Results for “time and endurance”

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

Love of My Life

Queen

A piano ballad structured as a direct plea to a departing lover, built almost entirely on repetition rather than narrative…

romantic loss supplication and pleading possessiveness in love

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

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke

A first-person account of a life lived under constant pressure — poverty, fear of death, segregation, betrayal by one's own —…

racial injustice and segregation endurance and faith mortality and doubt

Unshaken

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

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's version of this traditional folk-blues song reworks a prison-labor lament into swampy rock, keeping the old imagery of…

incarceration and forced labor longing for deliverance folk mythology / superstition

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

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

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

Unknown Legend

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

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