The Smiths
A short, almost prayer-like song built from just two brief verses and a repeated plea, this track compresses a lifetime of…
longing and deprivation fatalism the erosion of goodness by circumstance
Judee Sill
A hushed, almost liturgical meditation on grief and the search for mercy, built around the ancient plea for divine pity. Judee…
grief and mourning dreams as spiritual descent supplication and mercy
Maxwell
Maxwell's Unplugged reading of Kate Bush's ballad turns a song about a man helplessly watching his wife through a dangerous…
helplessness in the face of mortality regret over words and gestures withheld gendered division of labor and pain
Queen
A ballad of direct, almost naked pleading, structured as a repeated appeal to a departing lover rather than a story with events.…
romantic loss pleading and supplication devotion despite rejection
Merle Haggard
This is a plainspoken gospel prayer sung from a position of exhaustion and humility, asking for the strength to survive the…
religious surrender humility and human limitation present-moment endurance
Leonard Cohen
A short, incantatory prayer-song in which the speaker surrenders the illusion of being the one who loves and comes to see love…
surrender of ego divine or transcendent love exile and punishment
Carly Simon
Carly Simon's version of this old folk standard strips it down to a hushed, almost prayer-like lullaby, trading the song's usual…
fragile love fear of loss comfort and vulnerability
Son House
Son House recounts the death of a lover through a series of stark, repeated images: a letter, a wake, a burial, a failed prayer.…
grief and loss delayed recognition of love religious doubt
Mitski
A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…
mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy
Echo & the Bunnymen
This is a self-titled album's late, throwaway-sounding track built almost entirely from paired nouns and nonsense refrains…
nonsense/wordplay power and submission repetition as meaning
Depeche Mode
A slow-burning devotional track that blurs the line between spiritual ecstasy and self-annihilation, using the imagery of…
surrender and self-dissolution transcendence through love or faith mortality
D'Angelo
A meditative prayer set against apocalyptic collapse, this song written for a game about the closing of the American frontier…
spiritual endurance moral reckoning memory and forgetting