The Animals
This is The Animals' 1977 cover of Bob Dylan's 1965 farewell song, a surreal address to a departing figure told entirely through…
endings and departure identity dissolution surreal imagery
The Velvet Underground
A closing-track litany that names a small cast of the dispossessed—people with literally nothing left to their name—and turns…
poverty and dispossession resignation found community among outcasts
Lynyrd Skynyrd
A survival anthem built on plainspoken endurance imagery, the song catalogs loss and damage while insisting the speaker remains…
survival and endurance loss and dispossession freedom versus belonging
Margo Price
A pastoral invitation song that turns into something stranger: a plea to leave the city for rural Tennessee that widens into…
longing for rural simplicity mortality and impermanence land and dispossession
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
John Hiatt
A stripped-down, list-driven blues about total loss, where a man catalogs everything that has vanished from his life -- money, a…
loss and dispossession self-destruction addiction
Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch wrote this song in the early days of music piracy and free downloading, framing an artist's economic dispossession…
artistic labor and value piracy/free culture economic precarity