George Michael
A cover of Ewan MacColl's 1957 folk standard, rendered here as a slow, orchestral torch ballad. George Michael strips the song…
first love devotion transcendence through intimacy
Merle Haggard
A late-career protest song from Merle Haggard arguing that American resources and attention spent overseas should be redirected…
war-weariness economic neglect populist nationalism
Brian Eno
An instrumental piano-and-synthesizer piece from Eno and Harold Budd's ambient collaboration, built around slow, spaced piano…
dawn/threshold states stillness gradual emergence
Emmylou Harris
This is a straightforward reading of the traditional English carol, with Emmylou Harris's plainspoken vocal treating the…
nativity narrative revelation and light humility of shepherds
Mitski
A song about the vertigo of infatuation, where love feels less like comfort than like standing on a ledge. Mitski's narrator…
romantic obsession fear of vulnerability arrested emotional development
Creedence Clearwater Revival
A cover of the Gene Pitney-penned, Ricky Nelson-popularized 1961 pop-rock standard, this Mardi Gras rendition is CCR playing it…
love at first sight teenage infatuation nostalgia for early rock and roll
James Taylor
A wary lover talks himself through the mechanics of seduction, weighing candor against caution and settling on strategic…
romantic strategy vs. sincerity fear of vulnerability self-aware manipulation
Bright Eyes
A love song that frames romantic awakening as literal birth, treating the beginning of a relationship as the true start of…
rebirth through love vulnerability and slowness self-doubt versus hope
Arab Strap
A spoken-word, diary-style account of one long weekend of drinking, clubbing, and low-level social friction in a Scottish town,…
youthful drift and boredom drink and drug culture as social glue failed or awkward romance
Nick Drake
A quiet catalog of unrealized selves, sung by someone who lists all the modest, useful things he might have become instead of…
unfulfilled potential self-doubt longing for ordinariness
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
Eddie Floyd
A Southern soul singer transplanted to Los Angeles writes a direct, uncomplicated love song to a woman he's just met, framing…
infatuation at first sight romantic devotion place as metaphor for a person
X
This is X's version of the garage-rock standard, stripped down and repeated almost to the point of incantation. Rather than…
infatuation desire uncertainty about love
Blondie
A cover of a 1963 girl-group style bubblegum tune, reworked by Blondie into a knowing new wave valentine that trades on…
infatuation surface pleasure and artifice girl-group nostalgia
Mariah Carey
A buoyant celebration of infatuation that lives entirely in the space between attraction and consummation, where the pleasure…
infatuation escapism desire and daydream
The Stooges
Little Doll is a two-minute blues-punk grind built on a simple crush and a raw, repeated command to move. Its lyric barely…
infatuation objectification desire vs. distance
Anita O’Day
This is Anita O'Day's vocal-jazz treatment of the Fats Waller standard, a breezy declaration of infatuation built entirely on…
infatuation sweetness as metaphor public admiration
Billie Eilish
A hushed debut single built around a single extended metaphor: a pair of eyes compared to the ocean, standing in for the…
infatuation vulnerability fear of intimacy
Lupe Fiasco
A straightforward pop-rap infatuation song in which Lupe Fiasco uses the language of songcraft itself—hooks, choruses, verses—as…
infatuation obsession music as metaphor for love
The xx
A duet-style track built around the exhilaration and risk of falling into infatuation, with the two vocalists trading lines that…
infatuation vulnerability risk-taking in love
Michael Jackson
A buoyant, physically driven declaration of infatuation built almost entirely around a single hook that gets repeated, echoed,…
infatuation desire and pursuit possessiveness
Madonna
A buoyant early-80s dance-pop confection that turns a childhood wishing-star rhyme into an adult love song, celebrating…
infatuation luck and fate celestial imagery
Jamiroquai
A breezy declaration of infatuation built around a single repeated hook, this track trades narrative complexity for pure…
infatuation the ineffability of attraction romantic devotion
Humble Pie
A short, almost skeletal love song built around the old rock-and-roll conceit of the heart skipping a beat, borrowed and…
infatuation the body as evidence of love repetition and ritual
Beirut
A brief, deceptively cheerful pop song built almost entirely from a wordless vocal hook, with a single quatrain of lyric…
infatuation uncertainty urgency
Queen
A slight, groove-driven vignette about attraction to someone effortlessly stylish and self-possessed, filtered through…
infatuation cool detachment vs. desire surface style over substance
Lauryn Hill
This is Lauryn Hill's rendition of the 1967 Frankie Valli classic, placed on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a brief,…
infatuation gratitude vulnerability
A slow-dance ballad built around a single moment: crossing a crowded room toward someone and closing the distance between…
infatuation vulnerability physical desire
Joan Armatrading
A love song built almost entirely on declaration rather than incident: a narrator confesses an all-consuming attachment, admits…
infatuation self-aware sentimentality gratitude/luck
Disclosure
Tenderly is an early, largely instrumental-minded Disclosure track where a handful of vocal phrases are looped and reconfigured…
infatuation obsession as repetition minimalism
Vince Gill
A country love song built around the physical panic of infatuation rather than its resolution. The narrator never gets to…
unrequited longing vulnerability idealization
Big Star
A brief, almost naive love song stripped of metaphor and complication, where a man expresses plain astonishment at feeling love…
first love emotional vulnerability simplicity as sincerity
Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
Frank Ocean
A meditation on a formative teenage love, remembered from the vantage of adulthood with all the contradictions of nostalgia…
nostalgia and lost innocence first love memory's unreliability
The Pretenders
A giddy, slightly defensive love song built around a single repeated plea: don't misread my erratic behavior as indifference.…
infatuation and its contradictions fear of being misunderstood impermanence versus commitment
James Blake
A hazy meditation on romantic infatuation so intense it blurs into hallucination, James Blake's song treats intimacy as…
infatuation and disbelief dissolution of time psychedelic imagery of love
Tears for Fears
A love song that keeps interrupting itself, veering between romantic infatuation and anxious social commentary before dissolving…
infatuation and vulnerability fear of loss social conscience amid personal desire
The Divine Comedy
A playful, slightly starstruck pop sketch of the eighteenth-century Russian empress, delivered with Neil Hannon's trademark mix…
hero worship power and intellect historical pastiche
Ella Fitzgerald
A standard-issue torch song from the Great American Songbook, "Misty" describes the disorientation of falling helplessly in…
helpless infatuation surrender of control sensory overwhelm
Björk
Björk's cover reworks a 1951 Betty Hutton novelty tune into a dynamic set piece where hushed, orchestral verses collapse into…
the volatility of infatuation quiet vs. chaos as emotional states the absurdity of romantic obsession