Gladys Knight
A domestic monologue in which a woman catalogs the daily labor she performs for a partner who has grown cold and inattentive,…
emotional labor and domestic care the myth of female self-sufficiency withdrawal and neglect in a relationship
Chaka Khan
Chaka Khan addresses a fragile, self-sabotaging figure she calls an angel, coaxing her toward vulnerability and self-acceptance.…
emotional fragility self-acceptance codependency and healing
Erykah Badu
A meditation on getting lost, both literally and existentially, that refuses to resolve into a tidy moral. Badu treats…
self-doubt and self-trust fate versus choice spiritual wandering
Nirvana
Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough single is a rock anthem built on refusing to say anything anthemic. Over a four-chord riff that…
adolescent apathy and boredom the demand to be entertained self-loathing and self-sabotage
Ethan Whitney
This is a straightforward pop declaration of devotion that borrows superhero mythology to dress up a fairly conventional promise…
devotion and support escapism fantasy of destiny
SZA
SZA narrates an affair with candor rather than shame, positioning herself as the intermittent, exciting alternative to a primary…
infidelity and complicity self-worth vs. self-sabotage possessiveness and jealousy
Joan Baez
Baez's rendition of this traditional folk ballad tells the story of a woman ruined by a New Orleans house of ill repute, framing…
ruin and moral downfall warning and cautionary storytelling regret
Neil Young
A domestic sketch collides with a highway fantasy: the narrator remembers a diner waitress and imagines her alternate, freer…
restlessness and rootlessness domestic confinement vs. freedom idealization/myth-making
Sandy Denny
A cover of Dylan's early ballad, rendered here as a hushed meditation on longing and self-erasure in absence. Sandy Denny's…
longing and absence loss of self idealized love
Talking Heads
A preacher-like voice addresses an unnamed "you," cataloguing the accidental furniture of a middle-class life and then asking…
mid-life disorientation the unearned life time as drift
Bill Callahan
Bill Callahan opens his own name into someone else's -- the title alludes to the noir novelist James M. Cain -- and uses that…
self-transformation the writing process as detective work impermanence and mortality
The Temptations
A mid-80s Temptations single that pitches courtly-gentleman romance as a self-help pitch, with the narrator cataloguing small…
traditional courtship gender roles nostalgia for inherited values
Betty Davis
Betty Davis takes a lover's insults—bitch, witch, alley cat, dirty dog—and turns them into a badge of honor, staging a…
sexual autonomy and shame reclaiming derogatory language power reversal in a relationship
Public Enemy
A protest anthem built as a dance record: Chuck D argues that political consciousness and Black pride are things you build in…
Black pride and self-definition institutional racism who gets to be a national hero
Nina Simone
A catalogue of natural images -- birds, rivers, blossoms, stars -- builds into a declaration of personal liberation and renewal.…
renewal freedom self-possession
Nick Drake
A brief autobiographical arc compressed into a handful of couplets, tracing a movement from innocence through disillusionment to…
loss of innocence depression and fatigue dependency on another
Donny Hathaway
This is a live soul reinterpretation of the Beatles standard, in which Donny Hathaway strips the song of its chamber-pop…
loss and regret nostalgia as refuge romantic bewilderment
Bruce Springsteen
A young man stands in a driveway trying to talk a woman named Mary into getting in his car and leaving town with him. Over five…
escape and flight the limits of romantic promise small-town decay
Emmylou Harris
A narrator looks back at a childhood friend, Lillian, whose life in a small Southern town never escapes the gravity of that…
rural poverty and stasis female friendship the cost of unfulfilled ambition
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
The Rolling Stones
A weary plea for tenderness dressed up as a refusal to keep serving as someone's workhorse. The narrator insists he's given…
exhaustion in relationships emotional labor vs desire masculinity and self-worth
Radiohead
A petulant office-worker fantasy in which the speaker summons an imaginary cosmic police force to arrest people who irritate him…
petty vindictiveness bureaucratic and corporate servitude dehumanisation
Paul Simon
A reunion single from Simon and Garfunkel that reads as a bitter anti-nostalgia song, dismantling the idea of small-town…
small-town disillusionment loss of faith suppressed violence
Bob Dylan
A six-minute address to a woman who has fallen out of privilege into destitution, delivered by a narrator who alternates between…
loss of status the fraudulence of privilege freedom through destitution
Joni Mitchell
A three-part meditation in which the speaker sets a naive, image-drunk way of seeing against a disenchanted one, then refuses to…
disillusionment the limits of knowledge aging and changed perception
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
Tom Waits
A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…
restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom
Richard Thompson
A wry, uptempo account of a breakup told from the battered-but-wisecracking side, where physical comedy stands in for emotional…
romantic aftermath toxic love masculine bravado as deflection
Stevie Wonder
A funk sermon against magical thinking. Over one of the most recognizable clavinet riffs in popular music, Wonder catalogues…
superstition and magical thinking the cost of ignorance fear as self-fulfilling prophecy
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a Mexican bandit's death and the shadowy figure who may have betrayed him, told with the flat affect of folklore…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and diminishment
The Supremes
A woman demands her own release from a dead relationship, addressing an ex who refuses to fully let go even though he no longer…
emotional limbo asymmetry of feeling demand for autonomy
Gillian Welch
A short, circling ballad about a young woman fleeing domestic expectation for a taste of freedom before she settles into the…
deferred responsibility female autonomy vs. convention escape and fantasy
Elliott Smith
A quiet, almost lullaby-like address to someone (or something) that promises comfort while actually describing a kind of…
addiction and dependency seduction and control erased identity
Warren Zevon
A dying man's direct, unsentimental request to be remembered, framed as a farewell letter set to a gentle, almost lullaby-like…
mortality memory and legacy love as continuity
D'Angelo
A prayer-like meditation on trying to hold steady inside collapse, written for a video game about the death of the American…
endurance amid chaos spiritual uncertainty frontier mythology and its end