Solange
Solange catalogs a long list of failed coping mechanisms for an unnamed sorrow, building an inventory of avoidance that…
avoidance and denial depression/emotional exhaustion consumerism as false comfort
Marvin Gaye
A returning-soldier's-eye plea addressed to family members in turn — mother, brother, father — asking why grief and violence…
war and its cost at home generational misunderstanding police brutality and protest
Gram Parsons
A hymn-structured elegy that mourns three losses in succession -- a young man killed in a car crash, a musician taken too soon,…
mortality and premature death grief and mourning faith and supplication
Kate Bush
A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…
empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding
Laura Marling
This is a cover of a mid-1960s folk standard, sung here in Laura Marling's plainspoken, weary register, about the impossibility…
itinerancy and escape addiction as self-medication romantic longing and loss
Al Green
A young man addresses a train conductor directly, pleading for the impossible: reverse the train's direction so he can return to…
regret and reversal longing/separation loneliness
Billie Holiday
A three-stanza protest song about the lynching of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, built on a single sustained metaphor:…
racial terror and lynching the corruption of Southern pastoral imagery the body as evidence