Chet Baker
Chet Baker's reading of this Rodgers and Hart standard turns a bright, playful showtune into something hushed and interior.…
anticipation of love imagination versus reality romantic idealism
Beck
A brief, hook-driven single that trades in fragmentary, almost dissociated imagery of division and delay, wrapped around a…
impending departure social division sensory disorientation
Elton John
A spaceman narrates the mundane dread of leaving home for another routine off-world shift, and finds the glamour of space travel…
alienation the gap between public and private self domestic loss
Sandy Denny
A Bob Dylan song given to Sandy Denny's voice becomes a study in absence: the singer measures every image of beauty and time…
longing and absence time as burden identity dissolved by loss
Tom Petty
A mid-tempo Heartbreakers-style rocker built around a single deflating refrain: whatever romance is being described, the song…
disillusionment with romantic idealism emotional exhaustion letting go
The Clash
A jet-lagged travelogue that collapses the Spanish Civil War into the same frame as 1970s package-holiday Spain and the ongoing…
historical memory versus tourism the Spanish Civil War romantic longing as political metaphor
Frank Sinatra
A love song that uses cosmic imagery as an elaborate courtship metaphor, translating grand celestial longing into the plainest…
romantic devotion longing and desire the vastness of space as metaphor for feeling
Neil Young
Neil Young's elegy for a car that has died is written with such tenderness it plays as a breakup song or a eulogy for a person,…
loyalty and companionship loss and mortality nostalgia for youth
Wire
A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…
mental exhaustion alienation failure of language
Aesop Rock
A children's-book superhero story about a heroic frog who rescues people (and a poodle) from peril, delivered with a straight…
heroism as ritual childlike wonder absurdism
Rosanne Cash
A ghost narrates his own wrongful execution, explaining that he chose death over revealing the affair that would have cleared…
forbidden love silence and secrecy guilt and sacrifice
Tom Waits
A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…
restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom
Marvin Gaye
A slow-burning soul lament built almost entirely on repetition and vocal ad-lib, in which the narrator addresses a lover who has…
longing and absence romantic betrayal memory versus present loss
Ella Fitzgerald
A Gershwin standard delivered as a quiet meditation on romantic longing, framed through the image of a lost lamb searching for a…
romantic longing vulnerability self-deprecating humor
Joan Baez
This is a straightforward, sunny cover of the Bellamy Brothers' soft-pop hit, built entirely around an extended nature metaphor…
romantic surrender nature as metaphor seasonal renewal
Blondie
A slight, doo-wop-inflected pop song about physical longing dressed up as teenage romantic melodrama. Blondie plays it as a…
desire and physical longing romantic jealousy performance of innocence vs. sexuality
Gorillaz
A prayer-like protest song set against the anxious aftermath of the 2016 US election, in which a Black narrator addresses a…
racial violence and police brutality political despair faith and doubt
Nick Drake
A quiet, almost unbearably direct song built entirely around a single repeated question, addressed to someone the narrator loves…
romantic uncertainty fear of rejection self-doubt
The Louvin Brothers
A plain, pleading country ballad built entirely around a single conditional wish: to win the love of someone who remains just…
unrequited love longing devotion
This is an instrumental reading of the pop standard "Tangerine" as performed by Chet Baker, likely on trumpet (possibly with a…
longing romantic nostalgia exoticism/escapism
Lauryn Hill
Performed live and introduced almost as an experiment in vulnerability after the confrontational 'Rebel', this song builds an…
surrender spiritual longing conflated with romantic desire purification
Air
A hushed, anxious love song built almost entirely from confessions of shyness and longing, addressed to a girl the narrator…
unrequited longing shyness and inhibition idealization of a love object
Bad Company
A late-period Bad Company track built around a simple, almost adolescent premise: a narrator paralyzed by unspoken feelings for…
unrequited longing fear of rejection romantic timidity
Etta James
Etta James's reading of this standard turns a modest pop lyric into a slow-burning testimony about wanting permanence rather…
longing for commitment loneliness sacred vs. secular love
Nat King Cole
A bolero of pure longing, built almost entirely around the word "ansiedad" (anxiety/yearning) as the singer describes the…
longing and desire separation romantic devotion
Little Feat
A road-weary travel song built around a single fixed point of longing: Atlanta, and a woman there. Bill Payne's lyric stages the…
longing and distance travel and restlessness romantic fixation
A classic torch song built on a single sustained nautical metaphor for heartbreak, recorded by Rosanne Cash as part of an album…
romantic abandonment isolation longing for rescue
Al Green
A young man begs a train conductor to reverse course so he can return to a lover he left too hastily. Al Green, still developing…
regret and reversal longing isolation
Jethro Tull
A gentle, hushed love song built on the image of watching a sleeping partner and holding onto quiet, private moments. It moves…
tender devotion distance and longing the fragility of romantic idealism
Donny Hathaway
A meditation on a lover's seasonal absence, this song uses the turning of the year as a structural metaphor for unreliability in…
seasonal absence and unreliability romantic disappointment cyclical time versus stagnant love
Etta James takes the 1933 Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler standard and strips it down to raw, aching testimony, using weather as an…
heartbreak and abandonment weather as emotional metaphor spiritual longing
Judee Sill
Judee Sill builds an extended military allegory around a mysterious, idealized rescuer figure who is part lover, part guardian…
spiritual rescue romantic devotion as surrender suffering and redemption
Whitney Houston
A devotional love ballad built almost entirely on a single act of assertion: repeated declarations of faith in a partner rather…
romantic devotion faith and belief as metaphor for love surrender/vulnerability
The Flaming Lips
A funky, riff-driven anthem that dresses up a political fantasy of taking down authoritarian power in the language of magic…
power vs. greed collective resistance fantasy as political metaphor
Van Morrison
A rhapsodic, almost plotless celebration of communal joy, music, and firelight, built around a rolling gypsy caravan as an image…
communal belonging music as transcendence romantic longing
Tom Petty builds a wry daydream around the fantasy of absolute power and ease, using the language of royalty as a stand-in for…
escapism fantasy vs reality longing for control
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan's 1986 reading of the Gershwin standard treats the lyric as a meditation on wanting a specific kind of protection…
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
Mississippi John Hurt
This is Mississippi John Hurt's spare, fingerpicked take on the traditional blues standard "Corrina, Corrina," a song about a…
romantic longing abandonment fidelity despite rejection
Laura Marling
This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…
itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow