The Kinks
A naive young man recounts his disorienting, thrilling encounter with Lola, a nightclub companion whose gender identity…
gender fluidity and identity sexual awakening innocence versus experience
David Bowie
A song about self-reinvention that treats identity as something perpetually in motion rather than a fixed achievement. Bowie…
self-reinvention generational conflict identity instability
Kate Bush
A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…
empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding
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
Prince
"Batdance" is less a song than a sound collage built to promote the 1989 Batman film, splicing dance-funk grooves with dialogue…
media spectacle identity/duality commercialism and tie-in culture
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
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
The Temptations
A mid-80s Temptations single that pitches courtly-gentleman romance as a self-help pitch, with the narrator cataloguing small…
traditional courtship gender roles nostalgia for inherited values
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
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
Bert Jansch
This is a traditional Appalachian song (with roots in older British/American folk balladry) about a woman driven out of a…
exile and social rejection itinerancy gendered outsider status
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
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