Elliott Smith
A quiet, almost lullaby-like address to someone (or something) that promises comfort while actually describing a kind of…
addiction and dependency seduction and control erased identity
The Beach Boys
A love song that opens by admitting its own limits "" the singer won't promise permanence "" and then spends the rest of its…
conditional devotion dependence and identity uncertainty as a form of honesty
Talking Heads
A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…
mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift
Bill Callahan
Bill Callahan opens his own name into someone else's -- the title alludes to the noir novelist James M. Cain -- and uses that…
self-transformation the writing process as detective work impermanence and mortality
Stevie Wonder
A new father's unfiltered, almost breathless reaction to the birth of his daughter, rendered as a series of rhetorical questions…
fatherhood and new birth gratitude love as creative/generative force
Sandy Denny
A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…
longing and absence loss of self idealized love
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
John Prine
Prine elegizes a real Kentucky town erased by strip mining, using a child's plea to his father as the frame for a broader story…
environmental destruction loss of home/place industrial 'progress' vs. nature