Results for “nostalgia for childhood/home”

Songs

To Build a Home

The Cinematic Orchestra

A slow, sparsely worded piano-and-strings piece that treats a house and a tree as vessels for memory and loss. It moves from a…

memory loss and impermanence home as metaphor for relationship

Home

LCD Soundsystem

Home closes This Is Happening as a slow-building comedown song, one that treats the title word as both destination and evasion.…

escape versus arrival fear of vulnerability nightlife as ritual and anesthetic

I Want to Come Home for Christmas

Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye reframes a holiday standard as a POW's lament, layering familiar Christmas imagery over a desperate plea for peace…

war and captivity longing for home family separation

Pictures of Home

Deep Purple

A lone figure stranded on a mountainside cries out into silence, caught between physical isolation and a self-created…

isolation self-deception alienation from home

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

Down Home Girl

Betty Davis

A raw, funk-driven declaration of Southern Black identity that fuses food, sex, and soul music into a single unapologetic…

Southern Black identity sexual assertiveness reclamation of stereotype

Go Home

Angel Olsen

A meditation on disorientation and self-loss dressed as a plea for retreat, this song sits at the emotional center of Big Time,…

displacement and homesickness grief and mourning identity dissolution

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Mariah Carey

This is Mariah Carey's 1994 cover of the Phil Spector/Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry classic, reworked as a Wall-of-Sound production…

loneliness during celebration longing and absence nostalgia for past happiness

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963

Rickie Lee Jones

A brief, hazy meditation on nostalgia and the loss of childhood innocence, framed as direct address to someone urged to hold…

nostalgia loss of innocence memory

Bring It on Home to Me

B.B. King

This is less a song than a spoken monologue set to guitar, in which B.B. King explains his relationship to his guitar, Lucille,…

companionship and loneliness music as confession survival and near-death experience

Bring It On Home to Me

Wilson Pickett

Pickett's 1968 cover of Sam Cooke's soul standard is a direct plea for reconciliation, stripped of pride, asking a lover to come…

romantic longing forgiveness submission in love

At Home He's a Tourist

Gang of Four

A clipped, funk-inflected post-punk track that treats leisure, culture-consumption, and sexual routine as forms of alienated…

alienation under capitalism commodification of leisure and sex self-improvement as anxiety

Far from Home

Traffic

A late-period Traffic track built around restless motion — a narrator pushing toward an undefined destination, framing the…

restlessness and departure spiritual seeking disillusionment with false comfort

Coming Home

Leon Bridges

A short, plainspoken soul song about returning to a lover after being worn down by the outside world. It works less through…

homecoming devotion weariness with the world

Home By Another Way

James Taylor

Taylor takes the biblical Magi's detour around Herod after visiting the infant Jesus and turns it into a wry parable about…

biblical allegory avoidance of tyranny/corruption wisdom and discretion

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…

restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom

Let Me Take You Home Tonight

Boston

A straightforward mid-70s arena-rock come-on, built almost entirely around a single repeated invitation. The song's interest…

desire and pursuit self-consciousness masked by bravado persuasion

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music

A deadpan monologue delivered by a consumer trapped inside his own showroom lifestyle, who eventually confesses to owning an…

consumerism and alienation artificiality vs intimacy suburban/domestic satire

Country Christmas

Loretta Lynn

A nostalgic, plainspoken carol that recreates a rural Appalachian childhood Christmas through small domestic details rather than…

nostalgia family and home rural tradition

Chromakey Dreamcoat

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that trades on the gap between its title's cheerful theatrical…

nostalgia childhood media artifice versus memory

Hey Saturday Sun

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece built from warm guitar-like tones and a loping, slightly loose beat, evoking a hazy summer afternoon…

nostalgia childhood memory analog warmth

White Christmas

Merle Haggard

This is Merle Haggard's rendition of the Irving Berlin standard, a song of longing for an idealized, snow-covered Christmas from…

nostalgia longing for home idealized past

Roygbiv

Boards of Canada

Roygbiv is an instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's debut album, built around warm analog synth tones and a hazy, nostalgic…

nostalgia childhood memory nature imagery

How Simple

Hop Along

A song about watching your own self-regard curdle in real time, as the narrator catches themselves vain, self-deceiving, and…

vanity and self-scrutiny romantic self-deception impermanence of intimacy

I Feel Like Breaking Up / Somebody's Home Tonight

Ann Peebles

A woman alone on a rainy night confesses to a desire strong enough to make her willing to wreck another relationship just to…

forbidden desire loneliness emotional compulsion versus morality

Telephone Road

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

I Walk the Line

Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell builds a memory song around a childhood car ride and the moment he first heard Johnny Cash's classic, using the…

nostalgia musical inheritance family and rural childhood

The Christmas Song

The Temptations

This is The Temptations' rendition of the standard often called "The Christmas Song" (though it borrows the familiar Mel Torme…

nostalgia childhood wonder seasonal comfort

Fingerbib

Aphex Twin

Fingerbib is a mostly wordless ambient-jungle piece built around a fragile, childlike melody line and treated vocal coos, set…

childhood and innocence artificial tenderness tension between fragility and mechanism

Dayvan Cowboy

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that unfolds in two distinct halves: a slow, warped guitar-and-drone…

nostalgia flight/ascent analog decay

Ribs

Lorde

A song about the terror of leaving adolescence, built from a single house party that becomes a stand-in for the whole passage…

fear of aging nostalgia for childhood female friendship

Diddy Bop

Noname

Diddy Bop opens Telefone as a childhood remembrance of Chicago summers, braiding sensory nostalgia with quiet undertow --…

childhood nostalgia Chicago community and place innocence versus danger

Music Is Math

Boards of Canada

A near-wordless piece built almost entirely from a warm, looping synth pattern, punctuated by a handful of manipulated vocal…

nostalgia and memory childhood innocence versus threat repetition and ritual

(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano

Sampha

A grief song disguised as a love letter to an instrument. Sampha addresses the piano in his late mother's house as a confidant…

grief and mourning music as companionship home and belonging

Car Wheels On a Gravel Road

Lucinda Williams

A childhood memory of restless traveling through the rural South, told from inside a car and a kitchen at once, where domestic…

childhood memory displacement and rootlessness the unreliability of home

Reach For The Dead

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece built from wavering analog synths and a slow, hazy tempo, "Reach for the Dead" trades on Boards of…

memory and decay mortality childhood nostalgia

King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1

Neutral Milk Hotel

An opening track that fuses childhood memory with domestic violence and adolescent sexual awakening, all delivered in a run-on,…

childhood innocence and its loss domestic dysfunction sexual awakening

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

If I Could See The World (Through The Eyes Of A Child)

Patsy Cline

A simple, wistful song built on a single wish: that the singer could trade her adult, disillusioned view of the world for a…

lost innocence nostalgia for childhood disillusionment with adulthood

Close Your Eyes and Remember

Minnie Riperton

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