Billie Holiday
A standard-era love song built entirely around the idea of infatuation rather than the beloved's physical presence: the singer…
idealized love longing and absence daydreaming as escape
John Lee Hooker
A slow, brooding solo blues meditation built almost entirely on repetition and a single fixed image: a man alone at a window,…
abandonment jealousy and suspicion loneliness
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
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
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
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
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
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
The Cure
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
Interpol
A fractured, obsessive address to a woman who dominates the narrator's inner life, built from disjointed images of intimacy,…
obsessive desire emotional damage decay and aging
Kate Bush
Kate Bush voices Cathy Earnshaw's ghost from Emily Brontë's novel, pleading at a window for reunion with Heathcliff. The song…
possessive love death and haunting nature as emotional mirror
Annie Lennox
Annie Lennox's reading of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins standard, cut for her covers album Nostalgia, strips the song down to its…
possessive love jealousy desperation
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
Ramones
A three-minute cover of a 1958 rock and roll standard, stripped down and sped up until the invitation to dance becomes an…
teenage romance dance as ritual nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll
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
Nat King Cole
A jilted lover appeals past his unfaithful partner to God and the sea as witnesses to his grief, then trails off into…
betrayal in love unanswered devotion isolation and distance
Thom Yorke
A fractured, glitchy meditation on trying to erase someone from consciousness only to find them multiplying under the pressure…
denial and obsession the futility of erasure suspicion and manipulation
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
Deerhunter
A brief, jangly pop song that fuses the language of romantic infatuation with imagery of illness, possession, and death, so that…
obsessive love possession and illness death and reincarnation
Broken Social Scene
This is Broken Social Scene's rendition of Joy Division's 1980 classic, recorded for the soundtrack of The Time Traveler's Wife,…
romantic disintegration emotional stasis guilt and self-recrimination
Marvin Gaye
A slow-burning seduction song built almost entirely on a single proposition: move in with me. Marvin Gaye layers a soft, almost…
seduction and desire domestic fantasy emotional vulnerability masked as pleasure-seeking
SZA
SZA turns devotion into a kind of hyper-vigilance, pledging extreme loyalty and even violence for a lover while the…
obsessive devotion insecurity masked as confidence loyalty and self-sacrifice
Otis Redding
A drifter sits by the water in San Francisco, watching boats and tides pass while he takes stock of a life that has stalled out.…
displacement stasis and drift loneliness
Interpol's 'Specialist' is a sprawling, image-drunk portrait of a relationship that oscillates between erotic surrender and…
obsessive love loss of control confinement and freedom
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
Aphex Twin
An untitled, numbered ambient piece from Aphex Twin's largely wordless second Selected Ambient Works volume, this track works…
dissociation interior space repetition and stasis
Son House
A Delta blues lament built on the classic AAB stanza form, this song traces a man's attempt to reconcile betrayal with lingering…
betrayal and abandonment obsessive longing wounded pride
PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…
obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention
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
Spoon
A song about staying put — emotionally and literally — inside a routine that has worn thin, and choosing devotion anyway. The…
endurance of routine devotion as choice stasis versus escape
Big Thief
"Not" is a song built entirely out of negation, circling an unnamed thing by naming everything it isn't. Lenker piles up sensory…
negation and unnameability impermanence desire and its objects
Lana Del Rey
This is Lana Del Rey's faithful, lightly reworked cover of Sublime's 1996 track, itself a reggae-inflected reimagining of the…
betrayal and possessiveness local pride and belonging romantic disillusionment
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
Neutral Milk Hotel
A frantic, horn-driven elegy that fuses the story of Anne Frank with a surreal, almost hallucinatory imagery of reincarnation…
death and afterlife war and atrocity obsessive love/grief
Pearl Jam
A song about the aftermath of a devastating breakup, built on the image of a world drained of color and identity once a lover is…
heartbreak and loss loss of identity grief's distortion of perception
Minnie Riperton
A single found photograph pulls the narrator involuntarily into a past relationship she thought she'd buried. What starts as…
involuntary memory grief over lost love loss of control
Lucinda Williams
A plainspoken, almost obsessive plea directed at someone who has vanished without explanation. The song works less through…
loss and disappearance unanswered longing anxiety about a loved one
Leonard Cohen
This is a late-Cohen autopsy of a life spent chasing and fleeing intimacy, delivered as a kind of confessional inventory. Cohen…
mortality and retrospection the failure of romantic and religious ideals self-mythologizing and its collapse