Results for “landscape observed from a car”

Songs

Car

Built to Spill

A hazy meditation on wanting revelation secondhand, "Car" pairs a plainspoken opening about borrowing a vehicle with a spiraling…

passive longing vicarious experience escape and inertia

Autobahn

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

You Are My Sunshine

Carly Simon

Carly Simon's version of this old folk standard strips it down to a hushed, almost prayer-like lullaby, trading the song's usual…

fragile love fear of loss comfort and vulnerability

Itsy Bitsy Spider

Carly Simon

Carly Simon splices the nursery rhyme about the persistent spider into the title track's refrain from her own 'Coming Around…

resilience cyclical hope romantic disappointment

409

The Beach Boys

An early Beach Boys car song that treats a Chevrolet engine like a lover and a racehorse at once, built almost entirely on chant…

car culture masculine pride and status consumerism/saving toward a goal

She's Lost Control

Joy Division

A stark, clinical account of watching someone lose command of their own body and mind, built around a mechanical repeated…

loss of control epilepsy/illness powerlessness of the observer

Jeepster

T. Rex

A glam-rock come-on that fuses car culture, cosmic imagery, and vampire slang into a single boastful seduction. Marc Bolan…

desire and objectification glamour of consumer culture (cars) seduction as performance

The Next Episode

Dr. Dre

A West Coast victory-lap posse cut in which Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg reassert their partnership and their region's dominance,…

regional pride hedonism and ritual (weed, cars, drinking) reunion/partnership

Once in a Lifetime

Talking Heads

A song about waking up inside a life you don't remember choosing, stitched together from the trappings of suburban success and a…

suburban alienation loss of agency time and repetition

Black Hole Sun

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

Long May You Run

Neil Young

Neil Young's elegy for a car that has died is written with such tenderness it plays as a breakup song or a eulogy for a person,…

loyalty and companionship loss and mortality nostalgia for youth

Gloria

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

Odessa

Caribou

A narrator watches a woman in an unhappy marriage build toward the moment she finally leaves, the story told through fragments…

domestic unhappiness female agency anticipation and delay

Kyoto

Phoebe Bridgers

A road-trip-slash-tour-diary song that uses the disorientation of foreign travel to circle around an unresolved relationship…

estrangement from a parent disillusionment with travel/escape ambivalence and self-contradiction

What Else Is There?

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

That's the Way the World Goes Round

John Prine

A shaggy-dog folk tune that shrugs at life's absurdity and cruelty in the same breath, moving from a domestic-violence vignette…

cyclical dysfunction absurdism resignation and acceptance

Thunder Road

Bruce Springsteen

A young man on a porch pleads with a woman named Mary to leave their fading town with him, framing an escape by car as both…

escape and flight romantic persuasion as salvation small-town limitation

Somewhere

Jimi Hendrix

A hallucinatory vision of social collapse filtered through a drinker's blurred perception, where reaching hands never quite…

social unrest spiritual longing alienation

So Fresh, So Clean

OutKast

A hook-driven strut through vintage cars, retro cool, and pickup lines, where the chorus's braggadocio functions less as…

vanity and self-presentation seduction and courtship rituals nostalgia for Black pop-culture iconography

Mile High

James Blake

A luxury-draped love song built on a Metro Boomin/Travis Scott feature that trades Blake's usual confessional ache for a more…

possessive intimacy material excess as emotional language fear of solitude

Winter Wonderland

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

Afro-Blue

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