Results for “permanence and mortality”

Songs

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Paradise

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

Keep Me in Your Heart

Warren Zevon

A dying man's direct, unsentimental request to be remembered, framed as a farewell letter set to a gentle, almost lullaby-like…

mortality memory and legacy love as continuity

Jim Cain

Bill Callahan

Bill Callahan opens his own name into someone else's -- the title alludes to the noir novelist James M. Cain -- and uses that…

self-transformation the writing process as detective work impermanence and mortality

God Only Knows

The Beach Boys

A love song that opens by admitting its own limits "" the singer won't promise permanence "" and then spends the rest of its…

conditional devotion dependence and identity uncertainty as a form of honesty

In My Hour of Darkness

Gram Parsons

A hymn-structured elegy that mourns three losses in succession -- a young man killed in a car crash, a musician taken too soon,…

mortality and premature death grief and mourning faith and supplication

Boogie Street

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on the pull between transcendence and the grinding routine of ordinary commerce and appetite, imagined as a street…

sacred vs. profane mortality and impermanence spiritual longing amid worldly routine

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke

A first-person account of a life lived under constant pressure — poverty, fear of death, segregation, betrayal by one's own —…

racial injustice and segregation endurance and faith mortality and doubt

You've Got a Friend In Me

Randy Newman

Written for the animated film 'Toy Story,' this is a plain-spoken pledge of loyalty from one companion to another, stripped of…

loyalty reassurance humility versus devotion

Gloria

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

A quiet meditation on walking alone toward some unnamed threshold, framed as a kind of secular hymn. The repeated invocation of…

solitude and pilgrimage devotion without doctrine mortality and departure

Christmas In the Room

Sufjan Stevens

A quiet domestic love song that strips Christmas of all its commercial and social trappings and relocates the holiday's meaning…

intimacy vs. commercialism presence over spectacle domestic love as sanctuary

Back Up Train

Al Green

A young man addresses a train conductor directly, pleading for the impossible: reverse the train's direction so he can return to…

regret and reversal longing/separation loneliness