Erykah Badu
A meditation on getting lost, both literally and existentially, that refuses to resolve into a tidy moral. Badu treats…
self-doubt and self-trust fate versus choice spiritual wandering
Led Zeppelin
A slow-building folk-rock epic that follows a mysterious woman convinced she can purchase spiritual transcendence, using her as…
spiritual materialism vs. authentic enlightenment ambiguity of language and meaning pastoral/mythic imagery as escape
Fairport Convention
This is the Fairport Convention arrangement of the old English/Scottish murder ballad about an adulterous tryst between a…
class transgression sexual desire and consequence honor and violence
Gram Parsons
A hymn-structured elegy that mourns three losses in succession -- a young man killed in a car crash, a musician taken too soon,…
mortality and premature death grief and mourning faith and supplication
Stevie Wonder
A funk sermon against magical thinking. Over one of the most recognizable clavinet riffs in popular music, Wonder catalogues…
superstition and magical thinking the cost of ignorance fear as self-fulfilling prophecy
Randy Newman
Written for the animated film 'Toy Story,' this is a plain-spoken pledge of loyalty from one companion to another, stripped of…
loyalty reassurance humility versus devotion
Public Enemy
A protest anthem built as a dance record: Chuck D argues that political consciousness and Black pride are things you build in…
Black pride and self-definition institutional racism who gets to be a national hero
Frank Ocean
A hazy, sun-warmed meditation on being shaped and protected by someone else's love, set against a backdrop of natural disaster…
maternal or protective love survival and disaster memory and childhood
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
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
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
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
Paul Simon
A reunion single from Simon and Garfunkel that reads as a bitter anti-nostalgia song, dismantling the idea of small-town…
small-town disillusionment loss of faith suppressed violence
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
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a Mexican bandit's death and the shadowy figure who may have betrayed him, told with the flat affect of folklore…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and diminishment
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
Yes
A three-part suite that moves from pastoral invocation through cosmic address to a mantra-like affirmation of shared awakening.…
cosmic consciousness nature as spiritual messenger transmission of hidden knowledge
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
D'Angelo
A prayer-like meditation on trying to hold steady inside collapse, written for a video game about the death of the American…
endurance amid chaos spiritual uncertainty frontier mythology and its end