The Temptations
A ballad of retrospective heartbreak in which the narrator catalogues small domestic pleasures from a lost relationship,…
nostalgia loss of love unresolved grief
Minnie Riperton
A single found photograph pulls the narrator involuntarily into a past relationship she thought she'd buried. What starts as…
involuntary memory grief over lost love loss of control
Slowdive
A hazy account of a relationship winding down, where tenderness and resentment are hard to separate. The song relies on…
fading love resignation jealousy
Bon Iver
A short, hazy meditation on a departure that's treated with strange tenderness -- the singer asks a lover to leave without…
parting and impermanence memory intruding on the present ambivalence about closure
Steve Earle
A quiet, unadorned reckoning with a relationship dissolved somewhere in a haze of substance abuse, told by a narrator who can…
addiction and memory loss romantic loss guilt and self-reproach
Bonobo
"Recurring" is an instrumental mood piece from Bonobo's Days to Come, built on looping samples, muted percussion, and layered…
repetition memory cyclical time
Roberta Flack
A slow, hymn-like meditation on falling in love, told through three escalating 'first times' — seeing, kissing, and lying with a…
romantic awakening the sacredness of intimacy time and permanence
Simon Jäger
A brief solo acoustic guitar instrumental that opens Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album, built around a simple, wistful…
memory time passing nostalgia
Free
A simple, aching blues-rock ballad built around nostalgia for a lost relationship, contrasting warm, sensory memories of shared…
nostalgia lost love loneliness
Sufjan Stevens
This opening track from Carrie & Lowell addresses the songwriter's estranged, deceased mother directly, groping toward…
maternal loss grief and forgiveness spiritual uncertainty
Mercury Rev
"Holes" is a hazy, impressionistic meditation on loss and the failure of memory to hold together, built almost entirely from…
memory and forgetting grief disorientation
The Triffids
A meditation on memory's unreliability, built around a man clutching physical relics of a lost woman while admitting each…
memory and distortion obsession idealization vs reality
A young narrator recounts the slow death of a girl he loves from bone cancer, intercutting scenes of adolescent intimacy with…
mortality and illness adolescent love faith and doubt
Fleetwood Mac
A ghostly, elegiac song written from what sounds like the perspective of someone already gone, addressing a loved one left…
death and separation memory guilt and regret
Four Tet
"Daughter" is an instrumental piece from Four Tet's New Energy that builds from a simple melodic cell into a warm, layered wash…
intimacy memory growth and accumulation
The Who
A meditation on the end of a love affair that doubles as a meditation on the end of a piece of music itself, where the singer's…
loss and acceptance art as transcendence dissolution of self
Adele
A chance reunion at a party becomes the occasion for Adele to measure the distance between who she was and who she's become. The…
nostalgia aging and mortality lost love
Chris Stapleton
A meditation on loss framed through the image of angels who appear briefly in our lives, help us, and then vanish. Stapleton…
grief and mourning impermanence faith and doubt
Guy Clark
A meditation on nostalgia and decline, built entirely from a chain of similes comparing an abstract feeling to aging, marginal…
nostalgia aging and decline loneliness
Broken Social Scene
An instrumental from Broken Social Scene's self-titled 2005 album, built as a churning wall-of-sound piece rather than a song…
absence and erasure memory collective vs. individual voice
Orbital
An instrumental electronic piece built around a slowly unfurling synth melody and a wordless, choir-like vocal pad, 'Belfast'…
reconciliation memory place and naming
Chaka Khan
A ballad of retrospective longing in which the narrator revisits a lost love she still believes was singular and irreplaceable.…
nostalgia idealized past love yearning and denial
Air
"Ce Matin-Là" ("That Morning") is a hazy instrumental interlude on Moon Safari, built from woodwind-like synth tones and a…
memory nostalgia morning/liminal time
Cat Power
Cat Power's stripped-down cover of the doo-wop standard turns a bright, buoyant 1959 hit into something hushed and fragile,…
devotion memory vulnerability
Burial
Young Death is less a song than a sustained emotional gesture, built almost entirely from a handful of chopped, pitch-shifted…
reassurance loneliness protection
Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash's reading of this Dylan standard is a hushed, spare rendition that treats the song as a message passed to a…
lost love distance and separation memory
Aphex Twin
Avril 14th is a brief solo piano piece by Aphex Twin, built from a simple, halting melodic phrase that repeats with small…
memory fragility impermanence
Loretta Lynn
A nostalgic, plainspoken carol that recreates a rural Appalachian childhood Christmas through small domestic details rather than…
nostalgia family and home rural tradition
Gorillaz
A hushed, drifting love song built from a handful of dreamlike images rather than a plot. The narrator offers companionship as a…
longing and consolation escapism isolation within intimacy
Leonard Cohen
A wry, half-comic meditation on aging and memory dressed up as a road song. The narrator sets out to reclaim some lost person or…
memory and forgetting aging exodus/departure
Willie Nelson
A heartbroken man addresses whiskey itself as a kind of substitute lover or guardian, begging it to erase the memory of the…
heartbreak addiction as refuge self-erasure
Dire Straits
A hazy, nocturnal recollection of teenage romance staged in a dockland landscape of quays, stairways, and coasters. The song…
nostalgia working-class romance memory and place
Lorde
Lorde uses the language of video editing to describe how memory sands a failed relationship down into its highlight reel. The…
selective memory idealization of a lost relationship self-deception
Lucinda Williams
A hushed, sensuous meditation on hard-won ease, sung to an absent lover whose memory the singer keeps circling back to even as…
earned solitude memory and longing domestic sensuality
Jethro Tull
A gentle, hushed love song built on the image of watching a sleeping partner and holding onto quiet, private moments. It moves…
tender devotion distance and longing the fragility of romantic idealism
A meditation on mortality and inherited fate, written in the voice of someone reckoning with the end of life while looking back…
mortality inheritance/family legacy acceptance
Chet Baker
A standard from 1939 (words and music by Jane Brown Thompson, published as a discovery by Hoagy Carmichael) becomes, in Baker's…
denial as self-protection involuntary memory seasonal association with loss
Billie Holiday
A standard from the Kern-Fields songbook, delivered here as a hushed, intimate meditation rather than a big romantic…
romantic devotion memory as consolation vulnerability
Superchunk
A hazy, fragmented recollection of a drunken night that may or may not have involved romance, tallied up through physical…
memory and forgetting intoxication erased identity
Wilco
A short, disoriented piece about someone trying to locate himself through self-deception and memory failure, using the image of…
self-deception disorientation distorted memory