Jimi Hendrix
A hallucinatory vision of social collapse filtered through a drinker's blurred perception, where reaching hands never quite…
social unrest spiritual longing alienation
Judee Sill
Judee Sill turns a love song into a devotional hymn, blurring the line between romantic union and religious ecstasy until the…
sacred and profane love transcendence mortality
Yes
Starship Trooper is a three-part suite that moves from an invocation of natural, cosmic imagery into a meditation on inherited…
transcendence the limits of language/knowledge nature as cosmic messenger
T. Rex
A glam-rock come-on that fuses car culture, cosmic imagery, and vampire slang into a single boastful seduction. Marc Bolan…
desire and objectification glamour of consumer culture (cars) seduction as performance
Mitski
A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…
mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy
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
Kate Bush
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as a problem that could be solved by literally trading…
empathy and its limits gender and relational miscommunication bargaining with fate
Seal
This is Seal's cover of the Ben E. King soul standard, reworked as a lush, string-laden vocal showcase for his 2008 covers album…
loyalty fear of abandonment cosmic/apocalyptic imagery as metaphor for hardship
Fleetwood Mac
A breakup song written from a position of eerie calm rather than anguish, in which the departing partner's bid for freedom is…
romantic dissolution detachment as self-protection cyclical nature vs. human choice
Rush
YYZ is an instrumental showcase built around the Morse-code rhythm for Toronto's Pearson International Airport identifier, which…
homecoming and travel technical virtuosity Canadian identity
Radiohead
A speaker invokes a childhood fantasy of cosmic justice to punish people who irritate him, then realizes partway through that…
petty vindictiveness corporate/institutional conformity self-recognition and guilt
Queen
A pure momentum song: the speaker declares himself an unstoppable force of pleasure and energy, piling up cosmic and mechanical…
hedonism and release self-mythologizing speed and momentum
Soundgarden
A hazy, dissonant piece of psychedelia dressed as a pop single, in which a decaying suburban landscape is invited to be…
apocalyptic longing decay and disguise escapism
Frank Sinatra
A love song that uses cosmic imagery as an elaborate courtship metaphor, translating grand celestial longing into the plainest…
romantic devotion longing and desire the vastness of space as metaphor for feeling
Mission of Burma
A post-punk anthem about disillusionment and the impulse toward violent or drastic rupture as a response to betrayed idealism.…
disillusionment loss of innocence generational inheritance
Led Zeppelin
A short, blunt battle-cry sung from the perspective of Viking raiders sailing west, framed less as narrative than as invocation.…
conquest and invasion myth and legend masculine bravado
Talk Talk
An oblique meditation on justice, guilt, and the gap between legal verdicts and moral truth, built from fragments of courtroom…
justice and its failures guilt and repentance institutional power
Fairport Convention
A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the…
mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love
Joan Baez
A cyclical folk lament that traces flowers into girls, girls into wives, husbands into soldiers, soldiers into graves, and…
war and its cost cyclical futility loss and mourning
The Roots
The Roots' reworking of Cody ChesnuTT's song blends literal talk of casual sex and impregnation with a metaphor for musical…
legacy and lineage sex as creative metaphor authenticity vs. commercialism