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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
Television
A slow, piano-led ballad from Marquee Moon's back half, this song trades the album's angular guitar interplay for something…
disorientation longing for stability romantic uncertainty
Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye sketches a wish list for a monogamous, church-going partner against a mid-80s backdrop of promiscuity and disease…
sexual anxiety in the AIDS/herpes era the sacred vs. the profane desire for domestic stability
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
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
Otis Redding
Otis Redding takes the Irving Berlin standard and rebuilds it as soul testimony, stretching its plain, nostalgic lines into…
nostalgia longing devotion
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
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
A slow-building meditation on desire built from small domestic gestures rather than declarations. Williams narrates a private…
longing memory and its physical trace solitary desire
Moby
Built almost entirely from a looped vocal sample lifted from old field-recording blues, this track treats lyrics as sound…
longing repetition as form sampling and folk memory
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
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
The xx
A short, spare meditation on the way absence corrodes trust in a relationship, where the beloved's reality becomes…
insecurity in intimacy fear of abandonment the unreliability of perception
Sarah Vaughan
A standard by Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington, here rendered by Sarah Vaughan as an intimate meditation on physical presence…
desire and presence the inadequacy of romantic cliché vulnerability
Pearl Jam
This is a cover of The Who's 1973 track, rendered here for a film soundtrack about grief and recovery. Pearl Jam's version leans…
longing emotional drought catharsis
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's cover of the Carpenters' "Superstar" strips the original's lush orchestration down to a slow, droning haze,…
one-sided obsession loneliness the falseness of mediated intimacy
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
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
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
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
A young man begs a train conductor to reverse course so he can return to a lover he left too hastily. Al Green, still developing…
regret and reversal longing isolation
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
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
The War on Drugs
An instrumental-forward, motorik rock track from Lost in the Dream whose lyrics function almost as texture rather than narrative…
emotional distance self-doubt longing
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
Chet Baker
This is an instrumental reading of the Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg standard, recorded by Chet Baker on his 1962 comeback album Chet…
longing exile and return faded innocence