Fleetwood Mac
A drifting, unhurried meditation on the pleasure of unexplained phenomena, built from a series of loosely connected anecdotes…
the appeal of the unexplained imagination versus proof folklore and hearsay
Vashti Bunyan
A brief, hushed instrumental-scale miniature that treats a single autumn day as a small ceremony, pairing seasonal images with a…
seasonal change rural pastoral life folklore and superstition
Andrew Bird
A folkloric, fever-dream narrative about a giant who dies from an untended wound after a day's walking, sliding into visions of…
mortality and neglect of the body childhood cruelty and innocence lost folklore and myth-making
Colter Wall
A young musician recounts to a preacher his roadside encounter with the Devil, reimagined as a sharp-dressed man cruising…
temptation and damnation the crossroads myth musical inheritance and corruption
George Jones
A novelty rockabilly tale about a moonshiner and his lethal homemade whiskey, told by his admiring kin in a comic, exaggerated…
Appalachian folklore outlaw defiance of authority masculine bravado
ZZ Top
This is a Texas boogie built around a wink and a rumor rather than a plot. The song circles a well-known brothel outside La…
local legend/rumor masculine boasting regional pride
Run the Jewels
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess
Bert Jansch
A late-period Bert Jansch song that treats courtship as sorcery, built from a wandering, almost dreamlike set of images rather…
enchantment and desire the limits of language to capture love folkloric imagery
Bessie Smith
This is Bessie Smith's rendition of W.C. Handy's classic, a comic-tragic tale of a woman named Susie Johnson pining after a…
romantic abandonment itinerant lovers and railroad culture communication and waiting
Louis Armstrong
Armstrong's version turns Brecht and Weill's ballad of a genteel serial killer into a genial swing number, letting the horror of…
moral hypocrisy charm masking violence urban crime as folklore
Little Feat
A loose, dreamlike vignette that drifts between a woman dancing near a mysterious tree, a boastful fisherman, and a sick…
escapism surreal storytelling transience
Soundgarden
A tribute to a real Seattle street performer becomes a compressed meditation on rhythm as communal salvation, with the song's…
music as ritual/salvation street performance and urban folklore community through rhythm
A boozy, tall-tale narrative about a drifter drawn in by a radio siren's voice and then by a woman (or maybe a car, or a storm,…
seduction and danger the open road as myth radio as folklore/siren call
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
Sarah Jarosz
This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1989 song, urging church bells to be rung as an alarm against a world sliding into moral…
moral decay religious urgency apocalyptic imagery
PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…
obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention
XTC
A hymn-like invitation to submit to an ancient nature spirit, framed as both courtship and worship. XTC build the song out of…
paganism vs. Christianity nature as deity surrender and devotion
Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds an entire meditation on time, memory, and mortality around a single river metaphor, letting a childhood image…
mortality and release memory and impermanence folk religion and redemption
The Band
A rambling, half-comic narrator addresses a woman named Molly amid some domestic crisis involving a gun, while spinning loose,…
restlessness and departure domestic tension masculine bravado and evasion
Genesis
Genesis take the folkloric Squonk—a creature of Pennsylvania legend so ashamed of its own ugliness that it weeps constantly and…
shame and self-loathing the cruelty of pursuit despair and self-destruction
Todd Rundgren
Rundgren takes an old proverb about a chain of small failures leading to catastrophe and grafts it onto a personal confession…
loneliness cause and effect personal responsibility
Traffic
A short, incantatory piece built almost entirely from pastoral and folkloric imagery, this bonus track functions less as a…
freedom and journey unity with nature unanswered questions