Boards of Canada
An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's Trans Canada Highway EP, built around warm analog synth pads, a loping mid-tempo…
travel and transit nostalgia analog memory
Kraftwerk
A minimal, almost documentary description of driving on the German highway becomes the pretext for a 22-minute electronic tone…
motion and travel modernity and technology landscape observed from a car
Frank Sinatra
This is Katharine Lee Bates's 1893 hymn to the American landscape, set to Samuel A. Ward's melody and delivered here as a…
national pride natural landscape as moral symbol idealism and unity
Björk
Björk voices the ocean itself as a primordial mother addressing humanity, tracing evolution from sea to land in tender, cosmic…
origin and evolution maternal address deep time versus human time
Bonobo
Black Sands is the title track of Bonobo's 2010 album, an instrumental built from slow-accumulating strings, breakbeats, and…
landscape and place tension between organic and electronic textures gradual transformation
Lucinda Williams
A childhood memory of restless traveling through the rural South, told from inside a car and a kitchen at once, where domestic…
childhood memory displacement and rootlessness the unreliability of home
Weezer
This is Weezer's note-for-note cover of Toto's 1982 hit, so the words themselves are unchanged; what shifts is the frame. Sung…
longing and distance exoticized landscape as metaphor devotion versus escape
Soundgarden
A hazy, dissonant piece of psychedelia dressed as a pop single, in which a decaying suburban landscape is invited to be…
apocalyptic longing decay and disguise escapism
Gang Starr
This is a straight-up hip-hop statement of purpose: Guru surveys a rap landscape he considers watered down and reasserts Gang…
artistic integrity authenticity vs. commercialism spiritual/moral authority
Joy Division
A tense, dreamlike monologue in which the speaker searches an urban and psychic landscape for someone he seems to have already…
guilt and complicity urban alienation performance of identity
Bonnie “Prince” Billy
A quiet, hymn-like meditation built around a wandering figure who walks alone through open landscape while a companion goes…
solitude and companionship pilgrimage/journey spiritual surrender
Röyksopp
A hazy meditation on visibility and distance between two people who are moving through the same landscape without ever truly…
invisibility and unrecognition distance within closeness self-mythologizing
Phoebe Bridgers
A road-trip through American landscapes and personal apocalypse, where the singer's private exhaustion with a relationship and a…
apocalypse (personal and national) homesickness and rootlessness burnout and exhaustion in relationships
Arcade Fire
An early, unpolished Arcade Fire track that turns highway traffic signals into a private code for a relationship's uncertain…
distance and longing uncertainty about the future isolation
Van Morrison
Van Morrison's title track drifts through a hazy, half-remembered landscape in search of rebirth and connection, using dreamlike…
rebirth and renewal spiritual longing displacement
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
Eurythmics
This is a cover of the 1934 standard, recorded for a mid-1980s charity Christmas compilation, and it plays the song fairly…
young romance seasonal escapism imaginative play
Abbey Lincoln
Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…
ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation