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
Johnny Cash
A prisoner in California listens to a passing freight train and measures his life against it. Over four short verses he moves…
incarceration freedom and mobility guilt and remorse
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
Sam Cooke
A first-person account of a life lived under constant pressure — poverty, fear of death, segregation, betrayal by one's own —…
racial injustice and segregation endurance and faith mortality and doubt
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