
racial injustice endurance faith and doubt
A dazed elegy in which a spectral presence is addressed directly, then reimagined through two surreal, violent images of falling…
death and transcendence haunting and possession loss of a loved one
T. Rex
A gentle, string-laced glam ballad that compresses an entire life into the single gesture of dancing, from birth to death and…
life cycle and mortality innocence versus self-consciousness dance as metaphor for being alive
Massive Attack
A slow-burning meditation on decay and dissolution, moving from a compromised birth to an economic wasteland to a final image of…
entropy and decay economic collapse fragile intimacy
Cat Stevens
A hymn of thanksgiving that treats an ordinary sunrise as if it were the first morning of creation. Cat Stevens' recording turns…
gratitude renewal and rebirth nature as sacred
Deerhunter
A funk-inflected litany of self-definition, "Snakeskin" strings together a series of blunt "I was born" and "I was" declarations…
disability and bodily difference fatalism versus resilience identity as inherited condition
Jimi Hendrix
This is the slow, extended blues incantation that Hendrix later compressed into 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return),' built around a…
self-mythology supernatural power cosmic/psychedelic imagery
Alison Krauss
This is a folk parable that condenses an entire human life—birth, marriage, death—into three ringing-bell scenes tied to the…
cycle of life community and ritual mortality
Muddy Waters
A late-career Muddy Waters track that functions as a genealogical claim and a roll call, tracing rock and roll's parentage…
musical lineage authorship and ownership of a genre community and testimony