Television
A short, hazy meditation on time and companionship that trades narrative for atmosphere, repeating its title like a mantra until…
time and impermanence dreamlike perception companionship
A downtown-New York nocturne about a night walk that tips into a heightened, almost hallucinatory perception of the city,…
urban nightlife altered perception desire and detachment
The Flaming Lips
This is a cover of the Beatles psychedelic classic, and the Flaming Lips' version leans into the song's dreamlike dissolve…
altered perception longing for an unreachable figure dream logic
Harry Nilsson
A small argument about the color of the sun spirals into a meditation on epistemic vertigo -- how do you trust anything,…
epistemological doubt trust and betrayal perception vs. reality
Black Sabbath
This closing track from Paranoid pairs a lurching instrumental jam with a half-comic, half-paranoid account of drug-induced…
drug paranoia unreliable perception self-deception
The Doors
A short, propulsive rock song built almost entirely around a single command repeated until it becomes a mantra. It uses images…
transcendence limits of perception desire and entrapment
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…
mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty
Built to Spill
A short, circling meditation on how received wisdom persists even when it no longer fits reality. Built to Spill uses plain,…
conformity vs. change epistemic humility the persistence of habit
Cassandra Wilson
This is a meditative, almost devotional song built around a simple ritual: each day's mundane and sensory acts are catalogued by…
impermanence ritual and routine art as anchor
Boards of Canada
An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that trades on the gap between its title's cheerful theatrical…
nostalgia childhood media artifice versus memory
Carly Simon
A pep talk in song form, urging a woman to stop measuring her steady, familiar relationship against fantasies of glamour and…
long-term love vs. novelty contentment reframed as romance self-perception
Animal Collective
A song about the paralysis of anxious self-consciousness and the small, almost accidental relief of stepping outside. It moves…
anxiety and self-criticism domestic clutter as psychological weight inertia versus movement
Magazine
A short, jagged meditation on the trap of self-consciousness, where the singer's supposed clarity of vision becomes a curse…
self-consciousness detachment perception vs reality
Pearl Jam
A song about the aftermath of a devastating breakup, built on the image of a world drained of color and identity once a lover is…
heartbreak and loss loss of identity grief's distortion of perception
The War on Drugs
An instrumental-forward, motorik rock track from Lost in the Dream whose lyrics function almost as texture rather than narrative…
emotional distance self-doubt longing
Joni Mitchell
A three-part meditation that uses clouds, love, and life as parallel case studies in disillusionment, each verse moving from…
disillusionment the limits of experience loss of innocence
Patsy Cline
A weary adult voice imagines borrowing a child's unclouded vision as a way of escaping accumulated disappointment. The song…
lost innocence nostalgia for childhood perception weariness with adult disillusionment
Mercury Rev
A hazy, druggy fable about pursuit and containment, where sunlit imagery of seduction and pleasure keeps curdling into images of…
intoxication and altered perception freedom versus entrapment instability of the self
Built to Spill open their 2006 album with a long, guitar-driven meditation on doubt and self-contradiction, built from a handful…
self-doubt masculinity and its expectations religious skepticism
The Who
A disoriented young man rides a commuter train while his mind fractures into fragments of memory, sexual anxiety, and social…
dissociation and identity collapse adolescent sexuality and shame class and Englishness
Steely Dan
A slack, aging drifter moves onto his aunt's couch and develops an unseemly fixation on his young cousin, pitching her a…
arrested development delusional self-image taboo desire played for laughs
Solange
"Mad" is a meditation on the exhaustion of having to justify one's own anger, built around a call-and-response between a…
the right to anger versus the demand for composure respectability and emotional policing of Black people survival and trauma disguised as success
The Shins
A woozy, image-dense monologue about self-protection and emotional avoidance dressed up in surreal, almost dreamlike language.…
emotional avoidance self-deception aging and inertia
Depeche Mode
A meditation on mortality and impermanence dressed in soft, dreamlike imagery, written and released in the shadow of a…
mortality and impermanence grief and remembrance spiritual uncertainty
Soundgarden
A hazy, dissonant piece of psychedelia dressed as a pop single, in which a decaying suburban landscape is invited to be…
apocalyptic longing decay and disguise escapism
Joy Division
A tense, dreamlike monologue in which the speaker searches an urban and psychic landscape for someone he seems to have already…
guilt and complicity urban alienation performance of identity
"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
A dreamlike wish-song built around water as an image of fluidity, ease, and self-erasure, drifting through loosely connected…
desire for formlessness/transformation mortality and impermanence creativity and artistic longing
Jimi Hendrix
A hallucinatory vision of social collapse filtered through a drinker's blurred perception, where reaching hands never quite…
social unrest spiritual longing alienation
Mission of Burma
A dense, dreamlike lyric from Mission of Burma's 'Trem Two' that treats a streetcar ride as a passage through half-formed memory…
dissociation and self-confrontation loss of intimacy transit as metaphor for consciousness
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
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift turns a self-lacerating confessional into a singalong chorus, cataloguing her worst self-perceptions—insomnia,…
self-loathing and self-awareness fame and disproportion fear of abandonment
Grandaddy
A loose, dreamlike catalog of small-town wreckage - shut-down factories, joyriding teens, a decrepit limousine, a spray-painted…
small-town decay aimlessness and boredom mechanization versus nature
Cream
A dreamlike escape song built almost entirely from fantastical images of flight from ordinary life, the lyric moves from castles…
escapism dissolution of self heartbreak avoidance