Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith stages a full descent-into-hell nightmare as a twelve-bar blues, using classic AAB stanzas to build a horror…
mortality and damnation nightmare and dream logic sin and judgment
Joni Mitchell
A short, fragmentary address to someone (or something) called Blue, mixing tenderness with an inventory of the era's chemical…
addiction and self-destruction intimacy as gift-giving disillusionment with countercultural excess
B.B. King
B.B. King uses a first-person narrator identified as an aging traveling musician to plead for dignity and recognition, framing…
itinerant hardship dignity under judgment aging and endurance
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
Son House
A loose, half-spoken reworking of a traditional blues frame in which a horse becomes a vehicle for restlessness, desire, and…
restlessness and wandering the search for a lover freedom through motion
Mississippi John Hurt
A talking-blues that starts as an ad-jingle riff on a coffee brand and quietly turns into an extended sexual pun, with the…
desire disguised as domestic ritual double entendre longing and pursuit
A minimal, twelve-bar blues built almost entirely around a single weather image, using the rain as a stand-in for hardship that…
resilience emotional numbness poverty and shelter
Townes Van Zandt
A restless travel song built on blues repetition, where the highway and its trucks become both an escape route and a kind of…
restlessness and flight addiction/escape as motion transience and homelessness
A weary blues confession built almost entirely from repetition and small variation, this piece follows a speaker trying to talk…
romantic exhaustion self-deception and resolve restlessness and departure
Ella Fitzgerald
Irving Berlin's standard is a compact declaration of romantic relief, built almost entirely on the pun between 'blue' as color…
romantic joy transformation of perception time and its acceleration in love
This is Hendrix inhabiting the Delta blues tradition wholesale, taking a floating verse form passed down from Muddy Waters and…
desire and transformation infidelity and temptation restlessness/travel
A homesick blues built around the tiny Mississippi hamlet of Avalon, where the singer measures the alienation of the big city…
homesickness rural vs urban life romantic longing
John Lee Hooker
A first-person lament from the depths of an auto industry strike, where the speaker's survival hinges on a labor dispute he has…
economic precarity labor and industry dependency on institutions
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 Stooges
"L.A. Blues" closes Fun House as a nearly wordless collapse — a squall of skronking free-jazz saxophone, feedback, and drum…
disintegration noise as catharsis urban dread
Steely Dan
A drifter narrates his escape from some vague personal wreckage toward a mythic seaside refuge called Blues Beach, a place that…
escape and drift resignation unreliable paradise
Moby
Moby builds this track around a looped vocal sample of a field-recorded folk/blues lament, layering electronic production…
grief religious faith as refuge isolation of suffering
Bessie Smith delivers a twelve-bar blues indictment of a charming, cruel lover, moving from a general question about bad men to…
romantic betrayal cynicism about men's constancy emotional endurance
Bessie Smith delivers a blues complaint about a lover who has gotten money and forgotten who stood by him when he had none. It's…
betrayal after success female self-respect economic power shifting a relationship
Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Lincoln sets original lyrics to Thelonious Monk's instrumental theme, turning a jazz standard into a meditation on…
solitude and self-reliance the price of freedom endurance through hardship
A traveling man wakes to find his woman gone and turns the ordinary act of putting on his shoes into an emblem of dislocation…
restlessness and displacement abandonment fatalism
James Taylor
A bartender confesses that his own steadiness is an illusion, propped up by routine and the fantasy of a rescuing lover rather…
loneliness disguised as competence dependency and self-deception stasis versus escape
Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds a heartbroken travelogue out of restlessness, cataloguing cities and cultural landmarks as a way of avoiding…
heartbreak and longing restlessness and travel as avoidance pride versus vulnerability
Bettye LaVette
A weary lover delivers a warning dressed as prophecy: the reckless partner she addresses is going to burn out or get caught, and…
consequence and reckoning romantic exhaustion self-respect and threatened departure
Johnny Cash
The Doors
This is a late-vaulted Jim Morrison recording, released decades after his death as a posthumous single with the surviving Doors…
escapism aging and decline fame and image
Common
Common builds a triumphant victory-lap track around a sampled ELO hook, using the sky as a running metaphor for ascent,…
ambition realized spiritual gratitude celebrity and success
Van Morrison
A buoyant, playful song built around a photo shoot, where the singer coaxes a model through poses while imagining the payday and…
playful eroticism work as flirtation material pleasure
Etta James
Etta James's late-career reading of this soul standard is a study in self-deception undone by feeling: a narrator insists she's…
unresolved longing self-deception memory as intrusion
Lead Belly
Lead Belly turns a personal humiliation—being refused housing in the nation's capital—into a blunt indictment of segregated…
racism and segregation hypocrisy of American ideals housing discrimination
Bert Jansch
A hushed, traditional-sounding love lyric built around a single reassurance repeated to a young woman: come lie beside me, no…
clandestine love youthful courtship reassurance and persuasion
Arcade Fire
A breakup song filtered through disco-pop sheen, where the singer (Régine Chassagne on lead vocal) tries to process a lost love…
romantic disillusionment anonymity in crowds self-deception
Frank Sinatra
A classic torch-song-turned-swing-standard about loneliness resolved by sudden romantic arrival, addressed to the moon as silent…
loneliness romantic transformation fate and chance
Tom Waits
A domestic wreck of a song dressed in the sunniest possible title: the narrator is broke, abandoned, and effectively parenting…
irony of optimism poverty and abandonment loneliness
Fleet Foxes
A young narrator wrestles with the individualism he was raised on, wondering whether meaning comes from being special or from…
individualism vs. collectivism disillusionment with authority search for purpose
Billie Holiday
A standard from the American songbook, this rendition finds Holiday addressing the moon as a witness to loneliness and its…
loneliness longing transformation through love
Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…
ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation
The Replacements
A quiet, unglamorous portrait of teenage isolation, framed around confusion about sexuality and identity. Instead of anthemic…
adolescent alienation sexual confusion loneliness
Chet Baker
A torch song built entirely on approximation, where the singer tries to substitute one person for a lost love and finds every…
substitution and self-deception grief disguised as romance emotional numbness
Vashti Bunyan
A short, spare lament that treats a failed love as a seasonal death, letting the bleakness of winter stand in for emotional…
loss of love seasonal metaphor for grief emotional numbness