The Temptations
A ballad of retrospective heartbreak in which the narrator catalogues small domestic pleasures from a lost relationship,…
nostalgia loss of love unresolved grief
Minnie Riperton
A single found photograph pulls the narrator involuntarily into a past relationship she thought she'd buried. What starts as…
involuntary memory grief over lost love loss of control
Fleet Foxes
A song about borrowed time and borrowed identity, framed as a wistful reckoning with youth and a fleeting image of someone…
nostalgia transience memory and image
Eurythmics
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
Bon Iver
A short, hazy meditation on a departure that's treated with strange tenderness -- the singer asks a lover to leave without…
parting and impermanence memory intruding on the present ambivalence about closure
The Cure
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
Steve Earle
A quiet, unadorned reckoning with a relationship dissolved somewhere in a haze of substance abuse, told by a narrator who can…
addiction and memory loss romantic loss guilt and self-reproach
Chris Stapleton
A meditation on loss framed through the image of angels who appear briefly in our lives, help us, and then vanish. Stapleton…
grief and mourning impermanence faith and doubt
Sufjan Stevens
A young narrator recounts the slow death of a girl he loves from bone cancer, intercutting scenes of adolescent intimacy with…
mortality and illness adolescent love faith and doubt
Bonobo
"Recurring" is an instrumental mood piece from Bonobo's Days to Come, built on looping samples, muted percussion, and layered…
repetition memory cyclical time
Guy Clark
A meditation on nostalgia and decline, built entirely from a chain of similes comparing an abstract feeling to aging, marginal…
nostalgia aging and decline loneliness
Roberta Flack
A slow, hymn-like meditation on falling in love, told through three escalating 'first times' — seeing, kissing, and lying with a…
romantic awakening the sacredness of intimacy time and permanence
Simon Jäger
A brief solo acoustic guitar instrumental that opens Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album, built around a simple, wistful…
memory time passing nostalgia
Free
A simple, aching blues-rock ballad built around nostalgia for a lost relationship, contrasting warm, sensory memories of shared…
nostalgia lost love loneliness
Jethro Tull
A gentle, hushed love song built on the image of watching a sleeping partner and holding onto quiet, private moments. It moves…
tender devotion distance and longing the fragility of romantic idealism
Rosanne Cash
A meditation on mortality and inherited fate, written in the voice of someone reckoning with the end of life while looking back…
mortality inheritance/family legacy acceptance
Wilco
A short, disoriented piece about someone trying to locate himself through self-deception and memory failure, using the image of…
self-deception disorientation distorted memory
Rodney Crowell
This is a nostalgic, sensory-dense portrait of a working-class Houston neighborhood seen through childhood memory. Crowell…
working-class childhood nostalgia place and memory
Mercury Rev
"Holes" is a hazy, impressionistic meditation on loss and the failure of memory to hold together, built almost entirely from…
memory and forgetting grief disorientation
Aesop Rock
A meandering, list-like meditation on rivers that uses the image as a container for memory, mortality, and imagination. Aesop…
mortality and grief memory and nostalgia escapism/fantasy
Sturgill Simpson
A slow-moving meditation on mortality written as the title theme for a zombie comedy, Sturgill Simpson's song strips the genre's…
mortality and the afterlife modern alienation grief and memory
Alison Krauss
A grief-stricken narrator describes herself as literally haunting her own home after a devastating breakup, using the ghost…
heartbreak and grief isolation and withdrawal memory and haunting
A gentle, pastoral lullaby that uses nature imagery as a doorway into childhood memory and nostalgia. Riperton's airy, high…
nostalgia nature as memory-trigger innocence
Chaka Khan
A ballad of retrospective longing in which the narrator revisits a lost love she still believes was singular and irreplaceable.…
nostalgia idealized past love yearning and denial
Orbital
An instrumental electronic piece built around a slowly unfurling synth melody and a wordless, choir-like vocal pad, 'Belfast'…
reconciliation memory place and naming
Rosanne Cash's reading of this Dylan standard is a hushed, spare rendition that treats the song as a message passed to a…
lost love distance and separation memory
Aphex Twin
Avril 14th is a brief solo piano piece by Aphex Twin, built from a simple, halting melodic phrase that repeats with small…
memory fragility impermanence
Cat Power
Cat Power's stripped-down cover of the doo-wop standard turns a bright, buoyant 1959 hit into something hushed and fragile,…
devotion memory vulnerability
A short, wintry song built around an odd, almost clinical meet-cute at a blood bank that gradually reveals itself as a…
intimacy and secrecy blood and kinship as metaphor for love the limits of language
Pavement
A satire of the early-90s alt-rock signing frenzy dressed up as a shaggy-dog non-sequitur song. Pavement mocks the music…
music industry cynicism image vs substance selling out
Mission of Burma
A song built almost entirely on negation, listing what an unnamed 'this' is not rather than what it is. The effect is a kind of…
negation and absence representation vs. reality escape from confinement
Leonard Cohen
A wry, half-comic meditation on aging and memory dressed up as a road song. The narrator sets out to reclaim some lost person or…
memory and forgetting aging exodus/departure
A hushed, elliptical piece built from fragmented images of rural decay and seasonal change, standing in for something closer to…
decay and memory rural isolation seasonal cycles as emotional metaphor
Death Cab for Cutie
A breakup song built around the image of a photograph's frame—one person edged out as the other steps into visibility and…
dissolution of a relationship fame/visibility eclipsing intimacy memory and forgetting
Maxwell
A meditation on the end of a relationship in which the narrator, admitting his own culpability, reframes letting go as an act of…
romantic loss self-blame release and letting go
Lorde
Lorde uses the language of video editing to describe how memory sands a failed relationship down into its highlight reel. The…
selective memory idealization of a lost relationship self-deception
Lucinda Williams
A hushed, sensuous meditation on hard-won ease, sung to an absent lover whose memory the singer keeps circling back to even as…
earned solitude memory and longing domestic sensuality
Beck
E-Pro rides a fuzzed-out riff and a nagging na-na hook while the lyric itself trades in disjointed, image-heavy fragments about…
defiance toxicity/poison self-destruction vs survival
A breakup song built from small, deflating images of self-worth, sung by someone who has resigned themselves to having been…
romantic rejection self-deprecation memory and haunting
Billie Holiday
A standard from the Kern-Fields songbook, delivered here as a hushed, intimate meditation rather than a big romantic…
romantic devotion memory as consolation vulnerability