James Taylor
A meditation on a small town's decline, written as a soft eulogy sung in the voice of someone who watched the place rise and now…
decline of small-town America obsolescence and progress loyalty to place
Iris DeMent
A dying narrator surveys a lifetime spent in one small town, moving through memories of love, birth, and burial before facing…
mortality small-town life and its erosion memory and place attachment
Paul Simon
A reunion song in the loosest sense — Simon and Garfunkel singing together again about the deadening sameness of a childhood…
small-town suffocation inherited identity disillusionment with faith and patriotism
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
Jason Isbell
A narrator sits at his dying father's bedside in a small town he's always known too well, and realizes only in that final vigil…
small-town claustrophobia estrangement from a parent grief and release
Public Enemy
Public Enemy uses three loosely connected vignettes of unsolved shootings tied to hip-hop culture to indict the industry and…
media complicity violence in hip-hop culture commercialization of black death
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
Gillian Welch
A traveler recounts a journey to a mythic, menacing place called Scarlet Town, where hospitality curdles into betrayal and…
betrayal mortality folk/ballad inheritance
Small Faces
A short, wistful ballad about clinging to the residue of a relationship that has effectively ended, where the narrator admits…
unrequited longing self-deception denial versus awareness
Townes Van Zandt
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
An early, stripped-down Townes Van Zandt song told as a first-person litany of ruin — abandonment, drink, a bad romance, a…
fatalism cyclical poverty and violence addiction as companionship
Tears for Fears
A hushed, folk-tinged meditation on mortality, freedom, and devotion, addressed from an aging narrator to a partner he credits…
mortality and aging freedom versus reason devotion as salvation
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
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
The Rolling Stones
A song written before the pandemic but released as it began, this track turns the band's home city into a hollowed-out stage…
isolation urban decay nostalgia for nightlife
Okkervil River
A first-person murder ballad told from inside the mind of a killer awaiting arrest, moving between ordinary teenage memory and a…
banality of evil unreliable confession small-town violence
Carly Simon
This is a torch-song standard (best known from Sinatra's version) recorded by Carly Simon for a film soundtrack, and it's built…
insomnia and longing unrequited love the contrast between day and night
Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey's 1994 reading of the 1934 novelty standard turns a simple children's warning song into a full-scale gospel-pop…
surveillance and reward childhood obedience holiday anticipation
A blues-rock strut built almost entirely around one insistent claim -- that the woman being addressed lacks something the singer…
sexual bravado dance-craze nostalgia repetition as persuasion
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
A restless travel song built on blues repetition, where the highway and its trucks become both an escape route and a kind of…
restlessness and flight addiction/escape as motion transience and homelessness
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 traveling songwriter's meditation on impermanence, love without possession, and the necessity of moving on, framed as both a…
impermanence itinerant life love without attachment
A short, quiet meditation on unspoken love and loss, built almost entirely from conditional wishes and unresolved arithmetic.…
unrequited love denial and repression escape and freedom
A traveling song built around the image of snow closing in on a mountain pass, using the road as a figure for time, mortality,…
transience and travel the impossibility of stopping time love versus wandering
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
Pearl Jam
A cover originally written by Victoria Williams, this Pearl Jam rendition tells the story of a marginalized, possibly mentally…
outsiderhood and stigma small-town cruelty and complicity fear versus compassion
A breezy, sing-song surface hides a small, deadpan love story about a sailor and a small-town girl. Paul Simon builds the song…
nostalgia innocence and Americana romantic idealization
Uncle Tupelo
A portrait of small-town stasis sung with the flat, unsparing eye of someone who grew up watching it happen. The song addresses…
small-town entrapment wasted time denial and self-deception
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
Margo Price sketches a small-town portrait of someone who left and never came good, using a specific failed person as a stand-in…
small-town decline broken promises generational failure
A dedication-turned-elegy for the defeated, this early Uncle Tupelo track surveys small-town despair and quietly asks whether…
small-town despair alcohol as coping mechanism spiritual exhaustion
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
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
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
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 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
Beck
A quiet, weary breakup song in which the narrator addresses a partner who is emotionally unreachable, cataloguing small signs of…
romantic exhaustion emotional withdrawal resignation
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