Results for “impermanence of memory and time”

Songs

Time After Time

Cassandra Wilson

Cassandra Wilson's version of the Cyndi Lauper standard slows the song into a meditative jazz ballad, trading pop urgency for a…

devotion amid distance memory and nostalgia time and its unreliability

Sleepy Time Time

Cream

A slow, blues-drenched miniature built almost entirely around one lazy phrase, this track works less as a story than as a mood…

refusal of work escapism laziness as pleasure

That Old Time Feeling

Guy Clark

A meditation on nostalgia and decline, built entirely from a chain of similes comparing an abstract feeling to aging, marginal…

nostalgia aging and decline loneliness

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like meditation on falling in love, told through three escalating 'first times' — seeing, kissing, and lying with a…

romantic awakening the sacredness of intimacy time and permanence

Memories

The Temptations

A ballad of retrospective heartbreak in which the narrator catalogues small domestic pleasures from a lost relationship,…

nostalgia loss of love unresolved grief

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Fairport Convention

A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the…

mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love

One For All Time

Chaka Khan

A ballad of retrospective longing in which the narrator revisits a lost love she still believes was singular and irreplaceable.…

nostalgia idealized past love yearning and denial

Funny How Time Slips Away

Al Green

A Willie Nelson standard reworked by Al Green into a slow-burning soul confrontation, where a chance meeting with an old lover…

lost love bitterness masked as pleasantry time and memory

Time Flies

Smokey Robinson

A late-career Smokey Robinson love song built around a single, almost proverbial complaint: time moves too fast when you're…

fleeting pleasure romantic contentment time and mortality

This Time Tomorrow

The Kinks

A song written from an airplane window seat, using the vantage of altitude to turn geographic distance into emotional and…

displacement touring life alienation from modernity

Time Has Told Me

Nick Drake

A quiet meditation on a love that seems both essential and doomed, framed as wisdom handed down by time itself rather than felt…

fatalism impermanence of love self-abnegation

Right In Time

Lucinda Williams

A slow-building meditation on desire built from small domestic gestures rather than declarations. Williams narrates a private…

longing memory and its physical trace solitary desire

Time's Up

Buzzcocks

A jittery catalogue of mundane waiting -- supermarket queues, phone calls, cigarettes -- becomes a comic study in erotic…

impatience and waiting sexual frustration consumer banality

Next Time

Laura Marling

A meditation on ecological dread and personal complicity, built almost entirely from the phrase 'it feels like,' as the narrator…

environmental collapse complicity and denial self-reproach

It's Going to Take Some Time

Carole King

A quiet post-breakup meditation in which the narrator refuses easy resolution, choosing patience over self-pity. Carole King…

heartbreak recovery self-forgiveness patience

Good Times

Sam Cooke

A loose, joyful party song built almost entirely on one repeated invitation: forget the clock and keep the good feeling going.…

carpe diem / seizing pleasure escape from time and obligation communal celebration

Doin' Time

Lana Del Rey

This is Lana Del Rey's faithful, lightly reworked cover of Sublime's 1996 track, itself a reggae-inflected reimagining of the…

betrayal and possessiveness local pride and belonging romantic disillusionment

Back Down Memory Lane

Minnie Riperton

A single found photograph pulls the narrator involuntarily into a past relationship she thought she'd buried. What starts as…

involuntary memory grief over lost love loss of control

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A Bob Dylan song given to Sandy Denny's voice becomes a study in absence: the singer measures every image of beauty and time…

longing and absence time as burden identity dissolved by loss

Wayside / Back In Time

Gillian Welch

A ramshackle travelogue through drink, drift, and old-time Nashville nostalgia, stitched to a chorus that keeps yearning to…

wandering and dissipation nostalgia for a vanishing Nashville romantic loss

Dirty Life and Times

Warren Zevon

This is Zevon's wry farewell song, opening the album he recorded while dying of mesothelioma, dressed as an outlaw's confession…

mortality and reckoning outlaw persona romantic failure

Bookends Theme

Simon Jäger

A brief solo acoustic guitar instrumental that opens Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album, built around a simple, wistful…

memory time passing nostalgia

Feel Flows

The Beach Boys

A near-abstract meditation by Carl Wilson that trades narrative for texture, using dense alliteration and impressionistic…

dissolution of self memory and time transcendence

I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)

Jamie xx

This Jamie xx track builds a euphoric, sample-driven dance anthem around a simple mantra of anticipated joy, then hands the mic…

anticipation and collective release hedonism and excess class and hustle

Nothing, Not Nearly

Laura Marling

A brief, elegiac song about a fading connection remembered mostly through fragments of landscape and season, arriving at a…

impermanence memory and forgetting depression and emotional numbness

Hands of Time

Margo Price

Margo Price lays out an autobiographical ballad of leaving home, losing a farm, and surviving hard years in the city, all in…

economic loss and displacement family loyalty grief and mortality

Time to Move On

Tom Petty

A meditation on departure and reinvention, built around a plain, almost mantra-like refrain that insists on forward motion even…

restlessness self-liberation uncertainty

One More Time

Daft Punk

A vocoder-processed voice loops a handful of phrases about celebration and dancing until the words stop functioning as narrative…

release through repetition collective celebration dissolution of self via technology (vocoder)

Never a Time

Genesis

A soft-rock ballad about a relationship stalled in avoidance -- two people who sense their love has died but can't find the…

emotional avoidance communication breakdown romantic disillusionment

Third of May / Ōdaigahara

Fleet Foxes

A sprawling, suite-like meditation on friendship, fracture, and reconciliation within Fleet Foxes, built around the real-life…

reconciliation after estrangement time and memory collective identity vs. individual selfhood

Cause = Time

Broken Social Scene

A dense, image-driven rock track that piles up fragmented, almost surreal accusations and slogans about belief, sex, and…

ideological fervor religious ambivalence collective identity vs individuality

All The Good Times

Angel Olsen

A breakup song that refuses the genre's usual apology, opting instead for flat, exhausted clarity about a relationship that has…

emotional exhaustion the end of a long relationship refusal of guilt

Saturday Sun

Nick Drake

A gentle waltz-time meditation on transience, built around the image of a single Saturday's sunlight that arrives, gathers…

transience nostalgia impermanence of happiness

Time Has Come Today

Ramones

This is the Ramones' cover of the Chambers Brothers' 1967 psychedelic-soul classic, stripped down and sped up into a two-minute…

generational urgency displacement/homelessness loss of love

One Day At a Time

Merle Haggard

This is a plainspoken gospel prayer sung from a position of exhaustion and humility, asking for the strength to survive the…

religious surrender humility and human limitation present-moment endurance

Real Cool Time

The Stooges

A two-part come-on built from almost nothing: a repeated request to come over, then a chant insisting the night ahead will be…

adolescent desire minimalism as provocation repetition and ritual

Big Time Sensuality

Björk

A euphoric, almost breathless meditation on giving in to a feeling too big to name, delivered as pure present-tense sensation…

surrender to the present moment intimacy without explanation courage as a precondition for pleasure

Beach Baby

Bon Iver

A short, hazy meditation on a departure that's treated with strange tenderness -- the singer asks a lover to leave without…

parting and impermanence memory intruding on the present ambivalence about closure

Leaves That Are Green

Simon Jäger

A young songwriter watches a single year of his life pass and turns that small span of time into a meditation on mortality and…

impermanence aging and time lost love

Let the Good Times Roll

Harry Nilsson

A stripped-down invitation to abandon restraint set to a rolling backbeat, the song works less as narrative than as incantation,…

seduction release/abandon repetition as persuasion