Paul Simon
A bitter recollection of a suffocating hometown, stripped of color and possibility, sung as a reunion piece by Simon and…
small-town claustrophobia loss of faith inherited identity
Bill Callahan
A quiet domestic love song disguised as an account of piloting a small plane together. The flight becomes a working metaphor for…
domestic trust shared control in partnership contentment
Kacey Musgraves
A small-town portrait built on nursery-rhyme wordplay, this song surveys the quiet addictions, forced marriages, and inherited…
small-town stagnation inherited expectation quiet addiction
Margo Price
Margo Price surveys the transactional culture of Nashville's music industry from the vantage of a newcomer who has already been…
music industry exploitation gender and power authenticity vs. commerce
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a legendary Mexican bandit and the friend widely suspected of betraying him, told with the flattened affect of a…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and displacement
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
A weathered ballad about a Mexican bandit and the friend who may have betrayed him, told with the flat, elliptical tone of a…
betrayal and guilt myth-making and unreliable legend exile and diminishment
A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…
poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado
Big Star
A deceptively simple slice of teenage boredom set to a chiming, anthemic riff, this song turns the aimlessness of small-town…
teenage boredom small-town aimlessness friendship
The Shins
A hushed, melodically sweet song about romantic regret and a wish to shed adult disappointment carries lyrics that are far more…
regret and self-recrimination longing for innocence small-town disillusionment
Grandaddy
A loose, dreamlike catalog of small-town wreckage - shut-down factories, joyriding teens, a decrepit limousine, a spray-painted…
small-town decay aimlessness and boredom mechanization versus nature
Steely Dan
A neighborhood gang works itself into a fever pitch preparing for the homecoming of a woman named Josie, whose arrival promises…
homecoming as ritual collective male desire violence disguised as celebration
Tom Waits
A road-worn ballad about a woman who flees a judgmental small town for California and ends up broke and cold in a motel, with a…
small-town judgment and shame escape and disillusionment poverty and survival
Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch strings together a series of small-town obituaries and rumors — an overdose, a runaway, a breakdown, a possible…
mortality and fatalism small-town gossip and rumor addiction and ruin
Bruce Springsteen
A young man on a porch pleads with a woman named Mary to leave their fading town with him, framing an escape by car as both…
escape and flight romantic persuasion as salvation small-town limitation
A narrator processes the disappearance of someone close by insisting she isn't actually dead, just gone and hiding in plain…
disappearance and denial isolation unreliable information
A short, circling song about a young woman stalling against the pressure to settle down—marriage, respectability, the expected…
deferred adulthood female autonomy vs. domestic expectation escape and mobility
Ann Peebles
Ann Peebles delivers a frustrated ultimatum to a partner stuck in aimless repetition, warning that her patience is running out.…
frustration with stagnation failing communication ultimatum and impending departure
Mitski
A brief, hymn-like address to the moon in which the speaker asks that their love outlive their body. It works less as narrative…
mortality possession and dispossession love as legacy
Underworld
This early, pre-techno Underworld track is a nervy pop-funk song about living small and invisible under the threat of…
Cold War anxiety surveillance and invisibility smallness/powerlessness
Carole King
A song about finding sanctuary in a small, unglamorous piece of urban space -- a tenement rooftop -- as an escape from the noise…
urban alienation escape and refuge working-class endurance
Wire
A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…
mental exhaustion alienation failure of language
Animal Collective
A tangled, riddling song about the effort of self-diagnosis — trying to name a discomfort that resists naming. Animal Collective…
self-examination communication breakdown instinct vs. denial
A short, incantatory song about self-renewal that treats change as a kind of switch that, once flipped, can't be reversed.…
renewal and rebirth escape from stagnation transformation as irreversible
A slippery, satirical cocktail-party exchange dressed up as an Afro-pop groove, in which Paul Simon strings together…
social performance and vanity emptiness of small talk passivity and resignation
Fugazi
A short, hammering post-hardcore sermon aimed at hypocrisy and inertia, built almost entirely on one refrain that refuses the…
hypocrisy authenticity stagnation vs. change
Ann Peebles builds a playful boast out of an odd conceit: itemizing her own body and character in pounds, like a recipe or a…
self-affirmation physical confidence sensuality as arithmetic
Little Feat
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
A catalog of no-win social judgments builds into a plainspoken anthem for living by one's own compass rather than trying to…
double standards sexual and social freedom religious hypocrisy
Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris narrates the entire life of a childhood friend from rural Alabama, from adolescence to an early, unremarked…
rural poverty thwarted ambition female friendship
Minutemen
A punk band's origin story told without irony or distance, this song insists that ordinary friendship and local geography are as…
friendship and collaboration punk rock lineage and influence self-mythologizing vs. humility
Aphex Twin
Avril 14th is a brief solo piano piece by Aphex Twin, built from a simple, halting melodic phrase that repeats with small…
memory fragility impermanence
St. Vincent
A domestic scene curdles into something closer to a portrait of intimacy as mutual damage. The song catalogs small betrayals and…
toxic intimacy identity dissolution emotional masochism
A gentle lullaby in which a father tries, with dwindling patience and self-deprecating humor, to coax his son to sleep. Beneath…
parental love domesticity sleep and childhood
The Jam
A brief, almost accidental human connection is offered as a small act of resistance against isolation and cynicism. The song…
fleeting connection alienation reciprocity
Nina Simone
A song-portrait of urban decay, written not by Simone but performed on her 1978 record of the same name, in which a wounded city…
urban decay poverty escape and displacement
James Taylor
A commuter's rant against gridlock turns, almost by accident, into a joke about mortality and then a flicker of environmental…
urban frustration mortality played for laughs environmental unease
Fleet Foxes
A young narrator wrestles with the individualism he was raised on, wondering whether meaning comes from being special or from…
individualism vs. collectivism disillusionment with authority search for purpose
A breakup song built from small, deflating images of self-worth, sung by someone who has resigned themselves to having been…
romantic rejection self-deprecation memory and haunting