Results for “longing for grounding/mortality”

Songs

Feeling Mortal

Kris Kristofferson

A late-career meditation on aging and mortality, written by a man in his mid-seventies confronting his reflection and his…

aging and mortality self-scrutiny gratitude amid decline

I Won't Be Long

Beck

A brief, hook-driven single that trades in fragmentary, almost dissociated imagery of division and delay, wrapped around a…

impending departure social division sensory disorientation

Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time)

Elton John

A spaceman narrates the mundane dread of leaving home for another routine off-world shift, and finds the glamour of space travel…

alienation the gap between public and private self domestic loss

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

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

Long Division

Fugazi

A short, incantatory piece built around a single arithmetic metaphor for a relationship's dissolution. Fugazi strip the lyric…

breakup and separation refusal of blame fracture as survival

Mary Long

Deep Purple

A snarling caricature of moral censorship, this track invents a composite figure of public prudishness and spends three verses…

hypocrisy censorship sexual repression

Love Is a Long Road

Tom Petty

A mid-tempo Heartbreakers-style rocker built around a single deflating refrain: whatever romance is being described, the song…

disillusionment with romantic idealism emotional exhaustion letting go

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…

restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom

Four Long Years

Wire

A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…

mental exhaustion alienation failure of language

Long Legged Larry

Aesop Rock

A children's-book superhero story about a heroic frog who rescues people (and a poodle) from peril, delivered with a straight…

heroism as ritual childlike wonder absurdism

Long Black Veil

Rosanne Cash

A ghost narrates his own wrongful execution, explaining that he chose death over revealing the affair that would have cleared…

forbidden love silence and secrecy guilt and sacrifice

Sky Full of Song

Florence + the Machine

A song about the exhaustion of being airborne — famous, adored, untethered — and the desperate wish to be pulled back to earth.…

fame and burnout codependency and distance in relationships self-destruction

Everything Beautiful Is Far Away

Grandaddy

A stranded astronaut, long resigned to isolation on some barren world, walks toward a mirage of swans on a lake he's never seen…

isolation longing mortality and acceptance

Now And Then

The Beatles

A simple, unguarded love plea built from a demo John Lennon left behind, completed decades later by his surviving bandmates. The…

longing mortality and memory reunion

Water Curses

Animal Collective

A dreamlike wish-song built around water as an image of fluidity, ease, and self-erasure, drifting through loosely connected…

desire for formlessness/transformation mortality and impermanence creativity and artistic longing

Tennessee Song

Margo Price

A pastoral invitation song that turns into something stranger: a plea to leave the city for rural Tennessee that widens into…

longing for rural simplicity mortality and impermanence land and dispossession

Battery Kinzie

Fleet Foxes

A short, dread-laced folk song about arriving too late for a lost love, told through images of bodily decay and a locked door.…

loss and abandonment decay and mortality possessiveness/control

New Slang

The Shins

A hushed, melodically sweet song about romantic regret and a wish to shed adult disappointment carries lyrics that are far more…

regret and self-recrimination longing for innocence small-town disillusionment

Grown Ocean

Fleet Foxes

The closing track of Helplessness Blues describes a visionary dream-state of peace and permanence, set against a waking world of…

dreams versus waking life longing for peace impermanence and mortality

Lover Lover Lover

Leonard Cohen

A prayer disguised as a love song, built from a dialogue between a son and a father-God about shame, embodiment, and the…

shame and self-loathing faith and divine dialogue the body as trial

Give Me the Cure

Fugazi

A short, blunt meditation on mortality that treats death not as an abstract idea but as a physical sensation intruding on the…

mortality denial and avoidance illness or loss

I Gotta Get Drunk

George Jones

A honky-tonk confessional in which the narrator describes his own drinking as an inevitability rather than a choice, framing…

compulsive drinking fatalism disguised as humor social ritual of the bar

Lay Me Down

Loretta Lynn

A late-career meditation on mortality that treats death not as an ending to fear but as the final release from a hard life.…

mortality faith and afterlife weariness and endurance

September When It Comes

Rosanne Cash

A meditation on mortality and inherited fate, written in the voice of someone reckoning with the end of life while looking back…

mortality inheritance/family legacy acceptance

Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet)

Lucinda Williams

An early Lucinda Williams ballad addressed to an idealized poet-lover, mixing plainspoken country-blues devotion with a fantasy…

idealized love escapism artistic admiration

For All We Know

Abbey Lincoln

A standard-era torch song built on a single plea: seize the present because permanence is never guaranteed. Abbey Lincoln's…

carpe diem uncertainty of the future mortality

Who's Gonna Miss Me?

Loretta Lynn

A late-life meditation on legacy, sung as a plain, repeated question rather than a boast. Loretta Lynn strips away career…

mortality legacy humility

Oh Very Young

Cat Stevens

A meditation on mortality and inheritance addressed to a child, using the wearing-out of a pair of jeans as an emblem for how…

mortality impermanence legacy and inheritance

Don't Know Why

Smokey Robinson

A spare confession of regret builds around a single unanswered question: why didn't the narrator show up for someone waiting.…

regret emotional paralysis longing

Touch

Seal

A sparse, almost incantatory song about physical absence and longing, built less on narrative than on the repetition of sensory…

longing memory of intimacy loss

Montezuma

Fleet Foxes

An opening-track meditation on aging and mortality, framed as a young man surprised to find himself already past the age at…

mortality aging and belated adulthood self-doubt

Scattered

The Kinks

A meditation on dispersal that moves from an agrarian image of scattered seeds to personal grief over a lost lover, and finally…

mortality loss and grief impermanence

White Christmas

Otis Redding

Otis Redding takes the Irving Berlin standard and rebuilds it as soul testimony, stretching its plain, nostalgic lines into…

nostalgia longing devotion

Who Tells Your Story

The Roots

A meditation on legacy and mortality built around the Hamilton-borrowed refrain about who survives to tell one's story. Three…

legacy and memory mortality Black identity and violence

Ascension Day

Talk Talk

Ascension Day is a fractured, almost liturgical piece of wordplay built from gambling terms and religious imagery, where the…

fate and predestination gambling as spiritual metaphor guilt and judgement

Hurt

Johnny Cash

A cover written originally as a young man's meditation on self-harm and numbness becomes, in Johnny Cash's version, an old man's…

mortality regret addiction and self-destruction

Philadelphia

Neil Young

A spare, hymn-like address to fear and mortality, written for Jonathan Demme's film about a man dying of AIDS-related illness…

mortality stigma and shame need for belonging

Coffin Nails

MF DOOM

Coffin Nails is an instrumental beat from MF DOOM's Special Herbs series, the long-running set of production-only tracks he…

mortality vice and self-destruction underground hip-hop craft

Do Anything You Want to Do

Thin Lizzy

An anthem of defiant self-assertion built almost entirely from imperative pep-talk and repeated affirmation, warning the…

self-empowerment social pressure and gossip autonomy vs. conformity