The Doors
A straight blues workout built on a single inverted-fortune boast, this track uses the twelve-bar form's repetition to turn…
confinement and release blues tradition/lineage sexual demand
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
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
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
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
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
Seal
This is Seal's cover of the Otis Redding soul standard, a slow-burning plea from a lover watching devotion curdle into…
one-sided devotion fear of abandonment emotional dependency
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
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
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
Wire
A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…
mental exhaustion alienation failure of language
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
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
Death Cab for Cutie
A song about distance rendered as flood myth: the ocean between two people is imagined as newly created, cutting off any…
long-distance separation longing creation myth as metaphor
James Blake
A stripped-down love song that uses apocalyptic imagery as a backdrop for devotion, insisting that romantic commitment outlasts…
devotion under catastrophe mortality and time faith in another person
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
Wilco
A hushed, fragmented meditation on depression and long-distance love, sung as a repeated apology and self-diagnosis. The song…
depression and emotional numbness distance in relationships failure of communication
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
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
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
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
Otis Redding
Otis Redding takes the Irving Berlin standard and rebuilds it as soul testimony, stretching its plain, nostalgic lines into…
nostalgia longing devotion
Al Green
Al Green takes a mid-century ballad already worn smooth by decades of cover versions and slows it down further, turning its plea…
longing and separation time as erosion faith and supplication
Television
A hushed, drifting piece from Television's second album, built around a single confession: the speaker keeps getting swept along…
passivity and surrender dissolution of self memory and its distortions
Frank Ocean
Frank Ocean's 2018 cover strips the classic Mancini/Mercer standard down to its skeleton, treating the original as a found…
longing transience companionship
A simple, tender travel song built around a single promise: the singer will return to a loved one when the day ends. Sandy Denny…
longing separation and reunion homecoming
The Louvin Brothers
A plain, pleading country ballad built entirely around a single conditional wish: to win the love of someone who remains just…
unrequited love longing devotion
Broken Social Scene
A hushed, hypnotic plea built almost entirely from conditional clauses and a repeated invitation to go home, undercut by a…
emotional numbness conditional intimacy self-doubt
Richard Thompson
A short, circling song built almost entirely around one unspoken sentence: the narrator never told a former lover he loved her,…
emotional inarticulacy regret unfinished endings
Alison Krauss
A quiet ballad about someone pleading with a former lover to stay rather than chase whatever new horizon has caught their…
lost love longing the pull of the new versus the familiar
Patsy Cline
A weary adult voice imagines borrowing a child's unclouded vision as a way of escaping accumulated disappointment. The song…
lost innocence nostalgia for childhood perception weariness with adult disillusionment
Nat King Cole
A classic Mexican bolero of total devotion, in which the speaker surrenders his heart, his being, and even his sense of the…
romantic surrender idealized love devotion as faith
Chet Baker
This is an instrumental reading of the pop standard "Tangerine" as performed by Chet Baker, likely on trumpet (possibly with a…
longing romantic nostalgia exoticism/escapism
Emmylou Harris
A brief, aching lament built on a single stubborn contradiction: the singer knows she should be done with a lover who doesn't…
unrequited love self-deception longing
Billie Holiday
A standard from the American songbook, this rendition finds Holiday addressing the moon as a witness to loneliness and its…
loneliness longing transformation through love
Burial
"Loner" is an instrumental piece built almost entirely from a chopped, pitch-shifted vocal sample looping over a skittering,…
urban isolation nightlife and rave nostalgia fragmented communication
Nick Drake
A quiet, almost unbearably direct song built entirely around a single repeated question, addressed to someone the narrator loves…
romantic uncertainty fear of rejection self-doubt
Roberta Flack
A quiet, aching ballad built around a single conditional wish -- the hope of a reunion the singer knows may never come. Flack…
longing regret idealized love
This piece reads less like a finished lyric than a raw studio artifact: a repetitive, formulaic love song built almost entirely…
longing distance repetition as devotion
A simple, wistful song built on a single wish: that the singer could trade her adult, disillusioned view of the world for a…
lost innocence nostalgia for childhood disillusionment with adulthood