Elvis Costello
A dead entertainer-priest narrates his own arrival in the afterlife, only to find God as an unimpressed, bored figure lounging…
religious satire performance and hypocrisy mortality
Mos Def
Mos Def's take on the Chuck Berry classic turns a simple chase-through-the-city into a breathless comic monologue about pursuit…
romantic pursuit urban mobility desire and elusiveness
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Suede
A short, hallucinatory B-side that circles a single obsessive refrain about someone's departure, delivered through disjointed,…
obsession loss and absence drug culture
Todd Rundgren
A blues-drenched confession addressed to a personified nocturnal terror—likely obsessive desire or a destructive relationship…
obsession fear and desire intertwined loss of control
Depeche Mode
A blues-electro stalker's chant built almost entirely around a single fixation: sexual compulsion framed as addiction and…
obsession addiction desire as compulsion
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
Muddy Waters
A slow, grinding blues in which Muddy Waters uses a strange, oversized cat as a comic stand-in for suspicion and sexual…
jealousy and suspicion infidelity domestic surveillance
Billy Joel
A young narrator describes a destructive, one-sided infatuation using imagery of physical danger — electrified rails, hidden…
obsessive infatuation self-destruction adolescent isolation
Eurythmics
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
The Stooges
A slow-burning ballad of surrender, "Ann" strips The Stooges' usual noise down to a hypnotic drone so Iggy Pop can perform total…
erotic surrender loss of control obsession
Roxy Music
A short, hypnotic track built almost entirely around a single repeated phrase, using minimal lyrical content to evoke a mood of…
obsession romantic devotion ambiguity of desire
Sturgill Simpson
A retro-soul come-on built around a single, overworked double entendre, this theme song for HBO's Vinyl trades on 1970s funk…
desire as addiction performance of seduction decay behind glamour
The Cure
"Push" is largely an instrumental-driven track with sparse, cryptic lyrics that arrive late and function more as texture than…
self-protection alienation obsession
Prince
A pulsing, funk-driven fantasy in which lustful thought itself becomes a punishable crime, with the narrator gleefully accepting…
desire as transgression punishment and pleasure obsession
Faithless
A trip-hop confession of romantic addiction, built on a hypnotic looping chorus and a spoken-sung verse that describes love as…
addiction as metaphor for love codependency and control self-deception
Mercury Rev
A short, mantra-like song built almost entirely from a single repeated claim of near-arrival, set against an image of racing an…
pursuit of an unreachable goal time pressure and mortality obsession
Death Cab for Cutie
An extended, deliberately monotonous instrumental build frames a lyric spoken by someone who refuses to accept another person's…
obsession denial of rejection unreciprocated desire
The Triffids
A meditation on memory's unreliability, built around a man clutching physical relics of a lost woman while admitting each…
memory and distortion obsession idealization vs reality
Cassandra Wilson
This is Cassandra Wilson's 2015 reading of the 1938 Coots/Gillespie standard, delivered as part of a tribute to Billie Holiday.…
intoxication as metaphor for desire self-awareness versus helplessness obsession
Harry Nilsson
A short, incantatory set of lines about the impossibility of escape gets stretched into a nearly six-minute groove, with the…
inescapability codependency self-destruction
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion
The Decemberists
A rangy, harmonica-flecked folk-rock tune built around a single refrain that fixes the action in one riverside, working-town…
desire and self-destruction place and memory erosion/nature as metaphor
Lucinda Williams
A song about the gap between knowing a relationship is finished and being unable to act on that knowledge. Built almost entirely…
romantic obsession denial versus awareness emotional paralysis
Built to Spill
A meditation on obsessive thinking and the indifference of the natural world, built around a repeated denial that functions…
obsessive thought indifference of nature anxiety over decision-making
Bruce Springsteen
A minimal, hushed blues built on obsessive desire, where the narrator's want curdles into something closer to torment than…
obsessive desire sleeplessness and mental anguish transgressive attraction
The Rolling Stones
A disco-inflected blues about romantic obsession, where a narrator's loneliness is undercut by the party noise and distraction…
obsessive longing denial and self-deception urban loneliness
The Teardrop Explodes
A brisk, bright pop-psych song about romantic fixation, where longing tips into something more obsessive and unstable. The lyric…
obsessive longing distance and return emotional instability
Black Sabbath
This closing track from Paranoid pairs a lurching instrumental jam with a half-comic, half-paranoid account of drug-induced…
drug paranoia unreliable perception self-deception
A breezy account of a teenage joyride that stalls on an absurd, deflating detail: a jammed seatbelt that thwarts the narrator's…
adolescent desire freedom and mobility comic frustration
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
Steely Dan
A comic-paranoid narrative about a man trying to evade a woman he finds both terrifying and, eventually, magnetic. Steely Dan…
obsession and avoidance paranoia as comedy ambivalent desire
Neutral Milk Hotel
A distorted, obsessive love song that swings between tenderness and revulsion, built around the fixation of a narrator who both…
obsessive desire idealization vs. disgust possession and control
Deerhunter
The title track of Deerhunter's 2013 album is less a song than a controlled breakdown: verses of fractured pleading and…
obsessive fixation psychic disintegration romantic desperation
Richard Thompson
A jaunty, almost comic account of a wrecked relationship, where the narrator recounts being physically and emotionally battered…
toxic romance emotional exhaustion comic violence
Florence + the Machine
A song about the void left by someone's silence, and the scale of belief or need required to fill it. Florence Welch turns…
romantic obsession spiritual emptiness unrequited longing
A loose, novelty-style country blues number about a laid-back dog named Clyde who supposedly plays bass and sings the blues on a…
rural leisure comic anthropomorphism stubbornness/inertia
John Lee Hooker
A slow, circling blues built on a single contradiction: the singer announces he's leaving while making clear he has no intention…
romantic obsession self-deception domestic wreckage
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith delivers an ultimatum blues to a freeloading lover, dressing up a blunt economic demand in barnyard comedy and…
economic independence sexual and domestic reciprocity female autonomy