The Pretenders
A live rendition of The Pretenders' elegy for lost intimacy, in which a found photograph triggers a return to grief and…
loss and memory grief disguised as anger impersonal forces vs. intimate life
Marvin Gaye
A slow-burning soul lament in which the narrator addresses an absent lover across an unspecified distance, moving from tender…
romantic longing separation and absence memory and nostalgia
The Beatles
A meditation on memory that moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to a declaration of present love, arguing that…
memory and nostalgia mortality the persistence of the past
Blondie
"Denis" is a girl-group pastiche dressed up in new wave attitude: a breathless, repetitive crush song built almost entirely…
infatuation teenage devotion nostalgia/pastiche
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
Donny Hathaway
This is a live soul reinterpretation of the Beatles standard, in which Donny Hathaway strips the song of its chamber-pop…
loss and regret nostalgia as refuge romantic bewilderment
The Temptations
A mid-80s Temptations single that pitches courtly-gentleman romance as a self-help pitch, with the narrator cataloguing small…
traditional courtship gender roles nostalgia for inherited values
Ramones
This is the Ramones' cover of a 1964 surf-pop nugget, stripped down and sped up into a blast of bubblegum escapism. It's not a…
escapism idealized geography youthful pleasure-seeking
Jason Isbell
Isbell uses a fading hotel as an extended metaphor for a long marriage at risk of going stale, watching an older couple's silent…
marital complacency the labor of sustaining love aging and decline
Paul Simon
A reunion single from Simon and Garfunkel that reads as a bitter anti-nostalgia song, dismantling the idea of small-town…
small-town disillusionment loss of faith suppressed violence