Results for “the passage of time”

Songs

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

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

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack

A slow, hymn-like ballad that traces one relationship's progress through three ascending intimacies: first sight, first kiss,…

awakening love cosmic/natural imagery as emotional scale vulnerability and surrender

Change Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Otis Redding's rendition of Sam Cooke's civil-rights-era anthem transforms a carefully wrought protest song into a raw,…

racial injustice and endurance faith versus doubt family and disappointment

Once in a Lifetime

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

Place to Be

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

Diamond Day

Vashti Bunyan

A short pastoral hymn that treats an ordinary rural day as something precious, using the smallest units of farm life to build…

rural simplicity contentment cyclical time

Thunder Road

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

Dreams

Fleetwood Mac

A breakup song delivered as calm prophecy rather than complaint. The singer grants her departing partner the freedom he asked…

romantic separation loneliness as consequence foresight and prophecy

Freddie's Dead

Curtis Mayfield

A eulogy that refuses to sentimentalize its subject, using the death of a small-time hustler named Freddie as a blunt instrument…

addiction and exploitation urban poverty complicity and blame

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A three-part meditation in waltz time that moves from a woman by a river, to Christ walking on water, and back to the woman…

erotic love as spiritual apprehension faith and doubt surrender to a guide

In My Hour of Darkness

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