Fairport Convention
This is the Fairport Convention arrangement of the old English/Scottish murder ballad about an adulterous tryst between a…
class transgression sexual desire and consequence honor and violence
Johnny Cash
A prisoner in California listens to a passing freight train and measures his life against it. Over four short verses he moves…
incarceration freedom and mobility guilt and remorse
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
Paul Simon
A reunion single from Simon and Garfunkel that reads as a bitter anti-nostalgia song, dismantling the idea of small-town…
small-town disillusionment loss of faith suppressed violence
Neil Young
A domestic sketch collides with a highway fantasy: the narrator remembers a diner waitress and imagines her alternate, freer…
restlessness and rootlessness domestic confinement vs. freedom idealization/myth-making
Talking Heads
A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…
mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift