Results for “rock band identity”

Songs

Rock & Roll Stew

Traffic

This is a road-worn touring song, a loose, groove-driven complaint and celebration about the grind of life on the move. It…

touring exhaustion displacement vs. home alienation from ordinary life

Atlantic City

The Band

A narrator in a fading, mob-shadowed Atlantic City weighs a desperate financial choice against a fragile romantic vow, using…

economic desperation moral compromise decay and renewal

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy's suite-like tribute to Irish identity, stitching together folk balladry, mythic invocation, and a rapid-fire…

Irish cultural inheritance myth and storytelling exile and longing for home

All the Young Dudes (David Bowie & Ian Hunter Vocal)

Mott the Hoople

A glam-rock anthem that assembles a cast of disaffected, gender-bending teenagers and hands them a vague, urgent 'news' to…

generational rupture glam identity and androgyny disaffection with 60s idealism

Changes

David Bowie

A song about self-reinvention that treats identity as something perpetually in motion rather than a fixed achievement. Bowie…

self-reinvention generational conflict identity instability

YYZ

Rush

YYZ is an instrumental showcase built around the Morse-code rhythm for Toronto's Pearson International Airport identifier, which…

homecoming and travel technical virtuosity Canadian identity

Lola

The Kinks

A naive young man recounts his disorienting, thrilling encounter with Lola, a nightclub companion whose gender identity…

gender fluidity and identity sexual awakening innocence versus experience

Once in a Lifetime

Talking Heads

A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…

mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift

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

Batdance

Prince

"Batdance" is less a song than a sound collage built to promote the 1989 Batman film, splicing dance-funk grooves with dialogue…

media spectacle identity/duality commercialism and tie-in culture

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

Between the Bars

Elliott Smith

A quiet, almost lullaby-like address to someone (or something) that promises comfort while actually describing a kind of…

addiction and dependency seduction and control erased identity

Isn't She Lovely

Stevie Wonder

A new father's unfiltered, almost breathless reaction to the birth of his daughter, rendered as a series of rhetorical questions…

fatherhood and new birth gratitude love as creative/generative force

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's version of this traditional folk-blues song reworks a prison-labor lament into swampy rock, keeping the old imagery of…

incarceration and forced labor longing for deliverance folk mythology / superstition

Stairway to Heaven

Led Zeppelin

A slow-building folk-rock epic that follows a mysterious woman convinced she can purchase spiritual transcendence, using her as…

spiritual materialism vs. authentic enlightenment ambiguity of language and meaning pastoral/mythic imagery as escape

Mr. Big

Free

This is a bare-bones jealousy anthem built around a menacing catchphrase — a working man warning off a rival who's been sniffing…

jealousy and possessiveness masculine pride working-class self-assurance

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…

longing and absence loss of self idealized love

Jeepster

T. Rex

A glam-rock come-on that fuses car-fetish imagery with vampiric hunger, treating seduction as a kind of automotive worship.…

desire and pursuit commodification of the body glamour and artifice

Break On Through (To The Other Side)

The Doors

A driving, insistent rock song built almost entirely around one imperative: push past the limits of ordinary perception and…

transcendence and liminality desire and intoxication confinement versus freedom

Can't Get Enough

Bad Company

This is a lean, riff-driven blues-rock strut built almost entirely around a single confession of desire repeated until it…

desire and appetite masculine bravado transactional love

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom

In My Life

The Beatles

A meditation on memory that moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to a declaration of present love, arguing that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the persistence of the past

I'm On Fire

Bruce Springsteen

A minimal, hushed rock song built around a single sustained image of desire as physical injury. Springsteen strips away the…

obsessive desire transgression/infidelity psychological torment

Hush

Deep Purple

This is a cover of Joe South's garage-pop original, reworked by Deep Purple into a driving rock jam built around a simple…

obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love desire vs. self-control

Matty Groves

Fairport Convention

This is the Fairport Convention arrangement of the old English/Scottish murder ballad about an adulterous tryst between a…

class transgression sexual desire and consequence honor and violence

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Nirvana

Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough single is a rock anthem built on refusing to say anything anthemic. Over a four-chord riff that…

adolescent apathy and boredom the demand to be entertained self-loathing and self-sabotage

Crossroads

Cream

This is Cream's electrified rework of Robert Johnson's Delta blues standard, compressing the original's verses into a lean live…

isolation and abandonment desperation and pleading the crossroads as fate/damnation myth

Because the Night

Patti Smith

A duet between erotic urgency and something closer to faith: the speaker asks a lover to take her as she is, and then defends…

erotic desire as sustenance night as sanctuary from harm doubt and belief