Maxwell
Maxwell's cover of Kate Bush's 'This Woman's Work' turns a song about a man's helplessness during childbirth into a raw,…
helplessness impending loss regret
John Prine
Prine elegizes a real Kentucky town erased by strip mining, using a child's plea to his father as the frame for a broader story…
environmental destruction loss of home/place industrial 'progress' vs. nature
Gram Parsons
A hymn-structured elegy that mourns three losses in succession -- a young man killed in a car crash, a musician taken too soon,…
mortality and premature death grief and mourning faith and supplication
Nick Drake
A brief autobiographical arc compressed into a handful of couplets, tracing a movement from innocence through disillusionment to…
loss of innocence depression and fatigue dependency on another
Donny Hathaway
This is a live soul reinterpretation of the Beatles standard, in which Donny Hathaway strips the song of its chamber-pop…
loss and regret nostalgia as refuge romantic bewilderment
Fleetwood Mac
A breakup song delivered as calm prophecy rather than complaint. The singer grants her departing partner the freedom he asked…
romantic separation loneliness as consequence foresight and prophecy
Bob Dylan
A six-minute address to a woman who has fallen out of privilege into destitution, delivered by a narrator who alternates between…
loss of status the fraudulence of privilege freedom through destitution
Paul Simon
A reunion single from Simon and Garfunkel that reads as a bitter anti-nostalgia song, dismantling the idea of small-town…
small-town disillusionment loss of faith suppressed violence
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
Laura Marling
This is a cover of a mid-1960s folk standard, sung here in Laura Marling's plainspoken, weary register, about the impossibility…
itinerancy and escape addiction as self-medication romantic longing and loss
Marvin Gaye
A slow-burning soul lament in which the narrator addresses an absent lover across an unspecified distance, moving from tender…
romantic longing separation and absence memory and nostalgia
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