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
The Band
A late-period Band track that dresses up desire as desperate need, using the language of addiction and salvation to describe…
romantic obsession as addiction powerlessness and surrender spiritual language repurposed for desire
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
Elvis Costello
A jilted narrator sifts through the physical debris a lover has left behind, treating each object as evidence of who she was and…
romantic obsession grief and loss self-deception
Bad Company
A late-period Bad Company arena-rock love song that borrows the language of religious ecstasy to describe romantic and sexual…
romantic devotion sacred/profane confusion obsession and disbelief
Frank Ocean
"Chanel" is a loose, associative track built around the Chanel logo's interlocking C's as a metaphor for bisexuality and duality…
bisexuality and duality surveillance and paranoia wealth as armor
Joni Mitchell
A meditation on romantic infatuation that refuses to resolve into either full escape or full surrender, built around the central…
romantic obsession self-sufficiency amid heartbreak creative identity as refuge
Curtis Mayfield
A late-70s disco-soul love song built almost entirely around physical and emotional surrender, with Curtis Mayfield trading his…
romantic and sexual devotion surrender of control obsession/infatuation
Madonna
A dancefloor anthem built on the friction between infatuation and impatience, where the singer clocks every second spent waiting…
romantic impatience obsession versus self-respect time as torment
Warren Zevon
A junkie in a rundown corner of Los Angeles narrates his own decline in a strangely tender, almost comic voice, addressing an…
addiction and withdrawal romantic longing as survival strategy poverty and bureaucracy
Ann Peebles
A woman alone on a rainy night confesses to a desire strong enough to make her willing to wreck another relationship just to…
forbidden desire loneliness emotional compulsion versus morality
Fleetwood Mac
A Stevie Nicks composition for Fleetwood Mac's 2003 reunion album, this song circles a fraught reconciliation between two people…
romantic obsession broken trust self-abasement in love
Todd Rundgren
A breakup song built around the gap between dream and waking: the narrator revisits a lost love in nightly fantasies of…
romantic loss the unreliability of dreams versus waking reality self-sabotage and emotional masochism
Adele
A ballad of collapse and self-immolation in a relationship, where the narrator moves from surrender to a lover who deceived her,…
romantic betrayal self-destruction as catharsis obsessive attachment
Steve Earle
A quiet, unadorned reckoning with a relationship dissolved somewhere in a haze of substance abuse, told by a narrator who can…
addiction and memory loss romantic loss guilt and self-reproach
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
Townes Van Zandt
This is a Rolling Stones cover (Jagger/Richards) performed live by Townes Van Zandt on Roadsongs, and in his hands the song's…
class resentment addiction and self-destruction romantic betrayal
Elliott Smith
A short, quiet song built around the phrase "morning after," which Smith turns from a hangover cliché into a metaphor for…
fragile hope fatalism vs. change romantic uncertainty
Björk
Björk's cover reworks a 1951 Betty Hutton novelty tune into a dynamic set piece where hushed, orchestral verses collapse into…
the volatility of infatuation quiet vs. chaos as emotional states the absurdity of romantic obsession
Sarah Vaughan
A torch song built entirely around one confined domestic scene: a woman drinking coffee alone through the small hours, waiting…
romantic waiting and vigilance gendered domestic roles insomnia and time distortion
This is Laura Marling's recording of Neil Young's 1972 song about heroin addiction, written after Young watched a bandmate…
addiction loss complicity of the witness
A stark, allegorical account of heroin addiction told through personified figures: the needle, the drug's seductive pull, and…
addiction death as seduction urban decay
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Steely Dan
A portrait of a man consumed by amphetamine addiction, told at a cool remove through a narrator warning a woman close to him to…
addiction denial warning/escape
A stark, minimally strummed song that follows a young addict on a bus and on foot toward a dealer, narrated with a flat,…
addiction dissociation self-erasure
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
Uncle Tupelo
A breakup song built around a simple exchange-of-belongings conceit, where the speaker asks for his possessions back while…
heartbreak addiction blame and self-justification
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
Gladys Knight
A plainspoken plea for reassurance, this song strips romantic anxiety down to one repeated question: is there enough love here…
romantic uncertainty need for validation fear of wasted devotion
Queen
A deceptively simple breakup anthem built on repetition and plain declarative statements, John Deacon's song uses the language…
liberation romantic disillusionment self-assertion
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
George Jones
A late-career George Jones confession set as a plainspoken moral ledger: a man looking back on a life of drink and lost…
regret addiction free will versus fate
Thin Lizzy
A gambler's monologue delivered as tense, driving hard rock, built around the physical sensation of nervous sweat rather than…
risk and compulsion masculine bravado poverty and escape fantasy
Amy Winehouse
A defiant, retro-soul kiss-off to the people urging the narrator into treatment, delivered with a swagger that keeps curdling…
denial and self-mythology addiction autonomy vs. paternalism
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
A wry character sketch of an unrepentant romantic drifter told from the outside, by a narrator warning a woman about the man's…
romantic recidivism performance vs. sincerity the myth of the outlaw lover
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
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
Roxy Music
A quiet plea for romantic risk-taking from a narrator who has been burned by love before. The song trades Roxy Music's earlier…
romantic vulnerability emotional fatigue hope after disappointment
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