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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Cure
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
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
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
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
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
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
Spoon
A pulsing title track built almost entirely around a single obsessive phrase, tracking a mind hijacked by desire while it's set…
obsession and infatuation loss of control urban nightlife / travel
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
Abbey Lincoln
A standard-turned-jazz-vehicle built entirely on circular imagery, this lyric maps the disorienting churn of memory after a…
memory and obsession the end of love time's circularity
Traffic
A straightforward blues-rock come-on built around infatuation and helplessness in the face of a magnetic, emotionally elusive…
desire and obsession loss of control emotional manipulation
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
The Smiths
A deadpan lament about the misery of ordinary employed adult life, delivered with such theatrical self-pity that it becomes…
alienation the tedium of work self-pity as performance
Elvis Costello
A jilted narrator sifts through the physical debris a lover has left behind, treating each object as evidence of who she was and…
romantic obsession grief and loss self-deception
Queen
A hard-rock stomper about sneaking past disapproving parents to get to a girl, played entirely for comic, cartoonish swagger.…
teenage rebellion forbidden romance comic machismo
T. Rex
A glam-rock incantation that fuses science-fiction imagery with erotic obsession, built almost entirely from repeated, dreamlike…
cosmic eroticism obsession and surrender dream logic
Interpol
A fractured, obsessive address to a woman who dominates the narrator's inner life, built from disjointed images of intimacy,…
obsessive desire emotional damage decay and aging
Tom Petty
Tom Petty turns a chorus of romantic devotion into a punchline by surrounding it with a comic gallery of failed relationships.…
romantic complacency divorce and dysfunction irony as affection
Pixies
A fragmented, image-driven portrait of a woman rendered through physical detail and refrain rather than narrative, built around…
obsessive desire fragmented portraiture exoticization/otherness
Curtis Mayfield
A late-70s disco-soul love song built almost entirely around physical and emotional surrender, with Curtis Mayfield trading his…
romantic and sexual devotion surrender of control obsession/infatuation
SZA
SZA turns a breakup confession into a deadpan murder fantasy, using the exaggerated violence of the title as a vehicle for…
obsessive love jealousy denial and self-deception
George Jones
A comic prison narrative told in George Jones's late-career storyteller voice, in which a convicted murderer talks his way into…
cunning versus authority folk-hero outlawry trust and betrayal
My Morning Jacket
This is a cover of Erykah Badu's 1997 kiss-off anthem, in which a woman lays out the receipts on a freeloading,…
financial exploitation in relationships entourage/freeloading friends self-respect and boundary-setting
Kacey Musgraves
A comic, unapologetically horny country song about a woman counting off the days since her last sexual encounter, using rural…
sexual frustration female desire and agency rural/country signifiers as innuendo
Frank Sinatra
A comic protest song in which the singer refuses to dance not out of reluctance but because dancing with this particular woman…
comic denial as flirtation physical desire disguised as reluctance control versus surrender