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
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
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
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
Bob Dylan
A six-minute address to a woman who has fallen out of privilege into destitution, delivered by a narrator who alternates between…
loss of status the fraudulence of privilege freedom through destitution
Marvin Gaye
A returning-soldier's-eye plea addressed to family members in turn — mother, brother, father — asking why grief and violence…
war and its cost at home generational misunderstanding police brutality and protest
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
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
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
Joni Mitchell
A three-part meditation in which the speaker sets a naive, image-drunk way of seeing against a disenchanted one, then refuses to…
disillusionment the limits of knowledge aging and changed perception
Prince
A slow, gospel-shaped ballad in which a speaker apologizes for hurting someone, then gradually widens the address from a single…
apology and regret failed intimacy that could not become friendship spiritual deliverance
The Beach Boys
A love song that opens by admitting its own limits "" the singer won't promise permanence "" and then spends the rest of its…
conditional devotion dependence and identity uncertainty as a form of honesty