Bob Dylan
A third-person account of a brief love affair dissolves into first-person confession, tracing a man's drift from chance…
chance and fate loss and longing memory and self-deception
Mission of Burma
A terse post-punk breakup song built around the logic of self-preservation dressed up as generosity. The narrator frames pushing…
self-justification guilt and denial independence vs. abandonment
Blue Öyster Cult
A brief, incantatory lyric that treats loss as an unexplained catastrophe, personifying death as a strangely dressed-up visitor…
mourning and loss the arbitrariness of death personification of fate
Talk Talk
Ascension Day is a fractured, almost liturgical piece of wordplay built from gambling terms and religious imagery, where the…
fate and predestination gambling as spiritual metaphor guilt and judgement
T. Rex
Monolith is a brief, riddling meditation on time, fate, and human blindness, delivered in Marc Bolan's characteristic style of…
fate and determinism time as a ruling force obscured perception
Ann Peebles
Ann Peebles addresses trouble, heartache, and sadness as if they were unwelcome visitors, ordering them off her doorstep now…
deliverance through love personification of emotional states resilience
Kacey Musgraves
Kacey Musgraves' rendition of this 1961 standard, recorded for the 2022 Elvis biopic soundtrack, strips the song down to its…
surrender to love fate versus choice vulnerability
Laura Marling
A quiet meditation on loss and self-accounting, where the narrator processes the departure of someone close by returning…
heartbreak and abandonment self-reliance as coping mechanism fate versus choice
Joan Baez
A folk parable pairs a doomed calf on its way to slaughter with a free-flying swallow overhead, using the contrast to meditate…
fate versus freedom submission and complicity mortality
The Temptations
This is The Temptations' soul-vocal-group treatment of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard from South Pacific, reframed with a…
fate and destiny in love carpe diem / seizing the moment fear of loneliness
Chaka Khan
A ballad of romantic devotion built on longing rather than resolution: the narrator insists a departed lover was fated to be…
unrequited or lost love fate versus self-doubt longing and yearning
Baez's early reading of this traditional ballad frames the singer as a woman recounting her own ruin, casting the House of the…
ruin and regret fallen woman narrative fate versus free will
Taylor Swift
willow is a courtship song that frames romantic surrender as both fate and craft, using water and tree imagery to describe a…
romantic fate versus choice yielding as strength seduction and manipulation
Minnie Riperton
A late-70s soul ballad about a friendship that quietly becomes a romance, sung with the conviction that this slower, familiar…
friendship turning to romance gradual realization of love domestic permanence
The Roots
A meditation on legacy and mortality built around the Hamilton-borrowed refrain about who survives to tell one's story. Three…
legacy and memory mortality Black identity and violence
The Stooges
A minimalist blues chant built from two mirrored halves, this song stages a failed exchange between a man and a woman who both…
mutual dysfunction emotional deprivation repetition as fate
Yes
A high-gloss opener to Yes's commercial breakthrough album, this song trades the band's earlier cosmic mysticism for a leaner,…
chance and fate self-deception versus self-repair resilience amid chaos
Smokey Robinson
A straightforward declaration of romantic devotion, built on the classic Smokey Robinson template of certainty and fidelity. The…
romantic devotion certainty/fate fidelity
Kate Bush
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as a problem that could be solved by literally trading…
empathy and its limits gender and relational miscommunication bargaining with fate
Billie Holiday
A standard from the American songbook, this rendition finds Holiday addressing the moon as a witness to loneliness and its…
loneliness longing transformation through love
Black Sabbath
This is Black Sabbath's title track marking the arrival of Ronnie James Dio, trading the band's earlier horror-movie doom for…
moral ambiguity illusion versus reality corrupted power
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
Paul Simon
A miniature allegory that compresses an entire love affair into six months and twelve lines, using the calendar itself as the…
impermanence the seasons as metaphor for love inevitability and fate
Frank Sinatra
A classic torch-song-turned-swing-standard about loneliness resolved by sudden romantic arrival, addressed to the moon as silent…
loneliness romantic transformation fate and chance
Willie Nelson
This is a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival standard, and Willie Nelson's version leans into its plainspoken, riddling…
paradox and contradiction impending trouble endurance through time
Madonna
A buoyant early-80s dance-pop confection that turns a childhood wishing-star rhyme into an adult love song, celebrating…
infatuation luck and fate celestial imagery
A short, riff-driven warning about crowd panic and the collapse of authority, delivered as a series of urgent commands and grim…
mob mentality loss of control societal collapse
Warren Zevon
A mock-heroic ballad about a Canadian enforcer whose only real ambition was to score a goal, told with the deadpan cadence of a…
thwarted ambition masculine role and duty violence as commodity
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt's version of the Stagolee legend strips the story down to its bare bones: a hat, a gun, a killing, and an…
violence and its casualness justice and law folk mythology
Sandy Denny
A short, dreamlike ballad in which a wandering narrator and a sea captain mirror each other's escapes from burning or confining…
escape and departure transcendence versus disaster fate and mirroring
Bad Company
A late-70s Bad Company track that treats life as a fairground ride: cyclical, arbitrary, and indifferent to effort or virtue.…
fate and chance cyclical existence hollowness of success
The Band
This is a cover of the Delmore Brothers' classic blues-country standard, recorded by The Band on their 1993 album Jericho. It's…
heartbreak personification of suffering fatalism
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as something so vast it could only be closed by a…
miscommunication in intimacy empathy and its limits bargaining with fate
The xx
A duet-shaped monologue about watching a relationship dissolve on its own timetable, using the ocean tide as a figure for…
inevitable loss powerlessness dependency
Fairport Convention
This is the Fairport Convention electric-folk arrangement of the ancient English/Scottish ballad about adultery, betrayal, and…
class inequality adultery and its consequences honor and vengeance
A blues-rock talisman song in which the narrator feels dogged by an ominous, unshakeable premonition of death even as good…
superstition and fate paranoia fear of death
Sly & Robbie
This is a cover of the classic Doris Day standard, reframed by Sly and Robbie's rhythm-section sensibility rather than by any…
fate and acceptance generational transmission of wisdom the unknowability of the future
John Prine
A soldier's chance encounter with a bar dancer turns into an unlikely origin story for a whole philosophy of life. Prine uses a…
rural simplicity vs. modern noise chance and fate counterculture retreat
PJ Harvey
A New York love song that treats romantic euphoria as a kind of superstition-defying miracle, sung by a narrator who has…
romantic euphoria reinvention/renewal New York as mythic backdrop
A breakup song built on the gap between assumed permanence and sudden loss, where the narrator realizes too late that…
complacency in love loss of control desire versus resentment