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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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