Billie Holiday
A standard-era love song built entirely around the idea of infatuation rather than the beloved's physical presence: the singer…
idealized love longing and absence daydreaming as escape
Japanese Breakfast
A short, almost breathless meditation on the effort of self-improvement, framed through the odd, physical image of a soccer…
self-sabotage the labor of happiness obsessive thought patterns
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
John Lee Hooker
A slow, brooding solo blues meditation built almost entirely on repetition and a single fixed image: a man alone at a window,…
abandonment jealousy and suspicion loneliness
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
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
Sufjan Stevens
This is an instrumental piece, so there is no lyric to parse; the analysis here works from the title, the compositional term it…
pattern and repetition nocturnal atmosphere formal/structural experimentation
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Madonna
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
Son House
A Delta blues lament built on the classic AAB stanza form, this song traces a man's attempt to reconcile betrayal with lingering…
betrayal and abandonment obsessive longing wounded pride
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
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
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
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
PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…
obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention
Frank Ocean
"Chanel" is a loose, associative track built around the Chanel logo's interlocking C's as a metaphor for bisexuality and duality…
bisexuality and duality surveillance and paranoia wealth as armor
Ramones
A three-minute cover of a 1958 rock and roll standard, stripped down and sped up until the invitation to dance becomes an…
teenage romance dance as ritual nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll
Marvin Gaye
A slow-burning seduction song built almost entirely on a single proposition: move in with me. Marvin Gaye layers a soft, almost…
seduction and desire domestic fantasy emotional vulnerability masked as pleasure-seeking
SZA turns devotion into a kind of hyper-vigilance, pledging extreme loyalty and even violence for a lover while the…
obsessive devotion insecurity masked as confidence loyalty and self-sacrifice
Interpol's 'Specialist' is a sprawling, image-drunk portrait of a relationship that oscillates between erotic surrender and…
obsessive love loss of control confinement and freedom
Nat King Cole
A jilted lover appeals past his unfaithful partner to God and the sea as witnesses to his grief, then trails off into…
betrayal in love unanswered devotion isolation and distance
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
Thom Yorke
A fractured, glitchy meditation on trying to erase someone from consciousness only to find them multiplying under the pressure…
denial and obsession the futility of erasure suspicion and manipulation
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
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's cover of the Carpenters' "Superstar" strips the original's lush orchestration down to a slow, droning haze,…
one-sided obsession loneliness the falseness of mediated intimacy
Neutral Milk Hotel
A frantic, horn-driven elegy that fuses the story of Anne Frank with a surreal, almost hallucinatory imagery of reincarnation…
death and afterlife war and atrocity obsessive love/grief
Big Thief
"Not" is a song built entirely out of negation, circling an unnamed thing by naming everything it isn't. Lenker piles up sensory…
negation and unnameability impermanence desire and its objects
Steve Earle
A wry character sketch of an unrepentant romantic drifter told from the outside, by a narrator warning a woman about the man's…
romantic recidivism performance vs. sincerity the myth of the outlaw lover