Bruce Springsteen
A young man stands in a driveway trying to talk a woman named Mary into getting in his car and leaving town with him. Over five…
escape and flight the limits of romantic promise small-town decay
Billie Holiday
A three-stanza protest song about the lynching of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, built on a single sustained metaphor:…
racial terror and lynching the corruption of Southern pastoral imagery the body as evidence
Leonard Cohen
A three-part meditation in waltz time that moves from a woman by a river, to Christ walking on water, and back to the woman…
erotic love as spiritual apprehension faith and doubt surrender to a guide
Otis Redding
A man who has moved across the country sits by the water in San Francisco, watching ships come and go, admitting he is doing…
idleness and drift migration and displacement loneliness
Kate Bush
A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…
empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding