The Decemberists
A revenge ballad told as a story-within-a-story: a man narrates to his childhood tormentor how he tracked him down for ruining…
revenge and obsession childhood trauma maternal loss
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
Blue Öyster Cult
A strange, half-gothic love-and-revenge song in which the narrator addresses a duplicitous woman named Vera Marie, promising to…
betrayal and retaliation duplicity / two-facedness seduction as danger
The Supremes
A woman lays out an ultimatum to a partner who has been cheating and lying, using the image of walking boots as both threat and…
infidelity female defiance revenge
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
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
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
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
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
Billy Joel
A young narrator describes a destructive, one-sided infatuation using imagery of physical danger — electrified rails, hidden…
obsessive infatuation self-destruction adolescent isolation
Roxy Music
A short, hypnotic track built almost entirely around a single repeated phrase, using minimal lyrical content to evoke a mood of…
obsession romantic devotion ambiguity of desire
A rangy, harmonica-flecked folk-rock tune built around a single refrain that fixes the action in one riverside, working-town…
desire and self-destruction place and memory erosion/nature as metaphor
Luna
Luna's "Malibu Love Nest" is a slow-motion love litany, a catalog of places where the narrator promises to inscribe his lover's…
romantic devotion glamour and celebrity culture dislocation and travel
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
Mercury Rev
A short, mantra-like song built almost entirely from a single repeated claim of near-arrival, set against an image of racing an…
pursuit of an unreachable goal time pressure and mortality obsession
Electric Light Orchestra
A ballad built around a single fixation: a man haunted by a vision of a woman glimpsed on the water, unable to shake the image…
obsession escapism fantasy versus reality
Eurythmics
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
The Stooges
A slow-burning ballad of surrender, "Ann" strips The Stooges' usual noise down to a hypnotic drone so Iggy Pop can perform total…
erotic surrender loss of control obsession
Archers of Loaf
A noisy, fragmented song about wanting to be essential to someone and finding yourself reduced instead to an obstruction in…
codependency and control self-deception miscommunication
Main Source
Main Source builds a grim cause-and-effect narrative: a child raised in a cycle of abuse and addiction grows into a contract…
cycle of abuse nature vs. nurture violence as inheritance
Sturgill Simpson
A retro-soul come-on built around a single, overworked double entendre, this theme song for HBO's Vinyl trades on 1970s funk…
desire as addiction performance of seduction decay behind glamour
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
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion
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
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
Prince
A pulsing, funk-driven fantasy in which lustful thought itself becomes a punishable crime, with the narrator gleefully accepting…
desire as transgression punishment and pleasure obsession
The Cure
"Push" is largely an instrumental-driven track with sparse, cryptic lyrics that arrive late and function more as texture than…
self-protection alienation obsession
Cassandra Wilson
This is Cassandra Wilson's 2015 reading of the 1938 Coots/Gillespie standard, delivered as part of a tribute to Billie Holiday.…
intoxication as metaphor for desire self-awareness versus helplessness obsession
Faithless
A trip-hop confession of romantic addiction, built on a hypnotic looping chorus and a spoken-sung verse that describes love as…
addiction as metaphor for love codependency and control self-deception
Lucinda Williams
A song about the gap between knowing a relationship is finished and being unable to act on that knowledge. Built almost entirely…
romantic obsession denial versus awareness emotional paralysis
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
Mel Tormé
A Cole Porter standard about romantic obsession that the speaker recognizes as self-destructive but cannot shake. The song…
obsessive love self-awareness vs. compulsion futility of resistance
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
Alex G
A sketchy, almost cartoonish sketch of obsession that curdles into something colder and more threatening by its end. Alex G…
obsessive desire objectification vs. selfhood power imbalance
The Rolling Stones
A disco-inflected blues about romantic obsession, where a narrator's loneliness is undercut by the party noise and distraction…
obsessive longing denial and self-deception urban loneliness
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
The Police
A compressed blast of obsessive desire dressed as punk-pop, where the narrator catalogues increasingly reckless acts to close…
obsessive infatuation loss of self-control impulsivity vs. stability
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