Kathleen Edwards
A woman tallies a decade-plus of unglamorous domestic labor and emotional endurance in a marriage that has quietly failed her,…
domestic labor and its invisibility marital exhaustion divorce/separation aftermath
Nanci Griffith
A portrait of a marriage collapsing under the weight of one partner's erratic, self-destructive restlessness. The speaker…
marital breakdown restlessness as self-destruction isolation
Bruce Springsteen
A weary account of a marriage stalled between inertia and infidelity, where domestic breakdown is mapped onto small mechanical…
marital stagnation emotional exhaustion temptation and restraint
Thom Yorke
A meditation on modern overload, "Analyse" pairs images of endless data and abstraction with a numbing sense of exhaustion. It…
information overload alienation exhaustion
Cat Power
Cat Power strips the Rolling Stones' garage-rock anthem of its swagger and turns it into something hushed, sad, and almost…
alienation commercial saturation exhaustion
Michael Jackson
A frantic, groove-driven complaint disguised as a love song: the narrator is exhausted not by manual labor but by the endless…
overwork as metaphor for unreciprocated effort suspicion and jealousy exhaustion
Talk Talk
A short, largely instrumental hymn from Talk Talk's most spacious record, "Inheritance" uses fragmentary pastoral imagery and a…
ecological loss denial and complacency spiritual longing
Jason Isbell
A working-class narrator describes his days through the rhythm of manual labor, framing exhaustion and diminished expectation as…
labor and class faith as consolation resignation vs. dignity
Solange
A hushed, weary meditation on withdrawal as an act of love, this A Seat at the Table track frames stepping back from public and…
burnout and self-care solidarity under pressure the personal as political
Deerhunter
Breaker is a survivor's song, written by Bradford Cox after a near-fatal car accident, that treats staying alive as an act of…
mortality and survival fate versus agency spiritual ambivalence
Free
A late-period Free track that trades narrative for mantra, circling the questions of what love and life amount to before…
exhaustion self-forgiveness spiritual uncertainty
Sam Cooke
A first-person testimony of endurance under racial oppression, built around a single hope that refuses to die even as evidence…
racial injustice endurance faith and doubt
Tom Petty
A weary drifter narrates a string of disconnected, half-hallucinated road episodes while returning again and again to a single…
dependency and returning exhaustion transience/drifting
My Morning Jacket
This is a live cover of the Mark James song made famous by Elvis Presley, performed by My Morning Jacket. The lyric itself is a…
romantic entrapment jealousy and distrust pleading for reconciliation
Beck
A quiet, weary breakup song in which the narrator addresses a partner who is emotionally unreachable, cataloguing small signs of…
romantic exhaustion emotional withdrawal resignation
Traffic
A road-worn account of touring life, set to a loose groove that mirrors its subject's fatigue and drift. The song moves from…
touring exhaustion rootlessness alienation from ordinary life
The Rolling Stones
A ballad of exhausted devotion, where a narrator caught between wanting to leave and being unable to admits that love has…
ambivalent love emotional exhaustion freedom versus attachment
The Strokes
A breakup song dressed in a falsetto so bright it almost disguises the exhaustion underneath. The Strokes borrow an A-ha style…
romantic ambivalence conformity vs. escape emotional exhaustion
Uncle Tupelo
This is a fragmented, road-song meditation on drift and exhaustion, built from disconnected images—driving, watching someone's…
exhaustion and burnout emotional guardedness aimlessness/transience
Joy Division
The closing track of Closer functions as a bleak epilogue, surveying damage already done rather than describing an unfolding…
exhaustion and burnout damaged youth ritual and repetition without release
Erykah Badu
A woman recounts a night out where she was the object of relentless attention -- and chooses solitude over it, retreating home…
fame and desirability as burden solitude as self-care withdrawal from male attention
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin sings a ballad about love curdling into pain without dying outright, where the couple still cares but has lost…
love and suffering intertwined emotional exhaustion fear of vulnerability
Hüsker Dü
A weary interrogation of a relationship on the edge of collapse, built almost entirely from a single repeated question and a…
emotional exhaustion concealment and self-deception ambivalence in love
A weary declaration of devotion dressed up as a refusal: the singer insists he won't be exploited or taken for granted, even as…
emotional labor in relationships self-worth and insecurity devotion disguised as protest
Sturgill Simpson
A road-weary musician catalogs the exhausting fakeness of fame—hangers-on, journalists, and industry rituals—while using…
fame and its costs authenticity vs. performance exhaustion and disillusionment
The Go-Betweens
A song of consolation addressed to a woman worn down by a failed relationship, offered by a speaker who positions himself as…
emotional exhaustion consolation and care gendered heartbreak
John Martyn
This is John Martyn's reworking of Portishead's 'Glory Box', stripped of its trip-hop menace and turned into a weary, aching…
exhaustion with games surrender to desire gender roles and reversal
Radiohead
A quiet, devastating song about the exhaustion of living inauthentically, built on an extended metaphor of synthetic materials…
inauthenticity and artifice emotional exhaustion commodified relationships
Gillian Welch
A domestic relationship is quietly buckling under exhaustion and unnamed psychological strain, and the narrator responds not…
relational exhaustion mental distress avoidance and deflection
R.E.M.
A hazy, mandolin-driven meditation on emotional isolation, where the narrator describes distance not as geography but as a…
emotional distance self-imposed isolation exhaustion and numbness
Angel Olsen
A breakup song that refuses the genre's usual apology, opting instead for flat, exhausted clarity about a relationship that has…
emotional exhaustion the end of a long relationship refusal of guilt
Solange catalogs every failed strategy for numbing an unnamed grief or unease, building a list of avoidance tactics before…
avoidance and denial emotional exhaustion consumerism as coping mechanism
Broken Social Scene
A hazy, minimal song built around one blunt image repeated until it loses its shock and becomes atmosphere. Broken Social Scene…
intimacy and exhaustion growing up reluctantly ambiguous consent
The Cure
A breakup song built on exhaustion rather than anger: the speaker addresses a partner named Elise and admits that whatever…
emotional exhaustion failed intimacy self-deception
An eight-minute drift of near-abstract imagery that reads more like liturgy than lyric, built from fragments about crowds,…
collective violence spiritual exhaustion biblical allusion (Cain)
A slow, hymn-like meditation on exhaustion and self-possession, "Weary" opens the emotional register of A Seat at the Table by…
exhaustion and endurance Black womanhood and dignity mortality of power
Peter Gabriel
A love song that treats romantic devotion as a form of spiritual salvation, where another person's gaze becomes the only stable…
romantic devotion as salvation spiritual longing expressed through eros restlessness and escape
The title track of The Strokes' debut is a woozy, deadpan meditation on romantic and existential exhaustion, delivered in a…
disaffection romantic dishonesty generational ennui
Al Green
Al Green's 1982 rendition of Thomas A. Dorsey's gospel standard is a plea for divine guidance sung from a place of physical and…
exhaustion and dependence faith as guidance death and crossing over
Mott the Hoople
A short, elliptical closer that reads like a benediction wrapped around exhaustion, with the singer casting himself as a diver…
exhaustion and burnout spiritual searching isolation