Results for “emotional labor and domestic care”

Songs

Superwoman

Gladys Knight

A domestic monologue in which a woman catalogs the daily labor she performs for a partner who has grown cold and inattentive,…

emotional labor and domestic care the myth of female self-sufficiency withdrawal and neglect in a relationship

Diamond Day

Vashti Bunyan

A short pastoral hymn that treats an ordinary rural day as something precious, using the smallest units of farm life to build…

rural simplicity contentment cyclical time

Beast Of Burden

The Rolling Stones

A weary plea for tenderness dressed up as a refusal to keep serving as someone's workhorse. The narrator insists he's given…

exhaustion in relationships emotional labor vs desire masculinity and self-worth

Keep Me in Your Heart

Warren Zevon

A dying man's direct, unsentimental request to be remembered, framed as a farewell letter set to a gentle, almost lullaby-like…

mortality memory and legacy love as continuity

Cranes in the Sky

Solange

Solange catalogs a long list of failed coping mechanisms for an unnamed sorrow, building an inventory of avoidance that…

avoidance and denial depression/emotional exhaustion consumerism as false comfort

Love, Reign O'er Me

The Who

This is the climactic closing statement of Quadrophenia, a plea for emotional deliverance disguised as a weather report. The…

spiritual longing emotional exhaustion love as elemental force

You Keep Me Hanging On

The Supremes

A woman demands her own release from a dead relationship, addressing an ex who refuses to fully let go even though he no longer…

emotional limbo asymmetry of feeling demand for autonomy

Distant Lover

Marvin Gaye

A slow-burning soul lament in which the narrator addresses an absent lover across an unspecified distance, moving from tender…

romantic longing separation and absence memory and nostalgia

Christmas In the Room

Sufjan Stevens

A quiet domestic love song that strips Christmas of all its commercial and social trappings and relocates the holiday's meaning…

intimacy vs. commercialism presence over spectacle domestic love as sanctuary

Respect

Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin's 1967 reworking of Otis Redding's song turns a man's plea for domestic deference into a woman's non-negotiable…

demanding respect sexual and economic bargaining power gender and domestic power

Unknown Legend

Neil Young

A domestic sketch collides with a highway fantasy: the narrator remembers a diner waitress and imagines her alternate, freer…

restlessness and rootlessness domestic confinement vs. freedom idealization/myth-making

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Gloria

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

A quiet meditation on walking alone toward some unnamed threshold, framed as a kind of secular hymn. The repeated invocation of…

solitude and pilgrimage devotion without doctrine mortality and departure

Can We Pretend

Bill Withers

A wounded plea for a fresh start with a partner whose affection is unreliable, built almost entirely around one conditional…

conditional love emotional ambivalence denial as coping

Angel

Chaka Khan

Chaka Khan addresses a fragile, self-sabotaging figure she calls an angel, coaxing her toward vulnerability and self-acceptance.…

emotional fragility self-acceptance codependency and healing

The Weekend

SZA

SZA narrates an affair with candor rather than shame, positioning herself as the intermittent, exciting alternative to a primary…

infidelity and complicity self-worth vs. self-sabotage possessiveness and jealousy

Flagship

Jason Isbell

Isbell uses a fading hotel as an extended metaphor for a long marriage at risk of going stale, watching an older couple's silent…

marital complacency the labor of sustaining love aging and decline

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom

Tear-Stained Letter

Richard Thompson

A wry, uptempo account of a breakup told from the battered-but-wisecracking side, where physical comedy stands in for emotional…

romantic aftermath toxic love masculine bravado as deflection

Look At Miss Ohio

Gillian Welch

A short, circling ballad about a young woman fleeing domestic expectation for a taste of freedom before she settles into the…

deferred responsibility female autonomy vs. convention escape and fantasy

Baby, This Love I Have

Minnie Riperton

A love song built around the anxiety of being misunderstood -- the singer insists that her feelings are genuine even if her…

communication and its failure reassurance devotion

Blues Run the Game

Laura Marling

This is a cover of a mid-1960s folk standard, sung here in Laura Marling's plainspoken, weary register, about the impossibility…

itinerancy and escape addiction as self-medication romantic longing and loss

Change Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Otis Redding's rendition of Sam Cooke's civil-rights-era anthem transforms a carefully wrought protest song into a raw,…

racial injustice and endurance faith versus doubt family and disappointment

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A three-part meditation in waltz time that moves from a woman by a river, to Christ walking on water, and back to the woman…

erotic love as spiritual apprehension faith and doubt surrender to a guide