Results for “the gap between longing and knowing”

I Know What I Know

Paul Simon

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

Don't Know Why

Smokey Robinson

A spare confession of regret builds around a single unanswered question: why didn't the narrator show up for someone waiting.…

regret emotional paralysis longing

Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time)

Elton John

A spaceman narrates the mundane dread of leaving home for another routine off-world shift, and finds the glamour of space travel…

alienation the gap between public and private self domestic loss

I Know It's Over

The Smiths

A funeral dirge for a heartbreak that treats emotional death as literal burial. Morrissey's narrator addresses his mother from…

romantic despair self-burial/death imagery loneliness and self-loathing

She Knows

J. Cole

Been Down So Long

The Doors

A straight blues workout built on a single inverted-fortune boast, this track uses the twelve-bar form's repetition to turn…

confinement and release blues tradition/lineage sexual demand

For All We Know

Abbey Lincoln

A standard-era torch song built on a single plea: seize the present because permanence is never guaranteed. Abbey Lincoln's…

carpe diem uncertainty of the future mortality

I Won't Be Long

Beck

A brief, hook-driven single that trades in fragmentary, almost dissociated imagery of division and delay, wrapped around a…

impending departure social division sensory disorientation

You Don’t Know Me

Alison Krauss

This is a classic torch song of concealed longing, performed here by Alison Krauss as a hushed, aching ballad. A speaker greets…

unrequited love emotional concealment missed opportunity

Long Flowing Robe

Todd Rundgren

A lonely Friday-night bar excursion turns into something closer to a ghost story or wish-fulfillment dream, as a mysterious…

loneliness desire and fantasy the uncanny

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Sandy Denny

A Bob Dylan song given to Sandy Denny's voice becomes a study in absence: the singer measures every image of beauty and time…

longing and absence time as burden identity dissolved by loss

Don't Want to Know If You Are Lonely

Hüsker Dü

A breakup song built on a contradiction: the narrator claims he wants distance from an ex-partner but keeps monitoring her…

ambivalence after a breakup emotional self-protection denial

I Know the End

Phoebe Bridgers

A road-trip through American landscapes and personal apocalypse, where the singer's private exhaustion with a relationship and a…

apocalypse (personal and national) homesickness and rootlessness burnout and exhaustion in relationships

More Than You'll Ever Know

Boyz II Men

A devotional love song built on a long-term relationship that has weathered strain and complacency. The narrator uses cosmic and…

enduring love gratitude after hardship intimacy and familiarity

Tell Me What I Don't Know

Danny Brown

A first-person account of coming up as a young drug dealer in Detroit, told with flat, almost bored affect that treats violence,…

cycles of poverty and incarceration desensitization to violence youth and false maturity

Eye Know

De La Soul

"Eye Know" is De La Soul's sunniest love song, built on a Steely Dan sample and playful Daisy Age slang. Both Posdnuos and…

courtship and seduction wordplay as intimacy group identity and self-naming

Sweet Dreams

Emmylou Harris

A brief, aching lament built on a single stubborn contradiction: the singer knows she should be done with a lover who doesn't…

unrequited love self-deception longing

Long As You're Living

Abbey Lincoln

A direct, sermon-like piece of advice-giving set to jazz phrasing, in which the singer positions herself as a hard-won…

mortality and urgency self-improvement brotherhood and ethics

We Used to Know

Jethro Tull

A wistful meditation on aging and the passage of time, framed as an address to old companions whose paths are diverging. The…

nostalgia aging and mortality disillusionment

You Know I'm No Good

Amy Winehouse

A confessional soul number in which the narrator catalogues her own infidelities and self-sabotage inside a volatile…

infidelity self-sabotage guilt and shame

Didn't Cha Know

Erykah Badu

A meditation on getting lost as a form of self-discovery, built around a single wandering vamp that never resolves into a tidy…

self-forgiveness uncertainty as growth intuition over planning

You Know My Steez

Gang Starr

This is a straight-up hip-hop statement of purpose: Guru surveys a rap landscape he considers watered down and reasserts Gang…

artistic integrity authenticity vs. commercialism spiritual/moral authority

I Don't Want to Know

Fleetwood Mac

A folk-rock kiss-off built on willful avoidance: the narrator insists they won't ask why a relationship is ending, framing that…

denial as self-protection romantic exhaustion emotional withholding

God Only Knows

The Beach Boys

A love song built on an admission rather than a boast: the singer refuses to promise eternal devotion outright, instead…

dependence and self-erasure in love uncertainty as a form of honesty devotion expressed through negation

Long Division

Fugazi

A short, incantatory piece built around a single arithmetic metaphor for a relationship's dissolution. Fugazi strip the lyric…

breakup and separation refusal of blame fracture as survival

Mary Long

Deep Purple

A snarling caricature of moral censorship, this track invents a composite figure of public prudishness and spends three verses…

hypocrisy censorship sexual repression

I Don't Want to Know

Gladys Knight

Gladys Knight delivers a hard-edged breakup address to a partner who is leaving for someone else, refusing to grant him the…

betrayal and infidelity emotional exhaustion self-respect after sacrifice

I've Been Loving You Too Long

Seal

This is Seal's cover of the Otis Redding soul standard, a slow-burning plea from a lover watching devotion curdle into…

one-sided devotion fear of abandonment emotional dependency

You Know You're Right

Nirvana

This is Nirvana's last recorded song, built almost entirely from negations and withdrawals — a speaker cataloguing all the ways…

withdrawal and self-erasure emotional numbness failure and self-sabotage

Know Your Onion!

The Shins

A fast, breathless rush of a song about salvaging a self out of adolescent isolation through music and books, then pushing that…

adolescent alienation self-invention through art escape and departure

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering, guilt-soaked ballad in which a restless narrator confesses his inability to settle down even as he pleads for…

restlessness and wanderlust guilt and self-forgiveness domestic responsibility vs freedom

Four Long Years

Wire

A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…

mental exhaustion alienation failure of language

Long May You Run

Neil Young

Neil Young's elegy for a car that has died is written with such tenderness it plays as a breakup song or a eulogy for a person,…

loyalty and companionship loss and mortality nostalgia for youth

Long Legged Larry

Aesop Rock

A children's-book superhero story about a heroic frog who rescues people (and a poodle) from peril, delivered with a straight…

heroism as ritual childlike wonder absurdism

Long Black Veil

Rosanne Cash

A ghost narrates his own wrongful execution, explaining that he chose death over revealing the affair that would have cleared…

forbidden love silence and secrecy guilt and sacrifice

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Fairport Convention

A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the…

mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love

Love Is a Long Road

Tom Petty

A mid-tempo Heartbreakers-style rocker built around a single deflating refrain: whatever romance is being described, the song…

disillusionment with romantic idealism emotional exhaustion letting go

Questions

Buffalo Springfield

A short, plainspoken love song built almost entirely out of questions, capturing the disorientation that follows getting what…

uncertainty in intimacy the gap between longing and knowing vulnerability after conquest

I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)

Jamie xx

This Jamie xx track builds a euphoric, sample-driven dance anthem around a simple mantra of anticipated joy, then hands the mic…

anticipation and collective release hedonism and excess class and hustle

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

The Smiths

A deadpan lament about the misery of ordinary employed adult life, delivered with such theatrical self-pity that it becomes…

alienation the tedium of work self-pity as performance