Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
Curtis Mayfield
A late-70s disco-soul love song built almost entirely around physical and emotional surrender, with Curtis Mayfield trading his…
romantic and sexual devotion surrender of control obsession/infatuation
Spoon
A pulsing title track built almost entirely around a single obsessive phrase, tracking a mind hijacked by desire while it's set…
obsession and infatuation loss of control urban nightlife / travel
Björk
Björk's cover reworks a 1951 Betty Hutton novelty tune into a dynamic set piece where hushed, orchestral verses collapse into…
the volatility of infatuation quiet vs. chaos as emotional states the absurdity of romantic obsession
Whitney Houston
A dance-pop track built around uncontrollable physical attraction rather than romance in any tender sense. The narrator catalogs…
obsessive desire loss of self-control infatuation vs. commitment
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Blondie
A cover of a 1963 girl-group style bubblegum tune, reworked by Blondie into a knowing new wave valentine that trades on…
infatuation surface pleasure and artifice girl-group nostalgia
Mariah Carey
A buoyant celebration of infatuation that lives entirely in the space between attraction and consummation, where the pleasure…
infatuation escapism desire and daydream
Waylon Jennings
A short, obsessive breakup lament built almost entirely around one plea repeated over and over: some accusation aimed at a…
heartbreak escape and flight self-destruction
Depeche Mode
A blues-electro stalker's chant built almost entirely around a single fixation: sexual compulsion framed as addiction and…
obsession addiction desire as compulsion
The xx
A duet-style track built around the exhilaration and risk of falling into infatuation, with the two vocalists trading lines that…
infatuation vulnerability risk-taking in love
Michael Jackson
A buoyant, physically driven declaration of infatuation built almost entirely around a single hook that gets repeated, echoed,…
infatuation desire and pursuit possessiveness
Traffic
A straightforward blues-rock come-on built around infatuation and helplessness in the face of a magnetic, emotionally elusive…
desire and obsession loss of control emotional manipulation
Eurythmics
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
Lauryn Hill
This is Lauryn Hill's rendition of the 1967 Frankie Valli classic, placed on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a brief,…
infatuation gratitude vulnerability
Madonna
A slow-dance ballad built around a single moment: crossing a crowded room toward someone and closing the distance between…
infatuation vulnerability physical desire
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion
Harry Nilsson
A short, incantatory set of lines about the impossibility of escape gets stretched into a nearly six-minute groove, with the…
inescapability codependency self-destruction
Queen
A slight, groove-driven vignette about attraction to someone effortlessly stylish and self-possessed, filtered through…
infatuation cool detachment vs. desire surface style over substance
A dancefloor anthem built on the friction between infatuation and impatience, where the singer clocks every second spent waiting…
romantic impatience obsession versus self-respect time as torment
Built to Spill
A meditation on obsessive thinking and the indifference of the natural world, built around a repeated denial that functions…
obsessive thought indifference of nature anxiety over decision-making
Bruce Springsteen
A minimal, hushed blues built on obsessive desire, where the narrator's want curdles into something closer to torment than…
obsessive desire sleeplessness and mental anguish transgressive attraction
The Rolling Stones
A disco-inflected blues about romantic obsession, where a narrator's loneliness is undercut by the party noise and distraction…
obsessive longing denial and self-deception urban loneliness
The Cure
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
Mitski
A song about the vertigo of infatuation, where love feels less like comfort than like standing on a ledge. Mitski's narrator…
romantic obsession fear of vulnerability arrested emotional development
Florence + the Machine
A song about the void left by someone's silence, and the scale of belief or need required to fill it. Florence Welch turns…
romantic obsession spiritual emptiness unrequited longing
James Blake
A hazy meditation on romantic infatuation so intense it blurs into hallucination, James Blake's song treats intimacy as…
infatuation and disbelief dissolution of time psychedelic imagery of love
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
Tears for Fears
A love song that keeps interrupting itself, veering between romantic infatuation and anxious social commentary before dissolving…
infatuation and vulnerability fear of loss social conscience amid personal desire
Deerhunter
A brief, jangly pop song that fuses the language of romantic infatuation with imagery of illness, possession, and death, so that…
obsessive love possession and illness death and reincarnation
Elvis Costello
A jilted narrator sifts through the physical debris a lover has left behind, treating each object as evidence of who she was and…
romantic obsession grief and loss self-deception
Interpol
A fractured, obsessive address to a woman who dominates the narrator's inner life, built from disjointed images of intimacy,…
obsessive desire emotional damage decay and aging
T. Rex
A glam-rock incantation that fuses science-fiction imagery with erotic obsession, built almost entirely from repeated, dreamlike…
cosmic eroticism obsession and surrender dream logic
Bad Company
A late-period Bad Company arena-rock love song that borrows the language of religious ecstasy to describe romantic and sexual…
romantic devotion sacred/profane confusion obsession and disbelief
Pixies
A fragmented, image-driven portrait of a woman rendered through physical detail and refrain rather than narrative, built around…
obsessive desire fragmented portraiture exoticization/otherness
SZA
SZA turns a breakup confession into a deadpan murder fantasy, using the exaggerated violence of the title as a vehicle for…
obsessive love jealousy denial and self-deception
Joni Mitchell
A meditation on romantic infatuation that refuses to resolve into either full escape or full surrender, built around the central…
romantic obsession self-sufficiency amid heartbreak creative identity as refuge
Creedence Clearwater Revival
A cover of the Gene Pitney-penned, Ricky Nelson-popularized 1961 pop-rock standard, this Mardi Gras rendition is CCR playing it…
love at first sight teenage infatuation nostalgia for early rock and roll
XTC
A giddy, image-drunk love song that describes a single overwhelming encounter through a barrage of unrelated historical and…
sudden infatuation the inadequacy of language before wonder celestial imagery displaced onto a person
Kate Bush
Kate Bush voices Cathy Earnshaw's ghost from Emily Brontë's novel, pleading at a window for reunion with Heathcliff. The song…
possessive love death and haunting nature as emotional mirror