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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
Cream
This is Cream's electrified cover of a pre-war country blues (originally by Blind Joe Reynolds), turned into a slow-burning…
sexual jealousy infidelity folk wisdom/proverb
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
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
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
The Replacements
A quiet, unglamorous portrait of teenage isolation, framed around confusion about sexuality and identity. Instead of anthemic…
adolescent alienation sexual confusion loneliness
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
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
Abbey Lincoln
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Townes Van Zandt
A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…
poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado
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
A direct address from the working poor to the wealthy, this 1928 blues sides a plea for economic justice with an implicit…
class inequality economic desperation war and sacrifice
Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch turns Elvis Presley's death into a meditation on American folk mythology, tracing his rise as a synthesizer of…
fame and its costs racial synthesis in American music mortality and mythmaking
Cat's Squirrel is an instrumental blues jam dressed with the barest scrap of vocalizing, a single repeated affirmation that…
blues tradition and adaptation instrumental virtuosity over lyricism minimalism as texture
Laura Marling
This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…
itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow
Deep Purple
A hard-rock strut through a one-night pickup that curdles into dismissal, built more for Jon Lord's organ pyrotechnics than for…
macho posturing casual sexual conquest dismissal and contempt
Curtis Mayfield
A sermon set to music, this track has Curtis Mayfield addressing Black America directly about internal divisions that threaten…
racial solidarity colorism self-determination
Johnny Cash
A first-person prison lament in which the narrator, confined and hopeless, is tormented by the sound of a train he cannot board.…
confinement and freedom guilt and moral consequence class resentment
Steve Earle
Steve Earle's tribute to a departed friend (widely understood as Townes Van Zandt) turns a travelogue into an elegy, mapping…
grief and mourning itinerancy and homelessness artistic legacy
The Velvet Underground
A hushed, plainly strummed confession about loving someone who is unavailable, oscillating between tenderness and quiet…
forbidden love longing and loss guilt and self-justification
Robert Johnson
A restless travelogue of the Mississippi Delta juke-joint circuit, this is Robert Johnson at his most physically direct — a…
itinerant desire sexual boasting bondage and debt
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
Joni Mitchell
A stark, allegorical account of heroin addiction told through personified figures: the needle, the drug's seductive pull, and…
addiction death as seduction urban decay