Results for “mortality as motivation”

Songs

Follow Your Arrow

Kacey Musgraves

A catalog of no-win social judgments builds into a plainspoken anthem for living by one's own compass rather than trying to…

double standards sexual and social freedom religious hypocrisy

Lay Me Down

Loretta Lynn

A late-career meditation on mortality that treats death not as an ending to fear but as the final release from a hard life.…

mortality faith and afterlife weariness and endurance

For All We Know

Abbey Lincoln

A standard-era torch song built on a single plea: seize the present because permanence is never guaranteed. Abbey Lincoln's…

carpe diem uncertainty of the future mortality

Philadelphia

Neil Young

A spare, hymn-like address to fear and mortality, written for Jonathan Demme's film about a man dying of AIDS-related illness…

mortality stigma and shame need for belonging

Hurt

Johnny Cash

A cover written originally as a young man's meditation on self-harm and numbness becomes, in Johnny Cash's version, an old man's…

mortality regret addiction and self-destruction

Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Warren Zevon

A cover of Dylan's outlaw death-ballad, recorded by Zevon while he was terminally ill, so the song's fictional frame collapses…

mortality surrender acceptance

Crossroads

Cream

Cream's version compresses Robert Johnson's Delta blues into a lean, high-velocity rock performance, turning a song about…

isolation spiritual desperation the blues tradition

The Kiss

Judee Sill

Judee Sill turns a love song into a devotional hymn, blurring the line between romantic union and religious ecstasy until the…

sacred and profane love transcendence mortality

Heaven

Depeche Mode

A slow-burning devotional track that blurs the line between spiritual ecstasy and self-annihilation, using the imagery of…

surrender and self-dissolution transcendence through love or faith mortality

The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…

judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse

Dead Flowers

Townes Van Zandt

This is a Rolling Stones cover (Jagger/Richards) performed live by Townes Van Zandt on Roadsongs, and in his hands the song's…

class resentment addiction and self-destruction romantic betrayal

Breathe (In the Air)

Pink Floyd

An opening address that sounds like gentle life-advice slowly reveals itself as a warning about the trap of compulsive labor and…

existential dread conformity and labor the passage of time

Meet Me On the Equinox

Death Cab for Cutie

A love song built around an astronomical image of perfect balance that the singer knows cannot last. Written for the New Moon…

mortality impermanence of love balance and equilibrium

One Fine Morning

Bill Callahan

A closing statement for an album called Apocalypse, this song imagines departure as both a literal ride into open country and a…

mortality departure and retirement personal apocalypse

My Love Mine All Mine

Mitski

A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…

mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy

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

24 Frames

Jason Isbell

A meditation on the fragility of everything a person builds—relationships, careers, a sense of stability—delivered through a…

impermanence mortality self-deception

Keep Me in Your Heart

Warren Zevon

A dying man's direct address to the people he loves, written and recorded as Warren Zevon faced terminal cancer. The song trades…

mortality memory and legacy love as continuity

The Needle and the Damage Done

Laura Marling

This is Laura Marling's recording of Neil Young's 1972 song about heroin addiction, written after Young watched a bandmate…

addiction loss complicity of the witness

Space Oddity

David Bowie

A dramatized radio transmission between mission control and an astronaut becomes an extended metaphor for detachment and…

isolation fame and alienation dissociation

Just Breathe

Pearl Jam

A quiet acoustic meditation on mortality and gratitude, in which the narrator confronts the certainty of death by turning toward…

mortality and impermanence gratitude romantic devotion

Ghosts Again

Depeche Mode

A meditation on mortality and impermanence dressed in soft, dreamlike imagery, written and released in the shadow of a…

mortality and impermanence grief and remembrance spiritual uncertainty

UMI Says

Mos Def

An intimate, unguarded address that opens as a direct confession about mortality and imperfection before widening into a…

mortality and urgency authenticity over performance Black solidarity and liberation

In My Hour of Darkness

Gram Parsons

A closing hymn built around three elegies for people the narrator has lost, framed by a repeated plea for divine clarity and…

mourning and loss mortality and premonition faith under duress

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk Hotel

A meditation on love, mortality, and impermanence that blurs the line between romantic address and elegy, filtered through Jeff…

mortality and impermanence romantic devotion memory and loss

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

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Fairport Convention

A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the…

mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love

Leaves That Are Green

Simon Jäger

A young songwriter watches a single year of his life pass and turns that small span of time into a meditation on mortality and…

impermanence aging and time lost love

Jim Cain

Bill Callahan

A restless, aphoristic meditation on identity and self-narration, borrowing its title's initials to nod toward the noir novelist…

self-mythology impermanence of mood the unreliability of narrative

Accordion

Madvillain

A compact showcase of MF Doom's rapid internal rhyme and layered wordplay, built over a spare, looping Madlib beat that barely…

braggadocio mortality and time artistic superiority

Vienna

Billy Joel

A weary older voice counsels a driven young person to ease off the throttle, arguing that ambition pursued without patience…

ambition versus patience fear of mortality burnout

I'm Going Home

Hank Williams

A deathbed testimony song in which a dying believer comforts an onlooker by reframing death as homecoming. Hank Williams…

death and salvation religious comfort acceptance of mortality

From the Morning

Nick Drake

A brief, hymn-like closing track on Pink Moon that treats a single day's cycle—dawn, night, rising again—as a template for how…

renewal transience nature as instruction

Battery Kinzie

Fleet Foxes

A short, dread-laced folk song about arriving too late for a lost love, told through images of bodily decay and a locked door.…

loss and abandonment decay and mortality possessiveness/control

Paradise

John Prine

A son asks his father to take him back to a childhood town in western Kentucky, only to learn it has been physically erased by…

environmental destruction loss of home nostalgia versus reality

The Way It Goes

Gillian Welch

Gillian Welch strings together a series of small-town obituaries and rumors — an overdose, a runaway, a breakdown, a possible…

mortality and fatalism small-town gossip and rumor addiction and ruin

Heroes

Peter Gabriel

This is Peter Gabriel's orchestral cover of the Bowie/Eno classic, stripped of its original rock momentum and rebuilt as a slow,…

fleeting love defiance against circumstance division and barriers

Long May You Run

Neil Young

Neil Young's elegy for a car that has died is written with such tenderness it plays as a breakup song or a eulogy for a person,…

loyalty and companionship loss and mortality nostalgia for youth

Change Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Otis Redding's cover of Sam Cooke's civil-rights-era anthem strips the original's orchestral polish into raw, gospel-inflected…

racial oppression and hope endurance and exhaustion fear of mortality

Atlantic City

The Band

A small-time narrator in a decaying Atlantic City weighs a desperate, half-criminal solution to his debts against a fragile…

economic desperation organized crime and violence romantic loyalty amid ruin