Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens takes the 18th-century Robert Robinson hymn and renders it with hushed, folk-inflected intimacy, letting its old…
divine grace spiritual wandering gratitude and debt
Al Green
Al Green frames a romantic relationship as a sacred event, thanking a higher power for a love that feels chosen rather than…
sacred love gratitude devotion
Frank Sinatra
This is Katharine Lee Bates's 1893 hymn to the American landscape, set to Samuel A. Ward's melody and delivered here as a…
national pride natural landscape as moral symbol idealism and unity
The Flaming Lips
A short, incantatory track that treats luck as a physical force, something that arrives like weather and settles on a person…
luck and chance transformation into manhood weather/nature as metaphor for fate
James Blake
A minimalist ballad structured as a farewell blessing, where the speaker releases someone from obligation while affirming an…
letting go unconditional love spiritual blessing
Gregory Porter
A soft, devotional love song that treats a romantic partner as a near-mythical arrival — someone who seems to have literally…
romantic wonder divinity/transcendence in love healing through love
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…
judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse
Whitney Houston
A gospel testimony built almost entirely from a single scriptural refrain, this recording turns a short devotional statement…
divine refuge suffering and lament faith as action
Leonard Cohen
A short, incantatory prayer-song in which the speaker surrenders the illusion of being the one who loves and comes to see love…
surrender of ego divine or transcendent love exile and punishment
This song is a litany that presents the whole span of a human life — luxury and squalor, sickness and death, love and its ending…
mortality radical acceptance love as endurance rather than feeling
Stevie Wonder
A new father's unguarded celebration of his infant daughter's birth, structured as a series of rhetorical questions that answer…
fatherhood and new life gratitude love as creative force
A prayer disguised as a love song, built from a dialogue between a son and a father-God about shame, embodiment, and the…
shame and self-loathing faith and divine dialogue the body as trial
Nina Simone
A traditional African-American spiritual reworked into a nearly ten-minute incantation, tracking a sinner's frantic search for…
judgment and reckoning futility of escape divine justice vs. mercy
Gang Starr
A cosmic-flight framing device gives way to two verses of dense, mystically-inflected boasting in which Guru and an MC (the…
spiritual elevation vs. street corruption Five Percenter cosmology and self-divinity lyrical supremacy as warfare
A meditation on the pull between transcendent, near-mystical intimacy and the noisy, transactional churn of ordinary life. The…
sacred vs. profane transience of ecstasy spiritual longing
Jethro Tull
A caustic broadside against the American co-option of Christianity, pairing frontier violence and cowboy mythology with the…
religious hypocrisy American mythology and violence colonialism
The Supremes
A whimsical children's-style Christmas novelty in which a tree-top star sings in the first person about descending from the sky…
childlike wonder generosity and giving holiday magic
A sustained attack on institutional religion, contrasting the rigidity of church ritual with a pantheistic sense of the divine…
institutional religion vs. personal spirituality hypocrisy pantheism/immanence
Sarah Vaughan
This is a devotional address built almost entirely on paired opposites, culminating in a refrain of unconditional love. The…
unconditional love moral duality forgiveness
Cat Stevens
A hymn of thanksgiving that treats an ordinary sunrise as if it were the first morning of creation. Cat Stevens' recording turns…
gratitude renewal and rebirth nature as sacred
Gram Parsons
A closing hymn built around three elegies for people the narrator has lost, framed by a repeated plea for divine clarity and…
mourning and loss mortality and premonition faith under duress
Uncle Tupelo
This is Uncle Tupelo's take on the Flying Burrito Brothers standard, a doom-laden vision of Los Angeles as a modern Babylon…
moral corruption of wealth apocalyptic judgment urban decay
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
Paul Simon
A young man addresses an abstraction—darkness, silence—as a companion, then walks through a hallucinatory cityscape where…
alienation failure of communication modernity and technology as false idol
Lauryn Hill
A raw, semi-improvised confessional performed live, in which Hill wrestles aloud with an internal voice of doubt and control…
psychological bondage vs. freedom spiritual surrender toxic control in relationships
Arcade Fire
A parental address structured as a series of blessings — trust your heart, mind, body, soul — that builds toward an unqualified…
unconditional love parental guidance imperfection and acceptance
Judee Sill
A hushed, almost liturgical meditation on grief and the search for mercy, built around the ancient plea for divine pity. Judee…
grief and mourning dreams as spiritual descent supplication and mercy
Jason Isbell
A working-class narrator describes his days through the rhythm of manual labor, framing exhaustion and diminished expectation as…
labor and class faith as consolation resignation vs. dignity
Wind-Up closes Aqualung's second-side critique of institutional religion with a direct autobiographical account of a schoolboy…
institutional religion vs personal faith education as indoctrination inherited belief