R.E.M.
R.E.M.'s breakthrough single is famous for being nearly unparseable as language, built from fragments that gesture at broadcast…
media distrust obscured communication displacement and arrival
Jimi Hendrix
A twelve-bar blues in the most traditional sense: a man walks to his lover's house only to find himself locked out, suspects…
romantic abandonment resilience through humor the blues tradition itself
Van Morrison
Van Morrison's title track drifts through a hazy, half-remembered landscape in search of rebirth and connection, using dreamlike…
rebirth and renewal spiritual longing displacement
Air
An instrumental mood piece built from a spare piano motif, brushed drums, and cool synth washes, evoking the specific loneliness…
solitude displacement travel
Chet Baker
This is an instrumental reading of the Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg standard, recorded by Chet Baker on his 1962 comeback album Chet…
longing exile and return faded innocence
Sam Cooke
A breezy, self-mocking complaint from a young man stuck in a new town with cash in his pocket and no date on a Saturday night.…
loneliness displacement romantic frustration
The War on Drugs
A song about outgrowing a former self and a former place, told through the loosening grip of memory and the strange comfort of…
self-transformation nostalgia and its unreliability displacement
Otis Redding
A drifter sits by the water in San Francisco, watching boats and tides pass while he takes stock of a life that has stalled out.…
displacement stasis and drift loneliness
The Kinks
A song written from an airplane window seat, using the vantage of altitude to turn geographic distance into emotional and…
displacement touring life alienation from modernity
Peter Gabriel
A duet built as an argument between despair and consolation: one voice details the humiliation of joblessness and displacement,…
unemployment and economic shame loss of identity and belonging depression and suicidal ideation
Joni Mitchell
A road-worn narrator recounts a brief, charged affair with a rancher named Coyote, using the touring musician's rootlessness…
transience and displacement desire without commitment incompatible lives/circumstance
Lucinda Williams
A childhood memory of restless traveling through the rural South, told from inside a car and a kitchen at once, where domestic…
childhood memory displacement and rootlessness the unreliability of home
Paul Simon
Written with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this track from Graceland fuses Zulu isicathamiya vocal tradition with a spare…
homelessness and displacement cross-cultural collaboration communal grief and endurance
Frank Ocean
A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…
isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia
Brian Eno
"The Big Ship" is a short instrumental piece built almost entirely on a single sustained chord progression and a rising…
arrival and scale stillness within motion the sublime treated as ambient event
The Cure
A jittery funk-pop novelty from The Cure's most eclectic album, built on a repeated image of lightning strikes that destroy…
destruction as pleasure compulsive repetition escape and displacement
Bob Dylan
A wandering, half-mythic narrator recalls a woman who offered him refuge from a hostile, almost apocalyptic world, then traces…
displacement and exile refuge and its loss betrayal and gratitude
Interpol
"Gran Hotel" is a hazy travelogue-as-longing, using a specific place name as a stand-in for an emotional destination the…
longing and devotion escape and displacement memory and time
Led Zeppelin
A hypnotic travelogue through desert and vision, where the journey itself becomes indistinguishable from a mystical state. The…
spiritual quest desert imagery as transcendence time and displacement
Yes
A restless, plainspoken rock song about wanting rescue from stasis and self-doubt, framed as a plea to a lover who is also…
romantic dependency displacement/rootlessness longing for transformation
The Band
A traveler moves through a haunted, mythic American South, stacking images of slavery, exile, and vice into a single vision of…
historical memory of slavery the blues as witness/testimony original sin and corruption
Merle Haggard
A grief-haunted ballad in which a river becomes both the site of love and the site of loss, and the refusal to ever swim it…
grief and loss fear of intimacy after tragedy California working-class geography
Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash's version of this traditional folk song turns a simple hitchhiker's lament into a meditation on permanent distance…
distance and displacement homesickness regret
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a legendary Mexican bandit and the friend widely suspected of betraying him, told with the flattened affect of a…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and displacement
Bert Jansch
A folk song reimagined as a science-fiction ballad, this track follows a generation ship drifting through interstellar space,…
exile and displacement scale of time and distance isolation
The National
A disoriented homecoming song built from fragments rather than a clear story: a man returns to Ohio broke, unmoored, and…
debt and economic anxiety displacement and homecoming emotional numbness
Robert Johnson
A restless, fragmented blues built around the image of pursuit — weather, hoodoo, and dread all fused into a single sense of…
pursuit and dread restlessness/displacement folk magic and superstition
Gregory Porter
Gregory Porter narrates a pilgrimage to Harlem that turns into a meditation on cultural inheritance and gentrification—the icons…
cultural memory gentrification and displacement artistic lineage
Nina Simone
A song-portrait of urban decay, written not by Simone but performed on her 1978 record of the same name, in which a wounded city…
urban decay poverty escape and displacement
Margo Price
Margo Price lays out an autobiographical ballad of leaving home, losing a farm, and surviving hard years in the city, all in…
economic loss and displacement family loyalty grief and mortality
Solange
Solange catalogs every failed strategy for numbing an unnamed grief or unease, building a list of avoidance tactics before…
avoidance and denial emotional exhaustion consumerism as coping mechanism
James Taylor
James Taylor spins a science-fiction folk tale about a 19th-century sailor revived after a century frozen in ice, using the…
mortality and the fear of dying twice technology versus nature alienation and displacement in time
Warren Zevon
A junkie in a rundown corner of Los Angeles narrates his own decline in a strangely tender, almost comic voice, addressing an…
addiction and withdrawal romantic longing as survival strategy poverty and bureaucracy
Gram Parsons
A countrypolitan narrative song told by a man who uproots his life to satisfy his wife's craving for city glamour, only to watch…
rural-to-urban displacement the limits of sacrifice gendered domestic roles
John Lee Hooker
This is Hooker's own spin on a blues standard's title and premise, stretched into a loose, half-spoken meditation on a locked…
romantic abandonment displacement/exile from home male bravado as cover for hurt
Death Cab for Cutie
A breakup song built around the image of a photograph's frame—one person edged out as the other steps into visibility and…
dissolution of a relationship fame/visibility eclipsing intimacy memory and forgetting
Kris Kristofferson
Kristofferson builds a composite portrait of a road-worn artist figure out of fragments of himself and his musician friends,…
self-destruction and creativity spiritual searching without arrival the cost of the touring musician's life
Robyn
Robyn scripts a breakup for a man on behalf of the woman he's about to leave someone for, coaching him line by line on how to…
infidelity and self-justification emotional labor the ethics of kindness
XTC
A giddy, image-drunk love song that describes a single overwhelming encounter through a barrage of unrelated historical and…
sudden infatuation the inadequacy of language before wonder celestial imagery displaced onto a person
The Beach Boys
An early Beach Boys car song that treats a Chevrolet engine like a lover and a racehorse at once, built almost entirely on chant…
car culture masculine pride and status consumerism/saving toward a goal