Results for “the decline of monogamy”

Songs

Everyday

Weyes Blood

A wry, melancholic meditation on romantic uncertainty in the age of dating apps and open relationships, where the narrator's…

romantic insecurity the decline of monogamy self-doubt

That Old Time Feeling

Guy Clark

A meditation on nostalgia and decline, built entirely from a chain of similes comparing an abstract feeling to aging, marginal…

nostalgia aging and decline loneliness

Tender Is the Night (The Long Fidelity)

The Triffids

A narrator recounts the moral and emotional collapse of a man she once knew, then slides into her own restlessness and…

emotional decline displacement and time zones addiction to intensity/pain

Railroad Song

Jim Croce

A nostalgic folk song that uses the decline of American railroads as a vehicle for mourning lost boyhood and unrealized freedom.…

nostalgia loss of innocence industrial decline

Paris Blues

The Doors

This is a late-vaulted Jim Morrison recording, released decades after his death as a posthumous single with the surviving Doors…

escapism aging and decline fame and image

I Want Your Sex, Pts. 1 & 2

George Michael

George Michael turns a single, blunt demand into a sustained argument about desire, patience, and monogamy, dressing up a simple…

sexual desire and frustration persuasion and rhetoric monogamy versus promiscuity

Our Town

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

Sweet Gene Vincent

Ian Dury

A eulogy for rockabilly star Gene Vincent that moves between tender elegy and jukebox-era pastiche, using stark black-and-white…

mortality and decline rock and roll mythology addiction and self-destruction

No Easy Way Down

Dusty Springfield

A meditation on the comedown after infatuation, built around the image of a balloon's slow deflation and a mountaineer's…

disillusionment after love's high loss of control isolation

America First

Merle Haggard

A late-career protest song from Merle Haggard arguing that American resources and attention spent overseas should be redirected…

war-weariness economic neglect populist nationalism

Jersey Shore

The Promise Ring

A brief, offhand travelogue of restlessness set against a fading summer, where the speaker's physical drift along the Jersey…

transience aging out of youth seasonal decline

Next Lifetime

Erykah Badu

A woman confesses to an overwhelming attraction to someone who isn't her partner, and instead of acting on it, she defers the…

temptation fidelity vs desire self-restraint

The Great British Mistake

The Adverts

This is a bleak state-of-the-nation address delivered through fragmented, almost prophetic imagery rather than direct narrative.…

national decline complacency and stagnation surveillance and predation

Funtimes In Babylon

Father John Misty

This is Father John Misty's debut-album opener, a mock-prophetic toast to decadence before apocalypse. It frames Los Angeles and…

apocalyptic anxiety hedonism as defense mechanism satire of Hollywood ambition

Everything Must Go

Steely Dan

A liquidation sale becomes a metaphor for a business, a relationship, or an era ending, with the narrator determined to face…

failure and decline corporate dissolution as metaphor denial through humor

Crippled Crow

Kris Kristofferson

A slow, bitter ballad that turns the busking beggar into an emblem of the working musician, someone who trades private pain for…

artistic suffering fame's cost begging as metaphor for performance

Lucretia My Reflection

The Sisters of Mercy

A dense, industrial-sounding incantation that fuses imagery of collapsing empires, war machinery, and drug-fueled decadence into…

imperial decline dissociation and numbness decadence and excess

Hardly Getting Over It

Hüsker Dü

A song from Hüsker Dü's original run recast here as a live document, this track builds a bleak inventory of loss — a broken…

mortality emotional numbness aging and decline

Place to Be

Nick Drake

An opening-track confession that traces a single life arc—innocence, vitality, and eventual depletion—in four spare stanzas. The…

decline and aging loss of innocence spiritual exhaustion

The Last Mall

Steely Dan

A supermarket-style PA announcement becomes the herald of an apocalypse, as Steely Dan stages consumer culture's final…

consumerism as religion apocalypse/end times American decline

Disorder in the House

Warren Zevon

Zevon turns his own house into a stand-in for a body and a country falling apart at once, cataloguing collapse with black comedy…

mortality physical decline national decay

Unshaken

D'Angelo

A meditative prayer set against apocalyptic collapse, this song written for a game about the closing of the American frontier…

spiritual endurance moral reckoning memory and forgetting

This Is England

The Clash

This is The Clash's late, embittered self-portrait of Thatcher-era Britain, stitching together images of unemployment, racist…

national decline unemployment and social decay racist violence

Ashes of American Flags

Wilco

A meditation on consumer numbness and spiritual exhaustion set against the mundane ritual of an ATM transaction, this track uses…

consumerism and alienation self-loathing failed transcendence

Letting Me Down

Margo Price

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

Looking for a Way Out

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

Low Budget

The Kinks

Ray Davies turns late-1970s British economic austerity into a comic self-portrait, complaining in absurdly physical terms about…

economic austerity class anxiety and pride consumerism and thrift

The Weekend

SZA

SZA casts herself as the mistress in a triangle and refuses the shame the role usually carries, framing her position as a…

infidelity and complicity self-worth versus desire possession and comparison

Surf's Up

The Beach Boys

A dense, impressionistic collage that moves from a decaying image of aristocratic high culture to a hymn-like meditation on…

decline of civilization/culture innocence versus experience memory and dissolution

Microfiche

Open Mike Eagle

Open Mike Eagle stitches together deadpan self-deprecation, pop-culture non-sequiturs, and a quietly devastating account of a…

mental health and anxiety self-deprecating humor as coping pop culture as escapism

Feeling Mortal

Kris Kristofferson

A late-career meditation on aging and mortality, written by a man in his mid-seventies confronting his reflection and his…

aging and mortality self-scrutiny gratitude amid decline

Red Dirt Girl

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

The City of New Orleans

Arlo Guthrie

A folk travelogue narrated by a train as it runs from Chicago to New Orleans, cataloguing the ordinary Americans aboard and the…

decline of American rail travel working-class life nostalgia

A Design for Life

Manic Street Preachers

A song written in the voice of a working-class community that both inherits and resents the identity assigned to it. It opens…

class and inheritance the decline of working-class institutions alcohol as anesthetic

circle the drain

Soccer Mommy

A song about depression that persists despite outward stability, built around the image of a body slowly failing while the…

depression and mental illness the gap between appearance and interior state exhaustion from performing wellness

Meet Me On the Equinox

Death Cab for Cutie

A love song built around an astronomical image of perfect balance that the singer knows cannot last. Written for the New Moon…

mortality impermanence of love balance and equilibrium

Desperados Waiting for a Train

Guy Clark

A grown narrator remembers the old oilman who raised him, tracing their bond from childhood through the man's decline and death.…

intergenerational friendship aging and mortality masculine mythmaking

September When It Comes

Rosanne Cash

A meditation on mortality and inherited fate, written in the voice of someone reckoning with the end of life while looking back…

mortality inheritance/family legacy acceptance

It Ain't Me Babe

Joan Baez

A Bob Dylan composition performed here by Joan Baez, the song is a firm, almost gentle refusal of an idealized love that demands…

refusal of idealized love autonomy versus self-erasure disillusionment with romantic fantasy

Come & See

Protomartyr

A fragmented, sermon-like address that treats salvation and civic decline as interchangeable con jobs. Joe Casey delivers…

false salvation civic decay fear as discipline