Results for “nature as mirror for inner state”

Songs

Feeling Good (From "the Roar of the Greasepaint")

Nina Simone

A catalogue of natural images -- birds, rivers, blossoms, stars -- builds into a declaration of personal liberation and renewal.…

renewal freedom self-possession

Starship Trooper

Yes

A three-part suite that moves from pastoral invocation through cosmic address to a mantra-like affirmation of shared awakening.…

cosmic consciousness nature as spiritual messenger transmission of hidden knowledge

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…

longing and absence loss of self idealized love

Wade In the Water

The Staple Singers

This is the Staple Singers' rendition of the traditional African American spiritual, built almost entirely on call-and-response…

deliverance and salvation collective faith and community crossing over / transition between states

Jim Cain

Bill Callahan

Bill Callahan opens his own name into someone else's -- the title alludes to the noir novelist James M. Cain -- and uses that…

self-transformation the writing process as detective work impermanence and mortality

April Come She Will

Simon Jäger

A miniature allegory that maps the arc of a love affair onto the months of a calendar year, from spring arrival to autumn…

impermanence the natural cycle as metaphor for love loss and memory

Paradise

John Prine

Prine elegizes a real Kentucky town erased by strip mining, using a child's plea to his father as the frame for a broader story…

environmental destruction loss of home/place industrial 'progress' vs. nature

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Jump Into the Fire

Harry Nilsson

A short set of declarative lines about escape and entrapment dissolves into a chant that repeats itself into…

entrapment disguised as freedom codependency compulsion and addiction

You Keep Me Hanging On

The Supremes

A woman demands her own release from a dead relationship, addressing an ex who refuses to fully let go even though he no longer…

emotional limbo asymmetry of feeling demand for autonomy

Respect

Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin's 1967 reworking of Otis Redding's song turns a man's plea for domestic deference into a woman's non-negotiable…

demanding respect sexual and economic bargaining power gender and domestic power

Superstition

Stevie Wonder

A funk sermon against magical thinking. Over one of the most recognizable clavinet riffs in popular music, Wonder catalogues…

superstition and magical thinking the cost of ignorance fear as self-fulfilling prophecy

A Change Is Gonna Come

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