Results for “love and longing across time”

Songs

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…

longing and absence loss of self idealized love

Love of My Life

Queen

A piano ballad structured as a direct plea to a departing lover, built almost entirely on repetition rather than narrative…

romantic loss supplication and pleading possessiveness in love

Isn't She Lovely

Stevie Wonder

A new father's unfiltered, almost breathless reaction to the birth of his daughter, rendered as a series of rhetorical questions…

fatherhood and new birth gratitude love as creative/generative force

Love, Reign O'er Me

The Who

This is the climactic closing statement of Quadrophenia, a plea for emotional deliverance disguised as a weather report. The…

spiritual longing emotional exhaustion love as elemental force

Baby, This Love I Have

Minnie Riperton

A love song built around the anxiety of being misunderstood -- the singer insists that her feelings are genuine even if her…

communication and its failure reassurance devotion

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Veronica

Elvis Costello

A deceptively bouncy pop song about an elderly woman lost inside dementia, watched by relatives and caregivers who can no longer…

aging and memory loss identity erasure institutional care/neglect

Freeway of Love

Aretha Franklin

This is a driving-metaphor party song: sex and romance recast as a joyride down an open highway in a pink Cadillac. It's…

romantic/sexual liberation escape and momentum playfulness and flirtation

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom

Can't Take My Eyes Off of You (I Love You Baby)

Lauryn Hill

This is Lauryn Hill's faithful cover of the 1967 Frankie Valli pop standard, tucked into The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a…

romantic infatuation gratitude vulnerability

La La Love You

Pixies

A deliberately dumb, deadpan pastiche of teen pop-song sincerity, sung by drummer David Lovering rather than the band's usual…

parody of pop romance adolescent sexuality irony through simplicity

Bizarre Love Triangle

New Order

A euphoric synth-pop track built on lyrics of paralysis and unspoken feeling: the narrator is caught between infatuation and…

romantic paralysis emotional confusion fear of vulnerability

Androgynous

The Replacements

A plainspoken piano ballad from a band better known for noise, this song sketches two gender-nonconforming characters and treats…

gender nonconformity tolerance vs. prejudice time and generational change

The Kiss

Judee Sill

Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' fuses erotic and devotional language until they become indistinguishable, imagining spiritual union as a…

sacred and profane love transcendence death as release

Boogie Street

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on the pull between transcendence and the grinding routine of ordinary commerce and appetite, imagined as a street…

sacred vs. profane mortality and impermanence spiritual longing amid worldly routine

Distant Lover

Marvin Gaye

A slow-burning soul lament in which the narrator addresses an absent lover across an unspecified distance, moving from tender…

romantic longing separation and absence memory and nostalgia

Flagship

Jason Isbell

Isbell uses a fading hotel as an extended metaphor for a long marriage at risk of going stale, watching an older couple's silent…

marital complacency the labor of sustaining love aging and decline

In My Life

The Beatles

A meditation on memory that moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to a declaration of present love, arguing that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the persistence of the past

Sweet Thing

Van Morrison

An ecstatic, almost breathless love lyric built from a chain of future-tense vows rather than a plot. The singer imagines a walk…

romantic rapture renewal/rebirth innocence regained

Tear-Stained Letter

Richard Thompson

A wry, uptempo account of a breakup told from the battered-but-wisecracking side, where physical comedy stands in for emotional…

romantic aftermath toxic love masculine bravado as deflection

Once in a Lifetime

Talking Heads

A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…

mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift

Christmas In the Room

Sufjan Stevens

A quiet domestic love song that strips Christmas of all its commercial and social trappings and relocates the holiday's meaning…

intimacy vs. commercialism presence over spectacle domestic love as sanctuary

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A hazy, sun-warmed meditation on being shaped and protected by someone else's love, set against a backdrop of natural disaster…

maternal or protective love survival and disaster memory and childhood

Bring On the Dancing Horses

Echo & the Bunnymen

A moody, image-driven post-punk lyric that trades narrative clarity for atmosphere, cycling through fragmented character…

emotional self-protection turning to cruelty isolation and alienation artifice versus authenticity

Gimme Shelter

The Rolling Stones

An apocalyptic weather report that turns into a plea for cover. Over a coiling, tremolo'd guitar figure and a hammering rhythm,…

apocalyptic dread violence as imminent, not distant the need for refuge

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A three-part meditation in waltz time that moves from a woman by a river, to Christ walking on water, and back to the woman…

erotic love as spiritual apprehension faith and doubt surrender to a guide

Back Up Train

Al Green

A young man addresses a train conductor directly, pleading for the impossible: reverse the train's direction so he can return to…

regret and reversal longing/separation loneliness

Superwoman

Gladys Knight

A domestic monologue in which a woman catalogs the daily labor she performs for a partner who has grown cold and inattentive,…

emotional labor and domestic care the myth of female self-sufficiency withdrawal and neglect in a relationship

Can't Get Enough

Bad Company

This is a lean, riff-driven blues-rock strut built almost entirely around a single confession of desire repeated until it…

desire and appetite masculine bravado transactional love

It's Good to Be King

Tom Petty

Tom Petty builds a wistful daydream around the fantasy of kingship, using royal imagery as a stand-in for escape from ordinary…

escapism fantasy vs. reality longing for control

Can We Pretend

Bill Withers

A wounded plea for a fresh start with a partner whose affection is unreliable, built almost entirely around one conditional…

conditional love emotional ambivalence denial as coping

Diamond Day

Vashti Bunyan

A short pastoral hymn that treats an ordinary rural day as something precious, using the smallest units of farm life to build…

rural simplicity contentment cyclical time

Beast Of Burden

The Rolling Stones

A weary plea for tenderness dressed up as a refusal to keep serving as someone's workhorse. The narrator insists he's given…

exhaustion in relationships emotional labor vs desire masculinity and self-worth

Keep Me in Your Heart

Warren Zevon

A dying man's direct, unsentimental request to be remembered, framed as a farewell letter set to a gentle, almost lullaby-like…

mortality memory and legacy love as continuity

You're the One for Me (feat. Joss Stone)

Smokey Robinson

A straightforward duet declaration of romantic certainty and fidelity, built around a duet pairing Smokey Robinson's classic…

romantic devotion fidelity certainty in love

Hush

Deep Purple

This is a cover of Joe South's garage-pop original, reworked by Deep Purple into a driving rock jam built around a simple…

obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love desire vs. self-control

Change Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Otis Redding's rendition of Sam Cooke's civil-rights-era anthem transforms a carefully wrought protest song into a raw,…

racial injustice and endurance faith versus doubt family and disappointment

Place to Be

Nick Drake

A brief autobiographical arc compressed into a handful of couplets, tracing a movement from innocence through disillusionment to…

loss of innocence depression and fatigue dependency on another

Disorder

Joy Division

Disorder opens Unknown Pleasures with a portrait of dissociation, a speaker who registers the world's speed and violence but…

emotional numbness dissociation longing for normalcy

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's version of this traditional folk-blues song reworks a prison-labor lament into swampy rock, keeping the old imagery of…

incarceration and forced labor longing for deliverance folk mythology / superstition