X‐Ray Spex
A flat, almost clinical address to an unnamed "you" strips away personhood, reducing the subject to a marketing abstraction…
commodification of identity surveillance and fame mass media critique
Death Cab for Cutie
An extended, deliberately monotonous instrumental build frames a lyric spoken by someone who refuses to accept another person's…
obsession denial of rejection unreciprocated desire
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Joe Cocker
Joe Cocker's version of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins standard strips away the original's theatrical horror-show menace and…
obsessive love possessiveness jealousy
The Animals
The Animals' version of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins standard turns a theatrical curse into a raw, garage-blues confession of…
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
The Triffids
A meditation on memory's unreliability, built around a man clutching physical relics of a lost woman while admitting each…
memory and distortion obsession idealization vs reality
Neutral Milk Hotel
A distorted, obsessive love song that swings between tenderness and revulsion, built around the fixation of a narrator who both…
obsessive desire idealization vs. disgust possession and control
Tyler, The Creator
IFHY stages a romantic relationship as a volatile loop between adoration and resentment, voiced by a narrator who can't separate…
obsessive love emotional instability possessiveness and jealousy
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
Annie Lennox
Annie Lennox's reading of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins standard, cut for her covers album Nostalgia, strips the song down to its…
possessive love jealousy desperation
The Teardrop Explodes
A brisk, bright pop-psych song about romantic fixation, where longing tips into something more obsessive and unstable. The lyric…
obsessive longing distance and return emotional instability
Neko Case
A brief, incantatory song built around a single obsessive image: a furnace room where the speaker burns and buries something, or…
obsessive love guilt and self-punishment domestic entrapment
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
A short, incantatory track built around elemental imagery of fire and water, where a possessed or transformed narrator moves…
transformation purification possession/obsession
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
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
Pat Benatar
This is Pat Benatar's rendition of a song originally built around Emily Brontë's novel, voiced by the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and identity merger
Arctic Monkeys
A heavy, blues-inflected rock song built around obsessive desire and insecurity, where the narrator can't tell whether the woman…
obsessive desire possessiveness vs uncertainty escapism
Sarah Jarosz
This is Sarah Jarosz's musical setting of Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 poem, a tale of a doomed child-bride love affair told by a…
obsessive love death and mourning the supernatural/fate
Faith No More
A thrash-indebted track (originally written by guitarist Jim Martin's earlier band Agents of Misfortune) built entirely around a…
death and the afterlife as torment predator/victim power dynamics obsession and possession
Tim Buckley
"Devil Eyes" is a short, sweat-soaked funk vamp about erotic surrender, where restlessness and physical craving overwhelm any…
sexual obsession loss of control desire as possession
Hop Along
A fractured travelogue-as-breakup song, where surreal imagery of distant places and imagined infidelities stands in for…
jealousy and possessiveness self-deception distance and separation
Little Dragon
A quiet, obsessive meditation on searching for traces of a vanished or absent person through the physical residue they left…
longing and absence obsession with physical traces memory and its unreliability
Split Enz
A love song that keeps curdling into something closer to dependency and surveillance, where declarations of devotion are…
obsessive love jealousy and control insecurity
Fall Out Boy
"Centuries" is an anthem built on the fantasy of permanence: a narrator obsessed with being remembered, framed as a legend in…
legacy and immortality obsession and control teenage disillusionment
The Hollies
A tightly wound confession of romantic captivity, built around a plea for the beloved to explain the hold they have over the…
obsession loss of control romantic dependency
a‐ha
A soaring, anthemic ballad built around a single image: a man watching a sleeping woman and bracing for her inevitable…
romantic devotion loss and abandonment obsession
Chaka Khan
A meditation on jealousy and reassurance, sung by a partner who has just been told about some flirtation or attention from an…
jealousy possessiveness self-assurance
Suede
A short, hallucinatory B-side that circles a single obsessive refrain about someone's departure, delivered through disjointed,…
obsession loss and absence drug culture
A hazy, incantatory track that trades narrative clarity for mood and repetition, circling around loss, jealousy, and a loss of…
loss of control jealousy and betrayal naivety/self-deception
The Cars
A jittery new-wave fixation song in which the narrator describes mental overload caused by obsession with another person. The…
obsession anxiety loss of control
The O’Jays
A straightforward love song built almost entirely around light-as-devotion imagery, with the singer repeatedly affirming that…
devotion possessiveness light as metaphor for love
Kylie Minogue
A minimal, hook-built track in which an unnamed narrator describes an obsessive, almost involuntary attachment to a lover,…
obsession desire and restraint loss of control
Daniel Powter
A minor deep cut from Powter's self-titled album, this song dresses a confession of guilt (or at least complicity) in the…
guilt and denial interrogation as metaphor for relationship conflict obsession
Todd Rundgren
A blues-drenched confession addressed to a personified nocturnal terror—likely obsessive desire or a destructive relationship…
obsession fear and desire intertwined loss of control
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
Descendents
A brief, blunt hardcore-punk song in which the narrator waits out a romantic rival, convinced that patience and possessiveness…
jealousy possessiveness unrequited love
Lupe Fiasco
A straightforward pop-rap infatuation song in which Lupe Fiasco uses the language of songcraft itself—hooks, choruses, verses—as…
infatuation obsession music as metaphor for love
Kasabian
Club Foot is a swaggering, paranoid rock track built on murky electro-rock production and a lyric that reads less like a story…
paranoia obsession drug-induced disorientation