Warren Zevon
A mock-heroic ballad about a Canadian enforcer whose only real ambition was to score a goal, told with the deadpan cadence of a…
thwarted ambition masculine role and duty violence as commodity
Talk Talk
Ascension Day is a fractured, almost liturgical piece of wordplay built from gambling terms and religious imagery, where the…
fate and predestination gambling as spiritual metaphor guilt and judgement
Kacey Musgraves
Kacey Musgraves' rendition of this 1961 standard, recorded for the 2022 Elvis biopic soundtrack, strips the song down to its…
surrender to love fate versus choice vulnerability
Joan Baez
Baez's early reading of this traditional ballad frames the singer as a woman recounting her own ruin, casting the House of the…
ruin and regret fallen woman narrative fate versus free will
Kate Bush
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as a problem that could be solved by literally trading…
empathy and its limits gender and relational miscommunication bargaining with fate
Yes
A high-gloss opener to Yes's commercial breakthrough album, this song trades the band's earlier cosmic mysticism for a leaner,…
chance and fate self-deception versus self-repair resilience amid chaos
Weezer
This is Weezer's note-for-note cover of Toto's 1982 hit, so the words themselves are unchanged; what shifts is the frame. Sung…
longing and distance exoticized landscape as metaphor devotion versus escape
Black Sabbath
This is Black Sabbath's title track marking the arrival of Ronnie James Dio, trading the band's earlier horror-movie doom for…
moral ambiguity illusion versus reality corrupted power
Fairport Convention
This is the Fairport Convention electric-folk arrangement of the ancient English/Scottish ballad about adultery, betrayal, and…
class inequality adultery and its consequences honor and vengeance
Sly & Robbie
This is a cover of the classic Doris Day standard, reframed by Sly and Robbie's rhythm-section sensibility rather than by any…
fate and acceptance generational transmission of wisdom the unknowability of the future
Willie Nelson
This is a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival standard, and Willie Nelson's version leans into its plainspoken, riddling…
paradox and contradiction impending trouble endurance through time
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt's version of the Stagolee legend strips the story down to its bare bones: a hat, a gun, a killing, and an…
violence and its casualness justice and law folk mythology
Smokey Robinson
A straightforward declaration of romantic devotion, built on the classic Smokey Robinson template of certainty and fidelity. The…
romantic devotion certainty/fate fidelity
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as something so vast it could only be closed by a…
miscommunication in intimacy empathy and its limits bargaining with fate
The xx
A breakup song built on the gap between assumed permanence and sudden loss, where the narrator realizes too late that…
complacency in love loss of control desire versus resentment
The Band
This is The Band's cover of the old blues/Sun Records standard, reworked here as a mournful, swampy shuffle rather than a…
loss and abandonment travel as metaphor for separation folk/blues tradition
Joy Division
A stark, clinical account of watching someone lose command of their own body and mind, built around a mechanical repeated…
loss of control epilepsy/illness powerlessness of the observer
Townes Van Zandt
A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…
poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado
Carly Simon
Carly Simon splices the nursery rhyme about the persistent spider into the title track's refrain from her own 'Coming Around…
resilience cyclical hope romantic disappointment
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…
judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse
Gorillaz
A collaboration between Gorillaz and Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan, the track fuses a patois-inflected verse about hard-won…
survival and upward mobility fame's emptiness isolation within relationships
George Jones
A late-career George Jones confession set as a plainspoken moral ledger: a man looking back on a life of drink and lost…
regret addiction free will versus fate
Tom Waits
A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…
restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom
Rush
A meditation on chance and fate dressed up as a gambling metaphor, Rush's title track argues that existence has no grand design…
randomness vs. determinism mortality and suffering free will within constraint