Bob Dylan
Dylan's cover of a call-and-response children's Christmas polka builds a cumulative list of Santa's attributes through a…
holiday ritual and repetition Americana and civic satire nonsense/novelty performance
Neil Young
A domestic sketch collides with a highway fantasy: the narrator remembers a diner waitress and imagines her alternate, freer…
restlessness and rootlessness domestic confinement vs. freedom idealization/myth-making
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a Mexican bandit's death and the shadowy figure who may have betrayed him, told with the flat affect of folklore…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and diminishment
Simon Jäger
A miniature allegory that maps the arc of a love affair onto the months of a calendar year, from spring arrival to autumn…
impermanence the natural cycle as metaphor for love loss and memory
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
Kate Bush
A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…
empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding