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
Roxy Music
A deadpan monologue delivered by a consumer trapped inside his own showroom lifestyle, who eventually confesses to owning an…
consumerism and alienation artificiality vs intimacy suburban/domestic satire
Patti Smith
An anthem built from a dream-vision, in which the speaker imagines armies disbanding and deserts turning to gardens, then hands…
collective political power utopian vision vs. reality dream as prophecy
Röyksopp
A hazy meditation on visibility and distance between two people who are moving through the same landscape without ever truly…
invisibility and unrecognition distance within closeness self-mythologizing
Pixies
A disorienting, fragmentary meditation on bodily and psychic dissolution, built almost entirely around a repeated confession of…
bodily vulnerability existential confusion dream and sleep as escape
Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris narrates the entire life of a childhood friend from rural Alabama, from adolescence to an early, unremarked…
rural poverty thwarted ambition female friendship
King Crimson
A doom-laden meditation on Cold War anxiety and the collapse of moral authority, delivered as a kind of secular apocalyptic…
nuclear anxiety loss of faith/prophecy fear of the future
Stevie Wonder
A deceptively simple birthday singalong that Stevie Wonder uses as a political vehicle, campaigning for a U.S. national holiday…
civil rights memory collective celebration as protest racial justice and equality
Common
Common builds a triumphant victory-lap track around a sampled ELO hook, using the sky as a running metaphor for ascent,…
ambition realized spiritual gratitude celebrity and success