Results for “maturation and settling down”

Songs

Settle

Gladys Knight

This is a direct-address motivational anthem, closer to a sermon set to music than a conventional narrative song. Gladys Knight…

self-empowerment faith and perseverance overcoming fear

Can You Feel the Love Tonight

Elton John

A ballad of quiet emotional arrival, written for the moment in The Lion King when a wandering young lion falls into…

romantic surrender maturation and settling down wonder at the natural world

The Adults Are Talking

The Strokes

The opening track of The New Abnormal frames a generational and interpersonal standoff as one continuous scene of…

generational conflict surveillance and judgment romantic ambivalence

You and I

Betty Davis

A slow, confessional ballad in which Betty Davis strips away the funk-rock swagger of her usual persona to admit vulnerability…

emotional vulnerability the gap between maturity and desire dependency versus independence

I'll Keep It With Mine

Fairport Convention

A Bob Dylan composition (famously covered rather than written by Fairport Convention) built around a gently insistent offer of…

seeking versus settling unspoken devotion time and transience

Montezuma

Fleet Foxes

An opening-track meditation on aging and mortality, framed as a young man surprised to find himself already past the age at…

mortality aging and belated adulthood self-doubt

Where You Lead I Will Follow

Carole King

A devotional pledge song built almost entirely around one refrain, this track reworks King's own earlier hit into a mature,…

romantic loyalty compromise and partnership domesticity vs. adventure

Long Way Home

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

Hellhound On My Trail

Robert Johnson

A restless, fragmented blues built around the image of pursuit — weather, hoodoo, and dread all fused into a single sense of…

pursuit and dread restlessness/displacement folk magic and superstition

Easy on My Soul

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

Nobody

Mitski

A disco groove wraps around one of Mitski's bleakest lyrics, turning isolation into something you can dance to. The song tracks…

loneliness self-erasure longing for touch over love

Look At Miss Ohio

Gillian Welch

A short, circling song about a young woman stalling against the pressure to settle down—marriage, respectability, the expected…

deferred adulthood female autonomy vs. domestic expectation escape and mobility

I Couldn't Love You More

Sade

A slow, incantatory love song built almost entirely on a single declarative claim, repeated until it becomes its own proof. Sade…

contentment devotion sufficiency

Cactus Tree

Joni Mitchell

A young woman collects a string of suitors—a sailor, a mountaineer, an office correspondent, and finally an unnumbered crowd of…

freedom versus commitment female autonomy in the 1960s emotional self-protection

Small Plane

Bill Callahan

A quiet domestic love song disguised as an account of piloting a small plane together. The flight becomes a working metaphor for…

domestic trust shared control in partnership contentment

Strangers

The Kinks

A meditative song written by Dave Davies for the Kinks' 1970 album, built around the image of two travelers on the same road who…

companionship amid alienation spiritual searching impermanence and mortality

In My Life

The Beatles

A quiet reckoning with memory, this song moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to settling on a present love that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the present versus the past

The World At Large

Modest Mouse

A restless narrator drifts from place to place across seasons, unable to settle, unable to name what he's looking for. The song…

restlessness and rootlessness escapism emotional avoidance

Major Label Debut (Fast)

Broken Social Scene

A short, loop-driven track built around drift and dependency, where a narrator hovers between arrival and departure, never quite…

restlessness dependency ambivalent intimacy

The Modern Age

The Strokes

A loose, sun-bleached travelogue of restlessness, where the narrator drifts between attraction and avoidance without ever…

restlessness evasion of commitment performance vs. authenticity

I Was Zapped By the Lucky Super Rainbow

The Flaming Lips

A short, incantatory track that treats luck as a physical force, something that arrives like weather and settles on a person…

luck and chance transformation into manhood weather/nature as metaphor for fate

Water Curses

Animal Collective

A dreamlike wish-song built around water as an image of fluidity, ease, and self-erasure, drifting through loosely connected…

desire for formlessness/transformation mortality and impermanence creativity and artistic longing

Middle Of The Road

The Pretenders

A restless, mid-career reckoning song in which Chrissie Hynde's narrator refuses both the comfort of settled domesticity and the…

compromise and aging class and global inequality celebrity exhaustion

Lying in the Grass

Animal Collective

A tangled, riddling song about the effort of self-diagnosis — trying to name a discomfort that resists naming. Animal Collective…

self-examination communication breakdown instinct vs. denial

Love Bends

Wire

A short, incantatory list of contradictory claims about love, built almost entirely on repeating a single grammatical…

ambivalence of love transformation and distortion paradox

Ascension Day

Talk Talk

Ascension Day is a fractured, almost liturgical piece of wordplay built from gambling terms and religious imagery, where the…

fate and predestination gambling as spiritual metaphor guilt and judgement

Mr. Grieves

Pixies

A hallucinatory apocalyptic chant built from disconnected images and a mysterious title figure, 'Mr. Grieves' plays like a…

apocalypse/deluge faith and belief without content death and mortality

Hands on the Wheel

Willie Nelson

A wandering, self-destructive narrator arrives at a moment of grounding, finding stability not in ideology or vice but in…

disillusionment redemption through love moral ambiguity

The Rainbow

Talk Talk

An oblique meditation on justice, guilt, and the gap between legal verdicts and moral truth, built from fragments of courtroom…

justice and its failures guilt and repentance institutional power

Deeper Well

Kacey Musgraves

Kacey Musgraves uses the astrological milestone of a Saturn return to frame a quiet inventory of adulthood: cutting loose…

self-renewal boundary-setting spiritual/astrological awakening

Unknown Legend

Neil Young

A middle-aged narrator recalls a woman he once admired for her restlessness and beauty, now settled into domestic life but still…

nostalgia freedom versus domesticity female mythology/idealization

Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday

A protest song built on a single sustained metaphor, comparing lynched Black bodies hanging from Southern trees to fruit ready…

racial violence and lynching complicity of the pastoral South witness and testimony