Results for “home as identity”

Songs

That Home

The Cinematic Orchestra

A short, hymn-like address to a house that has absorbed a lifetime of inhabitation, where domestic decay becomes a form of…

home and belonging memory embedded in objects aging and wear

Home

LCD Soundsystem

Home closes This Is Happening as a slow-building comedown song, one that treats the title word as both destination and evasion.…

escape versus arrival fear of vulnerability nightlife as ritual and anesthetic

Down Home Girl

Betty Davis

A raw, funk-driven declaration of Southern Black identity that fuses food, sex, and soul music into a single unapologetic…

Southern Black identity sexual assertiveness reclamation of stereotype

Identity

X‐Ray Spex

A short, hammering punk track that treats the idea of self-image as a literal wound. Poly Styrene repeats the word "identity"…

media saturation self-image and alienation consumer culture

To Build a Home

The Cinematic Orchestra

A slow, sparsely worded piano-and-strings piece that treats a house and a tree as vessels for memory and loss. It moves from a…

memory loss and impermanence home as metaphor for relationship

Home In Your Heart

Solomon Burke

A courtship plea built around a single extended metaphor: the beloved's heart as a home the singer is desperate to reach.…

romantic longing home and belonging pursuit/courtship

Go Home

Angel Olsen

A meditation on disorientation and self-loss dressed as a plea for retreat, this song sits at the emotional center of Big Time,…

displacement and homesickness grief and mourning identity dissolution

I'm Going Home

Hank Williams

A deathbed testimony song in which a dying believer comforts an onlooker by reframing death as homecoming. Hank Williams…

death and salvation religious comfort acceptance of mortality

Pictures of Home

Deep Purple

A lone figure stranded on a mountainside cries out into silence, caught between physical isolation and a self-created…

isolation self-deception alienation from home

There Won't Be Many Coming Home

Roy Orbison

A spare anti-war lament written decades before its eventual use in a Tarantino western, the song addresses an unnamed public…

war and loss futility of combat collective grief

I Want to Come Home for Christmas

Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye reframes a holiday standard as a POW's lament, layering familiar Christmas imagery over a desperate plea for peace…

war and captivity longing for home family separation

At Home He's a Tourist

Gang of Four

A clipped, funk-inflected post-punk track that treats leisure, culture-consumption, and sexual routine as forms of alienated…

alienation under capitalism commodification of leisure and sex self-improvement as anxiety

Take Me Home

Brother Ali

This is a brash self-mythologizing track built around a looped soul-sampled hook that frames the whole song as a seduction, even…

artistic independence braggadocio work ethic vs. industry hustle

Far from Home

Traffic

A late-period Traffic track built around restless motion — a narrator pushing toward an undefined destination, framing the…

restlessness and departure spiritual seeking disillusionment with false comfort

Bring It on Home to Me

B.B. King

This is less a song than a spoken monologue set to guitar, in which B.B. King explains his relationship to his guitar, Lucille,…

companionship and loneliness music as confession survival and near-death experience

Coming Home

Leon Bridges

A short, plainspoken soul song about returning to a lover after being worn down by the outside world. It works less through…

homecoming devotion weariness with the world

I'm Going Home

Arlo Guthrie

A short, hymn-like closer built from natural images—falling leaves, flowing streams, a fading sunrise—that are each gently…

mortality and acceptance nature as spiritual metaphor continuity and return

Bring It On Home to Me

Wilson Pickett

Pickett's 1968 cover of Sam Cooke's soul standard is a direct plea for reconciliation, stripped of pride, asking a lover to come…

romantic longing forgiveness submission in love

Long Way Home

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

Come Go Home with Me

Lightnin’ Hopkins

A loose, talk-singing blues performance built around a come-on line that quickly drifts into digressions about family advice,…

seduction and courtship male boasting domestic friction

Bringing Home the Bacon

Procol Harum

A short, grotesque nursery-rhyme caricature of gluttonous privilege, built almost entirely from compound baby-talk insults and…

gluttony and excess class resentment infantilization of power

Christmas In My Home Town

Charley Pride

A straightforward, warmly sentimental holiday song that paints an idealized small-town Christmas Eve scene, moving from snowy…

nostalgia small-town idealism childhood wonder

Can't Find My Way Home

Joe Cocker

This is Joe Cocker's version of the Blind Faith classic, a song built on exhaustion and spiritual disorientation rather than a…

spiritual exhaustion displacement longing for release

Home By Another Way

James Taylor

Taylor takes the biblical Magi's detour around Herod after visiting the infant Jesus and turns it into a wry parable about…

biblical allegory avoidance of tyranny/corruption wisdom and discretion

Take the Long Way Home

Faithless

A spoken-word meditation over a trance groove, in which Maxi Jazz describes a kind of spiritual wandering and the hard-won peace…

spiritual journey earned wisdom detachment from material striving

Go On Ahead and Go Home

Iris DeMent

A quiet death-song framed as a lullaby, telling a dying or dead man that his labor is finished and it's safe to let go. Iris…

death and release rest after labor maternal welcome

Please Come Home for Christmas

Sharon Jones and the Dap‐Kings

A soul rendering of the Charles Brown blues-ballad classic, this version lets Sharon Jones mine the gap between Christmas's…

loneliness during the holidays longing and reunion blues within celebration

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music

A deadpan monologue delivered by a consumer trapped inside his own showroom lifestyle, who eventually confesses to owning an…

consumerism and alienation artificiality vs intimacy suburban/domestic satire

Let Me Take You Home Tonight

Boston

A straightforward mid-70s arena-rock come-on, built almost entirely around a single repeated invitation. The song's interest…

desire and pursuit self-consciousness masked by bravado persuasion

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Mariah Carey

This is Mariah Carey's 1994 cover of the Phil Spector/Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry classic, reworked as a Wall-of-Sound production…

loneliness during celebration longing and absence nostalgia for past happiness

I Feel Like Breaking Up / Somebody's Home Tonight

Ann Peebles

A woman alone on a rainy night confesses to a desire strong enough to make her willing to wreck another relationship just to…

forbidden desire loneliness emotional compulsion versus morality

Africa

D'Angelo

A meditation on fatherhood framed as a lineage running back through Africa, presented less as narrative and more as blessing or…

diasporic identity fatherhood and legacy spiritual protection

Still Woman Enough

Loretta Lynn

A late-career declaration of resilience, this song has Lynn taking stock of a long, hard-won life and refusing to concede any…

resilience aging and identity working-class pride

Flying Dream 1

Elbow

A quiet, almost spoken-word title track that recreates a childhood flying dream in intimate domestic detail, turning a familiar…

childhood memory home and belonging transcendence through the mundane

The Folks Who Live On The Hill

Mel Tormé

A quietly domestic standard in which a narrator rejects ambition in favor of a lifelong, unremarkable partnership, imagining a…

domestic contentment aging together modesty versus ambition

Goddamn Lonely Love

Drive‐By Truckers

A drinker's monologue that treats self-medication as the only available cure for an unnamed ache, delivered with gallows humor…

addiction and self-destruction loneliness as identity failed or absent home

Completeness

Minnie Riperton

A soft, incantatory love song built almost entirely from direct address and imperative pleading, in which the singer asks a…

romantic surrender identity through the other sensuality

Salt

Lizz Wright

A spare, hymn-like meditation on identity as something essential and unlosable, built around the homely image of salt seasoning…

self-possession resilience essential identity vs. external circumstance

I Am a Poseur

X‐Ray Spex

A short, blunt punk manifesto about performing identity rather than possessing one. The narrator embraces the label of fraud,…

authenticity vs performance spectacle and voyeurism punk self-aware artifice

Art - I - Ficial

X‐Ray Spex

A snarling critique of manufactured identity, delivered by a narrator who claims artificiality as both symptom and defense. The…

consumerism artificial identity commodification of self