Results for “hope as deliberate practice”

Songs

Hold On Hope

Guided by Voices

A dim, half-abstract meditation on holding onto hope when nearly everything else has failed, built around a repeated refrain…

endurance amid despair isolation and disconnection betrayal and moral compromise

Sudden Ray of Hope

Mercury Rev

A woozy, fragmentary lyric that treats hope, love, and self-medication as nearly interchangeable sources of temporary relief.…

addiction and craving fleeting relief emotional withholding

Harness Your Hopes (B-side)

Pavement

A loose, digressive song built from non-sequiturs and internal rhyme games that only occasionally resolves into something like…

evasion of intimacy irony versus sincerity pop-cultural detritus

Glad Tidings

Van Morrison

A closing benediction addressed to someone heading out into the world, mixing wary warnings about commerce and pretension with…

departure and blessing cynicism about commerce and status innocence versus experience

Where Do You Start

Shirley Horn

This is a torch song about the domestic aftermath of a breakup — not the dramatic rupture but the tedious, heartbreaking…

disentanglement after love grief as practical logistics memory and ownership

The Wreckers

Rush

A narrator recounts a shipwreck deliberately caused by shore-dwellers who lure vessels onto rocks with false lights, then loot…

betrayal false hope/illusion predation and greed

Say Yes

Elliott Smith

A short, quiet song built around the phrase "morning after," which Smith turns from a hangover cliché into a metaphor for…

fragile hope fatalism vs. change romantic uncertainty

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Frank Sinatra

A holiday standard that consoles rather than celebrates, urging cheer in the present tense while openly admitting that reunion…

separation and longing deferred hope resilience

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke

A first-person testimony of endurance under racial oppression, built around a single hope that refuses to die even as evidence…

racial injustice endurance faith and doubt

Peace Train

Cat Stevens

A buoyant early-70s anthem that turns hope for global reconciliation into a literal vehicle, imagined as a train that anyone can…

utopian hope collective longing for peace spiritual/religious undertones

If I Ever See You Again

Roberta Flack

A quiet, aching ballad built around a single conditional wish -- the hope of a reunion the singer knows may never come. Flack…

longing regret idealized love

Should Have Known Better

Sufjan Stevens

A song about the aftermath of a mother's abandonment and death, staged as a private argument between numbness and the…

maternal abandonment and grief emotional repression childhood memory

Change Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Otis Redding's cover of Sam Cooke's civil-rights-era anthem strips the original's orchestral polish into raw, gospel-inflected…

racial oppression and hope endurance and exhaustion fear of mortality

On the Turning Away

Pink Floyd

A gentle, hymn-like protest song that addresses complacency toward poverty and suffering directly, using the recurring image of…

social indifference collective responsibility moral awakening

Chance for Us

Todd Rundgren

A relationship-in-crisis song built almost entirely around one anxious question: is it too late to save this. Rundgren keeps the…

relationship ambivalence the possibility of repair time running out

Philadelphia

Neil Young

A spare, hymn-like address to fear and mortality, written for Jonathan Demme's film about a man dying of AIDS-related illness…

mortality stigma and shame need for belonging

South Side

Moby

This is Moby's spare, half-sung meditation built around a repeating road-trip refrain that cycles through the four points of the…

urban danger friendship and loyalty hope versus fear

O Holy Night

Mariah Carey

This is Mariah Carey's rendition of the 19th-century Christmas carol, treated less as a historical text than as a vehicle for…

religious redemption hope after despair reverence

Take a Chance with Me

Roxy Music

A quiet plea for romantic risk-taking from a narrator who has been burned by love before. The song trades Roxy Music's earlier…

romantic vulnerability emotional fatigue hope after disappointment

Traveling Alone

Jason Isbell

A recovering man takes stock of a life spent moving through places without anyone to share them with, and asks someone directly…

recovery from addiction loneliness and isolation vulnerability and asking for help

Happy Birthday

Stevie Wonder

A deceptively simple birthday singalong that Stevie Wonder uses as a political vehicle, campaigning for a U.S. national holiday…

civil rights memory collective celebration as protest racial justice and equality

Northern Sky

Nick Drake

A quiet love song built almost entirely from negation and plea, in which the speaker describes a lifetime of numbness suddenly…

awakening through love isolation and wandering doubt and vulnerability

F.U.B.U.

Solange

F.U.B.U. is a direct address to Black listeners, reclaiming the phrase 'for us, by us' as a statement of cultural ownership. The…

Black solidarity cultural ownership racial profiling

It Could Be Sweet

Portishead

A hushed, anxious meditation on a relationship threatened by fear rather than betrayal, where the possibility of tenderness is…

fear of intimacy self-doubt conditional hope

I Want You (Vocal)

Marvin Gaye

A slow-burning plea for mutual desire, built almost entirely on repetition of a single wish stated and restated until it becomes…

unreciprocated desire longing for mutuality vulnerability in seduction

Itsy Bitsy Spider

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

I'll Fly Away

Mississippi John Hurt

This is less a full performance than a fragment captured on tape: Mississippi John Hurt sings the familiar gospel chorus of the…

incompleteness oral tradition humility

If You Needed Somebody

Bad Company

A late-period Bad Company track built around a simple, almost adolescent premise: a narrator paralyzed by unspoken feelings for…

unrequited longing fear of rejection romantic timidity

The Believer

Common

Common builds a hymn out of hip-hop's contradictions, weaving together images of urban violence, spiritual conviction, and Black…

faith and endurance urban violence and its roots Black historical legacy

Thunderbuck Ram

Mott the Hoople

An instrumental-heavy Mott the Hoople track built around a sparse, questioning lyric that reads almost as a fragment or an…

existential doubt hope for change fatalism versus agency

Can We Pretend

Bill Withers

A quiet plea for a fresh start in a relationship that both partners know is damaged. Withers doesn't argue that the past didn't…

emotional avoidance fragile intimacy hope against evidence

Old Rugged Cross

Loretta Lynn

This is Loretta Lynn's rendition of the 1913 hymn by George Bennard, a foundational piece of American Protestant devotional song…

redemption sacrifice faith and devotion

Even Flow

Pearl Jam

A portrait of a homeless man drawn through fragmented, impressionistic images rather than a linear story. The song's title…

homelessness mental illness social invisibility

Freedom Highway

The Staple Singers

A gospel-soul anthem written as a marching chant, tracking the Civil Rights Movement's literal and spiritual momentum. The…

civil rights and racial justice collective resolve gospel faith as political power

Blackbird

The Beatles

A solo acoustic miniature built on a single extended image: an injured bird urged to fly. McCartney has said it was inspired by…

resilience emancipation civil rights (coded)

Shake It Out

Florence + the Machine

A confessional anthem about trying to physically expel guilt and self-recrimination, built around the image of dancing off a…

guilt and self-forgiveness cyclical regret catharsis through movement

Starting Over

Chris Stapleton

A road-trip song about leaving a stale life behind for the sake of a relationship, built on plainspoken folk-country imagery of…

renewal and reinvention risk and commitment partnership over place

It Can Happen

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

Pacifics (From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “N.Y. Is Red Hot")

Digable Planets

Digable Planets turn a Sunday in New York into an extended meditation on rest, community, and creative replenishment, moving…

urban leisure and rest Black cultural inheritance (jazz, literature, hip-hop lineage) community and belonging

World On Fire

Dolly Parton

A protest anthem built on a nursery-rhyme taunt, cataloguing political dishonesty, social division and violence while insisting…

political disillusionment social division moral urgency